They teem in the streets, cordonedoff, starentranceside to the world; everywhere they’re rejoicing, horaing amid the shir: Oy vey can you see…no, I can’t, to tell you the truth, this veil, not over their hats, down in front, stay low; their mouths open wide to the niggun of a new day, they’re dancing in odd hobbled circles, closing in, tripwidening out again, wielding weapons of banners and bunting, beating their sandwichboards into placards, signs ’n’ wonders, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, their krazy kinderlach enjoying their appetitespoiling, dentitiondestructive kosher treats vended only in extendo familysize, lining around the impromptu stands and kiosks and carts and booths to purchase their merchandise, gleaning swag (not only the Gardengenuine, not merely the Islandapproved, but everything, the illicit imitation, the violate, knockoffs themselves knocked off the block, curbside vendors hocking the bogus, get your chimeric, the false of the false); purchases later they’re ready to wearing their own, above it souvenir yarmulkes, under it souvenir scapulars, which are tzitzit, phylacteries, too, tefilin, false noses and flossy beards, and so who knows if it even is Him up there waving and smiling and with arms held far out in front of Him with palms flat deficiently applauding their fizzy applause, and shvitzing, too, in this bare chill — how much they pay for His shvitz, who’s the seller, let’s have his papers: Metro Gestapo standing immovably at the sidelines, simcha security leaning up against the shuttered storefronts that line the parade routes, the limits of audience muster, standing sentry, as well, atop the 42nd Street mound, the makeshift Tel of paraphernalia profane now purposed into barricades and cordons crosstown (a spontaneous mountain, every lick of height lacked by Sinai this heap of treyf pots and pans, crucifixi strangled with the snakes of the rosary, value leather barcaloungers, kneelers and falds, robes and stoles); portapotties runnethover, traffic is stalled to the tushes of tunnels, constipated, congested; the streets are paved a hazard with papers crushed, crumpled: snowballs, the windfall of potholes; there aren’t enough trashcans, any there are have been like the courts overturned, without street sense or order. Dogs are hanged from the clotheslines, pinned above alleys that echo their barks with the gusts. Media personalities pass mics around headed in filter with frothing black clouds; flashes pop off like suns then fall through the night, smoky doves. As more and more people they keep crowding into Midtown though Mitteltown’s now what they’re saying, having bypassed the avenue gridlock by forsaking the tar for the ice without lane: touring carts, chartered, not quite climatecontrolled, they keep on with their arriving in caravans, hitched streamlined in lines, queues without end — from the Oranges East and West and from Hoboken, Hackensack, Ho-Ho-Kus, and Parsippany, from Conshohocken, Philadelphia, PA, and the Main Line, Levittown, and the Five Towns, from Garden City Herself of the island Long off the island off the Island that’s His, or that was; older people lately membered into newly formed, duesed and approved Affiliated groups and otherly miscellaneous benevolent associations bylawed friendly to the cause of the revivified Semitic, with don’t doubt special interests and hidden agendas of their own, too numerous to countenance before a good hot plate of fleisch and a schlaf, piling off that drecky, fleshsplintered hay and into the frost of the streets, veins swollen to burst with their life, a lively arterial clog; and the beggars, O how it seems that all the schnorrers in die ganze welt are just showing up, having gotten drunk upon the grapevine and pooled the dribble of their remaining resources to hitch and hire rides from points near, far, and enough, genug, each with a shaky withered hand out, each wanting no nicht demanding their own pinched piece of the action, a shtickel, a schmeck, the bell’s end of the salami, the warty tip of the pickle’s nose, the pleasure of your company and of your bed with you on the floor, and your mother, your sister, she single, or if not is she kind — this being the first stop of their individual fiftyfour city tours, one city for each Shabbos, it’s scheduled, one rest apportioned for each portion of the weekly read Torah, in each city by someone else, then in another city by that someone’s brother, to board for only a meager parsha of pity, the rachmones of an emotional miser, stunted in a grunted begrudge; receiving as it’s called home hospitality, a cold breakingfast don’t worry about me, and then — pulling out, moving on; two arguing: one wanting to trade his next Genesis weekend in Oconomowoc for a Leviticusly Deuteronomous stay in another’s Rome, Syracuse, Troy, or Utica, what’s not to like about the deal, have a heart, have mine and my bad back while you’re at it; I’ve got to be Upstate next week for a Kasha Festival, to make a few inquiries about a horse, the funeral of my father-inlaw, alright, so he’s just sick if ailing and, not getting any better you should tell me what to say, whatever you want to hear.
