B takes leave of the Orientals, helping to lock and shutter the restaurant behind its grate of shuddering metal…they’ll be closed all day Monday, Dim Sum says in parting, we’ll figure it out, everything works out in the end; he bows then, scraping — are you sure you don’t want any takeout, just asking, we have a little suey left, last chance as he lifts himself…25 % discount now that we’re old friends, in observance of your auspicious occasion?
To walk Himself wherever weathered, dry again, to drop no drip; B’s board halved, hung around His neck alongside a cross of chalk, what’s left that in the wind goes click against then clack again with every older step.
Oneyearold in Year One, today being the age of the world; there’s only a week left until the anniversary of its creation decreated, the destruction that’s made possible our miraculous rebirth. After Israelien, 1 A.I. — let it stand for that for which He falls. In a window, the sweeping glass of a going Broome Street concern selling religious paraphernalia (siddurim, tallisim, tefillin, Get Your Mezuzah Examined — No Commitment Free Of Charge), He takes in His reflection: His hair, once so moppishly light now darkly thinning, His glasses wrecked their earpieces lost held on only by the scrunch of His nose, wrinkled, His face old already, lined as if one of His mother’s lists for Wanda, his mouth a severely windreddened check marking all for off and finished, the milk and bread brains and that nose, a sack of potatoes. As for His form, it’s as fat as ever, forming fatter; waisted down His skirts His foreskin still occupied with its genethliacal growth and shed, cyclical and constant. He’s still in that old housecoat of His mother’s, her perpetual maternitywear, secondhanded but lacking pockets, then a mitten for the lefthand, a glove unfingered for the right. They hold the keys to residences untold, duplicated triplicates, with the alarmcodes combinatorials of His name, 18 18 18, B-E-N=21. He knows the routes to every safehouse, their attic and stagey trapdoor hides, Mitteltown nests and outerburrows…the homes of previous owners, masters otherwise known to Him as hosts when they’re treating and kind now summering in the winter of freedom if just to say they’ve done their part (He has all the key-chains, too, swag from Garden interests found among the trash — they’re loose; He hasn’t found the time in which to get attached). Under the housecoat but over the thermals designer from the dumpster, that Shabbos skirt, its ruffle ripped, tucked into His socks, sapped of their dressy dark from His shvitzy stray, stuffed with addresses to zips: pages ripped from phonebooks halved, revised, crumpled then crammed into His shoes for insulation (the heels made flats, pumps deflated), He’s shod in wads, too, of other people’s mail — a heatingbill from where, gas and electric invoices, then urgent warnings to Register, unofficial promises confirmed by governmental threats, the latest moon’s issue of a tznius periodical, homiletical home, lifestyle, or feminine hygienic (on negiah, on niddah), subscribed to in support of the yeshiva of a nephew; New Year’s greetingcards fallen from sukkah walls, and a lacy, stiffs-tocked invitation to a bris He’s missed, not His; a pidyon’s a redemption…feet are worn and numb, toes ten dreams of feeling. Despite, He stoops low against the wind down the street, littered with tattered fliers.
UNAF
