Absence of Stone

Everybody Needs a Friend

2008-03-18T10:05:00.002+02:00

My Remake of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

2008-02-20T09:53:00.007+02:00

Here's something unusual. I heard Leonard Cohen's song, "Hallelujah," and loved it, but I found the lyrics unrelievedly, almost monochromatically, diminished.

So I conceived the challenge: could I write new lyrics for the song--lyrics that would equal (if not surpass) the quality of the original lyrics, lyrics that would express a positively augmented view of the universe yet not be brightly pollyannish?

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is:

The streets were filled with dying men,
The women whom you'd once again
Disappointed when they saw right through ya.
But underneath the dust, you saw
The rising lava of the law,
The owners of each store sang hallelujah.

The craters of the silent moon
Poured out their silver streams, and soon
The stars of empty space were flying through ya.
The mountain top, the frozen air,
Your coal black horse, your streaming hair,
Without words, your soul cried, hallelujah

When hunger melted all their pride,
On the hill the groom and bride
Were singing to each other, singing to ya.
The woods were still, the roads all roared
Diminished and augmented chords,
That thundered in the halls of hallelujah.

So I set down my golden pen
I wrapped myself in silk and Zen,
I was all alone and I outgrew ya.
But I returned to clean the bath,
I felt the joy, the pity, wrath,
And it was all a muted hallelujah.

Joshua listened to the Lord,
The trumpet blast, the crashing chord
Shivered Jericho and overthrew ya.
The walls sank down into the ground,
And from a broken room, the sound In the midst of battle, hallelujah.

The Ant Walked Through The Door

2008-02-15T09:34:00.001+02:00

The ant walked through the door,
Which turned into a crescent sword.
The floor heaved, it bounded, it gently billowed,
Entire oceans drained into small wormholes.
Clouds were whisked away
And left skies with stark terror on their faces.
Cars that were driving purposefully
Tumbled into the San Andreas fault.
And no wonder old people tottered fearfully along the undulating boardwalk,
No wonder love shut the slats of its concession stand,
No wonder the Warbasse apartments shuddered,
No wonder buttered toast ceased to thrill the acquisitive mind.
The cat sat in the high cabinet
Meditating thoughtlessly,
The smell of salt was invisible, it rested upon the chestnut trees.
The curious automobiles came and went on their secret rounds,
And Mrs. Baum stood in her kitchen, preparing chicken.

A Quantity of Wheat

2008-02-08T16:19:00.001+02:00

It seems that such a quantity of wheat will be sold today,
That the markets will be filled with the rustle of cloths,
The sun will beat down hotly on sandaled feet,
Storekepers will cry their wares with distorted faces,
In shadowed alcoves, men will drink sweetened, yellow drinks,
The long lines of camels will shimmer from the distance in the hot, bright air,
The pastry boy will rush through the crowd
With a fragrant tray of sweet loaves,
From the bakery to which merchants brought flour
From mills that stand silent upon the river flowing to the sea.
In the bakery men work frantically
Shaping flour into dough and dough into bread and pastries
That is carried on platters through the bazaar blazing streets,
To the homes of satraps,
To the doors of impoverished widows,
Bringing satiety, bringing delight,
Bringing the mystery of their scent.

The Moon Swiveled Around

2008-02-06T05:51:00.001+02:00

The moon swiveled around
So that I could only see the back of her head.
How silent were the stars.
But we, we were chattering in the back seat,
In the front seat,
We flipped through the puddles,
We raced through the snowfields,
We rushed up the mountains to fields of caravans,
We hunched over and dug for radishes,
We were pursued by a beating heart through the windy downtown tenements in our dreams,
We curled in sleep in the branches of the universal tree
And slept, beloved.

The mystic moon was as clear as steel,
As tearless as glass,
As bright as a scintillating day
That waited patient and expectant,
That was the absence of all self
Except for the lumbering Jackson Pollack souls,
All of us, spattered exclamations of black, red, yellow ferment
Seeping into the sere dawn,
Our scattered colors catching on the colors of others,
The moon turned her head and the heavens were still,
And in that stillness
Our hearts were seized with stillness
And then spoke, of their own accord.

