Witz полностью

O gather all ye geography mavens, ye country collectors, and experts on topos, habitus hoarders, connoisseurs of blending, masters of the hide…hearken ye sons of inconspicuousness, ye gods of lyinglow — languages are yours, borders our birthrights, to cross into evermore outcast estates…I welcome you to Polandland, Shalom, dwell as you may. Name, please, Date of Birth, then Country of Origin. At the slips and stations around Him, there’s a mess of muster, of unmarked cargo being roustabouted into endless trains routed to the furthering gate. Thieves with oily hands and twitchy eyelids, made gypsies of necessity wanting only for night’s stealth. An examiner of imported “produce.” Disbursing half into his pockets for the wife. Hutched, hunched, an interrogator who already knows, but wants to hear you think (anything you answer will sound like a question — clasp hands, pray for deportation at best)…gabbly groups too afraid to address their fear to an official nowhere to be found uniformed the same. Upon penalty of what again, the windy confiscation of cries.

A heelshaped barrel they’re unloading from His ship drops and breaks, the staves pop off like an explosion, but it’s empty, there’s nothing inside and the pallets, they’re lonely for schlepping.

A woman leads a group (young): splinters of strangers gathered out on the dock. She says to them, This was the kind of ship they used. To immigrate. To emigrate. Anyone remember which? We just had it brought in. We shipped in a ship. Just this morning. This is how they got away — back before aeroplanes, remember?

B’s ship’s being boarded, condemned.

With a hand hot in His pocket to keep guard over what wad there and with His suitcase held in the other, He goes. Where a chalkcircle praying oneliners for the weather to stop, how it’s followed Him here even worse. Where a chamfered streetcorner and told just to wait. A night, a day. Where a whore’s room He’s renting from her and for her, and which He quits after only one night, leaving His deposit behind but taking the room with Him, hung around His neck on a rope of her braids, hiding the shame of His sex…Polandland, historically where. While many of our scholars have offered up the image, famous enough to have become truism, Edenic enough to have fallen from favor, of the snake, which consumes itself and yet like the bush inherited from its gardened tree is never consumed, its tail to mouth poisoning, others have settled on a like form, more felicitous because nourishing, because sustaining, enabling, this image of our bread, daily broken. A bagel He’s in, or so they suggest in this leavening of history, Him baked deep within that circling circle forever void…a great onion and garlic and sesame and poppyseed salted snake tailing itself, and then swallowing — the eternally returning Everything varietal, the glutinous fruit of Viennese merchants first made for and presented to Polandland’s King in thanks for his help in fighting the Turks out of Austria — its name from an old German word for stirrup, Bügel, in honor of Jan III Sobieski’s great horsemenschip, in recognition of the shape of the thing: stick your foot in its mouth, then ride off into the sunset…Him atop less a kingly steed than a sagged, stickribbed lowly roan (He’s renting off a gypsy thief, a pierside hustler in cheap dark denim), His bügel more like tourist-traps, to hold Him high while the wind empties His pockets, gusting through the holes. As arranged at the port, this horse with goldteeth — with its gypsy leading with the horse’s teeth dugout, stuffed into his own kisser — it’s leading Him inland, ever deeper, and marketed ever darker, too, what with the sun’s set toward the west…where, headed unto the mythical Souvenir Stand, just over the mountain yonder, there to shop for a store of local specialties, a wide selection of indigenous folk art, Handwerk’s kitschy dreck, tshirts hung with medals unearned, dolls inside dolls, matrioshky they’re called giving way after their disappointing smallest to an emptiness maternal it’s impossible not to feel in these parts, the numbly dead, the unmade. And then further…with His gypsy leaving Him at a wall, at a gate, an incredible inroading — disappearing after the money’s gone, with the horse gone, too, and with His suitcase in its mouth, that and the bundles and bags of His purchases, keepsakes kept safe from Him: left alone, without tikvah, that’s hope. To wander east down a narrowing of streets, a muddle of ways, cuts short and long, all huddling to this one wide street, a vast opening eastward toward the void at middle, always the hole at center’s core — the Square wherever this is, I’m never sure, just shocked…without language. Consonants stuck in the craw, a mouth shaped like a vowel, and speechless.