Finally, it’s the morning of the first day of the month known as Iyar, which in Babylonian says blossom and means bloom, don’t ask — used to be May, once named for the Greek goddess Maia, the eldest daughter of the seven Pleiades, protectoress of few remember now and no one cares, believes: a season and its star without worship, made subordinate to a maiden moon. Enough to know that today, feeling strong enough, Ben rises, and stands skyward, throws from His face His veil, throws open the shutters to the windows, too, four of them, one to each direction of the earth. He’s shaky, aching; He feels like Adam, mud-wrought and missing rib. To overlook His newest inheritance, God’s contract become flesh and geographic wild, notarized by Goldenberg or by dream…the cold bay with its skaters, lutzbundled into layers of fur and down, with their flippant taps and twirls, slicing into the ice passages of the Law amid intricate glosses, tripleaxles of responsa ending with a flourish in wondrously interpretive figureseight; cutahole fishers perched atop soapboxes, their wives baiting their hooks, kinder baiting their mothers with fishy words and leers and augers; the remains of swans halffrozen, stilled in a momentary flee; a motorcade of sleighs their runners greased with the fat of premium lambs; frozen hard scows and skiffs upended into igloos, beached upon the driftless ice amid barges stuck to hump the freeze as mountains, abandoned tows peaking high and white over tugs as hills overgrown in frost; a glimpse from the other window of industrial Joysey in rigs and joints and scaffold struts, its warehouses propbridged, their elevators imprisoned by the skeletal char of fireescapes, unhinged; fallen powerlines strangling cranes collapsed atop the light rail spurs, across the transit tracks, the Northeast Corridor and the Gladstone Branch, their signs unlooted symbolic of only rust, and the hissing wind, prophetically monaural:
The House of His Father just north of Israel’s old office stooped in its shadow, along with His house, too, in its mirroring — and Ben, He’s enraptured: by it, and by Himself…His first unveiled glimpse of the dwelling within which He’s been fathered to history and now, to air; leaning out over the sill to the Temple’s great reflecting eye, to behold Himself captured in that dome’s lone sloping facet that is the dome, its reflection of an unguarded face…a moment of silence passing for peace, only of Him made relation to the city beyond, married, mated, Him as Himself the city beyond, and then — the door’s knocked into a flood, watery light like gauze, a rippling welter. A front of journalists with cold cameras porting tripods, pens and pads, microphones and lights, fresnels and pars: they’re here for their publicity shots the less posed the more they’ll appeal to the growing ranks of the righteous, it’s supposed; here, too, for His comments, for any, the hurried documentation of a life lived on the record — then, for analysis and observation, scrutinized on slow; Ben an idol stood upon the Record Itself, or if not on it then altared by it, changed from burn to smoke to air; here for their quotes, their content and bracketfiller; for their whiplashed quips, their bytes off more than an earth would swallow down to molten chew. As if punishment for public living even the famous are given graves, and often those they dig themselves with the sharpness of their tongues. As shallow as the rest.
Sit still, they say in one mouth, within one mouth, massed amid its dim…that’s it, hold it, oneeyed — right there, you blinked, you’re beautiful, you’re perfect.
Maybe He should hold some lilies? Or contemplate some busts? Say AlleGory! emPHAsis on the last sylLAble!