The Revelation Wasn't Old

2008-02-04T06:11:00.001+02:00

The revelation wasn’t old.
It struck with all the force of a meteor.
There was a red fire and there was a white pillar
That was shining now, not then.
It was a time when every track is new,
When every landscape is a red fire and a white pillar of cloud.
Where is the red fire today?
Where is the white pillar of cloud?
Where is Egypt? Where is the terror of its cavalry?
(The cavalry that is real.)
Where is the glory of the constant press
Into the unknown redemption?
On the path to the sea,
Babies were still crying,
They still needed their diapers changed.
What a thing:
To see nothing on the way to the Red Sea
But the changing of diapers!
On the first night of Passover,
The Jews could not sleep.
And then,
They no longer wished to sleep.
When all of creation sleeps,
If we sing the words and listen,
We can hear that we are already singing within ourselves.
Already, we are awake,
Very busy, in fact.
Already, red fires blaze,
White clouds of smoke.
What color is your voice?
Are your words intaglio or bas relief?
Don't guess. Look inside.
See the drifting leaves of words upon your stream of prayer,
The green trumpet of voice,
The printer’s lead letters dripping indigo ink,
The granite statues of words like mountains
Among which you wander,
The white and pastel acrylic oils of words,
The stainless steel monuments with sharp edges,
A landscape of solid, skyscraper steel words.
What is your pillar of fire,
Your pillar of cloud?
What is its fresh, clear scent?

I Will Go On Eating Oranges, I Said

2008-01-21T06:05:00.000+02:00

I will go on eating oranges, I said,
I will collect shards of tires on the highways,
I will stanch running noses,
I will collect desolate socks,
I will survey the vistas of littered floors
And hills,
Comprehensively, as though I had forgotten the flute,
The gaming parlor, the ululations,
The sharp sparkle of the pre-dawn wind.

I Wondered Why You Were Breaking My Flowerpots

2008-01-10T06:22:00.001+02:00

I wondered why you were breaking my flowerpots.
But then you knew, didn’t you
(Even if you didn’t know that you knew),
That I hid my soul there,
That our family had stored its gold and silver there,
That there the constellations hid during the day,
That God Himself hid there.
It wasn’t just me you came to destroy,
For if you destroyed these flowerpots
You could crow naked on the top of the burly hills
And watch mountains of cities slip into the sea,
And your spirit would be freed
To march down the boulevards with squadrons of soldiers,
To requisition mansions without pay,
To dance with the Swiss ambassador’s wife,
To throw back your head and hoot at the moon.
But first you must break the city of stone,
First you must seed these hills with blood,
First you must fill the coastal towns with the winding smoke
Of weariness and decay,
So that the eyes of its pedestrians will not rise from the sidewalk
As your motorcade speeds resplendently by
Taking you to dance naked in your hotel room
And sleep with the corrugated idol
Whose thin loins sing
The odor of the grave.

Suddenly It is Like That

2008-01-09T08:22:00.001+02:00

Suddenly it is like that.
You are pulling your feet out of the long, sticky brown mud,
And you will no longer compromise.
But it is only you against a bulldozer,
And the wind and the stars are thin.

Go to the caves in the valley, shake the elders in their casques.
You need more than echoes in the dark.
You need more than youths spilling across valley floors.
You need the strength of mountains,
The bulldozers must stand with gaping mouths.
You must overwhelm them utterly,
Not with your spirit but with your flesh.

You must make your home in the streets,
You must love the mortar and the asphalt,
Or you will be praying in the corner of your home
When you are carted out with the rubble
And the winding smoke of powdered stone blinds your eyes white.

I Will Stop at Nothing

2008-01-07T06:15:00.000+02:00

I will stop at Nothing.
You stop at Nothing too
(Robert Frost’s horse did.)
And there in the shapes of darkness,
The huge bent back of the silent slouching beast
Obscures the sight of the stars.
The air rushes up in a trice
Like a paper dancer in the flame,
And you stand like the tin soldier on one leg.

