Mary which one who knows as who has the time she thinks to save, plucks up the fallen, fusiform tongue and wraps its impressive length in the Business, others hold skimped Sports or Book Review, section of a newspaper dated a Shabbos previous, in one account, bylined by the owner of that very paper…though others hold rolled in a hospital’s fundraising newsletter left lying around by the last shoesalesmensch to slink this way (used to wipe the filth from his soles) — in pages palmed, ripped right from the book of Psalms: if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my righthand forget its cunting, let my tongue cleave to the Ruth of my mouth, it goes…saves it though, “apparently,” no reattachment surgery’s possible (even if the price’ll be lately right by the Doctors Tweiss): risk such a procedure He’s thinking and He’ll risk His freedom, to think if not His life, Him stumbling deranged mouth glop maniacal spew from out of the motel’s rear service entrance and onto the highway, miraculous you have to admit as do latter commentators that He doesn’t get picked up by Anyone, hauled in for a session, a little of the old Q. & A. even for just appearing in public like this, a dressing down for dressing up as His mother, actually in disguise as a Mary disguised as His mother, if you’re with Him: that old desertruined robe exchanged for a pink slip of housecoat clasped too huggingly tight with plastic flower buttons, forgetmenots but who remembers, dumpster’s sneakers over slippered raiment retained He’s traded in for heels, pumps one for each stumble of foot He’s tripping, falling, huddling past the assembled Law, the Media, who are the Law’s later interpreters, its reporters and photographers (many latearriving Affiliated journalists actually forbidding themselves from pen and camera due to the holiness of the Ninth, the wasteful nature of such observance distressing in this ridiculous ritual of these lensmenschs and shutterschmucks: how making cameras of their own filmless hands, they squint one eye then click with the finger) — they let Him pass as her, without inspection, whether to them a motel maid, a whore just off for the night or her grandmother’s sister, a voyeur onlooking, rubbernecking what with her head kercheifed, too, become babushkad, old and avoided as destitute and sick. He trannies away from the river in heels, the skirt of His coat shrived high by the wind. His mouth’s open in an attempt to air pain, and so exposed to the weather falling, the spitting drift, but no yelling’s to be heard, only the untastedness of the street wind and the avenue wind and then at their intersection, the resoundingly ringing silence of that angry greedy pud. What it resembles is a growth of goldbrick, a bellish bud or coin sored upon the middle of the mouth, deep inside it and secret, the ornament of His standing aleph, an uppermost putz only smaller and softer than most. What He wants to say with it, though, He doesn’t know, as He isn’t saying it, as nothing’s being said through Him — only this letter, the round of its soundlessness in search of a vowel, the translation of this search for bearings east, a new beginning voiced only in blood…B’s arms flailing, as if communicant and with His legs, too, His head, as if limbed directly to His mouth’s fingery stud, made veined to what remains: the stirrings of a torturous howl through the slip of parkinggarage, then down its slipping grade, the turns, the ramps on and off, waiting at the crosswalk for any light to change, Him an aleph splayed, waving finally with sound, Aaaaaa…all He manages, to echo across the darkened and utterly vacant 10th sad & 40th He doesn’t know which, He wouldn’t, dispersing, disappearing into a traffic of whirling ice, obscuring the noise of even the sirens.