And manifold chambers open like a bright and airy origami.
At your feet the scrub whispers and murmurs,
Small nocturnal creatures.
Your nictitating membrane pops up, and
The dove of your spirit flies up on a gust of words
That are daylight,
That are a fountain of sparks,
That are a clapping of hands,
That are the night sky and its stone stars
And the marvelous humped silent huge back
Of the leviathan.

The Day Rose

2008-01-06T06:11:00.001+02:00

The day rose.
The night flowered.
Bakeries were open till dawn,
Pregnant women glided through the streets,
Ships upon the horizon glinted blue, yellow,
At small café tables women pecked at keyboards,
Sleek seals breached the freezing seas,
Eyes gazed upon the beach.
They were incandescent bulbs,
They were tulips,
They were ancient countenances,
They were beyond number.
Mountains floated in their field of vision,
Mountains and declamations.

There is a Messiah Without God

2008-01-01T06:12:00.000+02:00

There is a messiah without a God.
We have seen him visiting our beaches,
He commanded the waves and tar infested the sand.
He commanded the heavens
And missiles rained like stars.
He thundered at the mountain
But his voice rattled like the crinkling of a newspaper.
We turned the page, we snoozed,
Our chin bobbed upon our chest
And the air turned red and sullen.

The Rain Falls

2007-12-28T05:50:00.000+02:00

The rain falls.
Its pebbles skate along the street.
Its white horses rear up,
Its red petals stream along the curb,
We are all in its cold, wet throat,
Lugging our book bags
In a newly painted morning.

Wrinkled clothes
Lie across the living room floor,
Also playing cards,
Also a camel stands at the window,
Watch out, he’s got a nasty temper.

Once, in heaven, I sat down on the park bench to rest,
The boats sailed across the pond,
That sailed upon the clouds,
That twisted into vertiginous distances,
Twisted strands of the Milky Way,

The wet nose of the wind
Vibrated, then, the larynx
Of the air,
The staircase rose
And the orange blossoms.

A Diadem of Mountains

2007-12-26T09:07:00.001+02:00

I gave you silken rivers, rivulets of stars,
But you need a diadem of mountains.
You demand rocky terrain,
Brambles, peaks and horizons.

You seek a vertiginous dirt path,
A swinging rope bridge,
You need to hear the snow tiger
Growling outside your cabin upon the vast snow plains.

You require a troupe of men
Who will carry your bier into thick, uncharted jungles,
Where you will snap your fingers and bark out orders
In a strange, uncouth tongue
And dance your songs of triumph.

You must master the wisdom of the sailing ship
And set out into bronze mornings.
You must call out new islands and discover distant planets
From an uncharted tropical sea,
Where your loveliness is legendary amidst the island peoples.

Fierce, celebrated, all-powerful,
You must arrange great ceremonies
To which even giants will stride, from across the long, shadowed hills,
To pay you homage.

Rivulets of Stars

2007-12-24T06:01:00.001+02:00

I threw out the baby with the bath water.
I was tired of drinking bath water.
And who needs babies anyway?

Move over.
We both need to sleep,
To snore away our lives.
Of course it gets quite crowded in this bed.
I keep having to kick away guitars, old sandwiches.
I find that friend’s doorbells are digging into my back.
I curl around bassoons and double basses
So that in the morning, in the warm, body-scented sheets
I have an enormous crick in my neck.

There is so much to discover in the world—
Everywhere I have dropped crumbs of meaning.
I have left drops of my soul with so many people
And barged into the house wielding an empty wheel barrow.

I came home one evening with a packet of stars
But they all melted into a puddle when I opened the sack.

Really, when stones are rolled onto the mouths of wells,
What good are stars?
What good is light when there is no water?
And water, water shines like rivulets of stars.

Listen! Cries the Ocean

2007-12-21T06:29:00.000+02:00

Listen! cries the ocean.
So listen.
The whole night it roars like a freight train,
It rises up and sizzles against the seawall.
For an hour you can be the ocean,
And contain within yourself swift color-shifting squid
And long trees of frond-waving kelp
Amidst which the fish wind their swift glissando bodies.
In the north your waves can rise and fall like mountains.
You can lie beneath the black night sky, covered by the sheet of ice and sleep
And at the same time glaze beneath a sun hot as yellow pepper,
You can swing back and forth drawn by your desire for the moon,
The fog can cover you for hundreds of miles
And conceal your cold thoughts.
You can have no thoughts,
You can be a shapeless god who does not live
But moves with the majesty of life.

Inside Your Blood Cells

2007-12-20T06:04:00.001+02:00

Inside your blood cells children are talking to each other.
They race through the tunnels of your limbs.
They are so busy chatting that they do not notice
Whether they are in your toes or in your aorta.
That is as it should be.

I blanked out this morning
And found myself in a dream.
And it wasn’t about the past
But it wasn’t about the future either.
I had fallen into a computer
And was watching as it chatted to itself
And I woke up with a sense of wonder.

I woke up to find
Playing-cards arrayed in rows
Across the chairs and the floor,
And they marched across my eyes,
And everyone else was sleeping.

The Little Highways

2007-12-19T05:57:00.000+02:00

The little highways of anger riddle your heart,
Mercury globules spill through the tunnels.
In a crowded restaurant you find it difficult to swallow,
You are eating your children alive.
The calendar on the wall is tattered,
The things you have to do
You should have done long ago.
Solid as iron are the molecules of oxygen
That spin before your eyes.
The road you walk upon
Of soft dark red
Extends darkly forward,
And the walls of the corridor pulse solemnly
As you walk to a small bright room
Where you will be allowed to meet your children
Again.

Frothy Mold

2007-12-13T05:30:00.001+02:00

Frothy mold was growing along the inside of my scalp.
It was used to going where it didn’t belong—
On worn stairs or tables where elbows had rested without fail
Or in the wrinkles in long-used books.
How do you know, for instance, right now,
That mold has not engulfed your car,
Your children, or your wife?
I ran wildly through the health food store,
Wildly leaving marks of my choppers
In the organic fruits, the raw oats, the flasks of goat milk.

Brass Tacks

2007-12-12T05:44:00.001+02:00

There were brass tacks all over the floor
And brass words whizzing through the air
And the rush of the wind, or rocks, or what-have-you.
There was yesterday and there was tomorrow.
There was the rain that had been swallowed into the night
And left behind puddles in the street
Like the streaks of a giant snail.
There was love and there was breakfast.

Random House

2007-12-10T05:50:00.000+02:00

I was arranging my words
So that I could send them to Random House.
What a mistake!
There secretaries were flying out of the walls,
Abandoned IBM Selectric typewriters occasionally belched up
From the industrial carpet on the floor,
Colored salmon, charcoal gray, chartreuse,
The view outside the window shook, took off its clothes,
Put on some hard-edged skyscrapers, wiggled its sun,
Threw up a screen of clouds, of confused flamingos,
Of executives with hard-pack Pall Malls in their breast pockets.
It was all pell mell,
It was all going to hell,
Downstairs a bell cracked,
Freedom spilled out like shiny foil wrapped candies,
The hard kind with the soft taffy at the center.
My manila envelope spilled open, my words snaked across the corridor,
Past the water cooler,
Where a rhinoceros stood, shaking his heavy jaw.
I walked into the boardroom,
Where cab drivers, housewives, fast food deliverers, architectural students
And a variety of idealists
Were gazing into crooked mirrors, baring their teeth at each other.
Words were ejaculated, and small, misshapen moles scurried across the offices,
Blindly seeking the elevators, where they might descend to the basement
And find the cool tranquility of darkness.
Everyone was there in Random House,
And so I pressed into a crowded, noisy room
And held my manila envelope close to my breast
And watched the small black letters clamber out
And hurry to the morris dance.

It's Best to Talk

2007-12-09T05:53:00.000+02:00

It’s best to talk to no one,
To the wind,
To God,
In the company of moths and trees
That are so patient they will sagely listen
All night long.

Somehow you have built a city
In which you reside, alone,
With your guitar
And the smell of yesterday.

Shake the dreams like a veil of silver coins.

Here are All the Idols

2007-12-07T05:44:00.001+02:00

Here are all the idols,
Bustling about,
Jostling each other on the way to the synagogue,
Speeding along in their little idol cars to idol destinations.
And death oozes out from all of the crevices,
From all of the spaces between bricks,
From between teeth.
But in the gaze between our eyes there is no space,
Nor in the heart that is filled with effortless light,
Nor in the joy that waters the morning grass,
Nor in the colors of the street beneath the moon that hangs like a silver fruit.

Go Eat Candles

2007-12-06T05:31:00.000+02:00

by Yaacov Dovid Shulman

Go eat candles, wicks, clay candle holders,
Menorahs, oil, spark, flames, dreidels.
Eat light, swallow gold,
See how the darkness of the hills, the wasteland, the unknown chaos
Awaits its crevices of golden lava shining
To flow into the river of your thoughts.

We Have Run Out of Roosters Who Know How to Tell Time

2007-12-05T05:55:00.000+02:00

We have run out of roosters who know how to tell time.
They sleep through the morning,
Then one day, when we are in the middle of an important business meeting,
They hop up onto our head and start scratching.
We may be attempting to fix the car, as usual,
By throwing stones at it,
When it hops up onto the hood
And marches about imperiously.
It seems that wherever we look there is the rooster.
He appears when we turn down the blankets,
We had been hoping to spend some time with a good mystery,
Or in the orison of the chorus of the fall.
We try to run him off the road,
We shoo him away from the trash bin,
We wave our hands at him frantically
When he appears outside our window during breakfast.
He will no longer come again at dawn,
That was too easy for him.
Sometimes we wake up and go hunting for him through the dark streets
And see his shadow on top of a lamp post,
Or hear the silhouette of his invisible crowing in the vast black canvas of sky
And the shadow of wise foliage.

The Thick Artery of the Nile

2007-12-04T05:47:00.001+02:00

The thick artery of the Nile
Pulsed through Egypt,
The Hidekel, meanwhile, meandered through the course
Of memory,
All the rivers were lit, lit within or
Sparks of rain showered onto their surfaces,
Lines of color coursed within the sinews of their currents.

Along their banks grew thick clusters of reeds,
Where the frogs sang the joy of their universe
And the dragonflies darted through the Eden
Of their dreams.

The Waves are Not Tired

2007-12-03T06:02:00.001+02:00

The waves are not tired of rolling into shore,
The moon is not tired of dipping across the sky,
The mountains are not tired of their steady faithfulness,
The clouds are not tired of their shiftless drifting,
The car lights are not tired of their silent speeding across roads across the valley,
The radiator steam is not tired of its morning hiss,
Nor is the coffee tired of its wisps of steam,
But I am tired.
I have climbed down into the crevices of my brain,
I have slept in the shadows of words,
I have awoken to find that the same sultry dull summer morning
Of dry, baked earth awaited my hoeing and watering,
I have brought my desiccated peas home,
I have yearned for hills and streams of water.
I did not know that the earth itself was burning my feet
And that I was drying of thirst,
And raised my face to a sprinkle of scant rain
That raised puffs of dust.
No wonder those who looked at my dilapidated plow,
My heavy-headed, stark-ribbed ox,
My broken barn
Didn’t see the soil where tongues of flame lapped up.
Good morning,
Said the traveler, watching himself wearily hold the plow pulled by a dragging ox,
Watching himself look up at the sun crawling like a clock across the bony sky.
And his first arrow burst into his chest
And he watched his blood flow down into the thirsty soil.
And he gazed down from the lip of the canyon,
Seeing himself below holding his bow,
Seeing himself below lying upon the cracked soil
And his eyes met his.
The thunder was not tired of rumbling across the sky,
Nor were the swift shifting rivulets tired of carving their soft names
Into the hard brown earth.

Angels, Nomads, Wolves

2007-11-30T06:05:00.000+02:00

You were digging the night like a grave.
Lights shone like distant camps
Of angels, nomads, wolves,
The day creeped up the dingy curtain of the eastern sky,
The sun pushed up its reluctant head,
The birds circled once, twice, testing the air,
The dawn was gummy in their mouths.
The air took a deep breath.
Constantinople—there was a city for you,
There the Baal Shem Tov’s daughter wept washing clothing at the seashore
(As her father stood in his inn in blissful wonder),
The wealthy couple passed her with their wondrous message,
Sailing ships floated across the horizon.

Serious Obstacles

2007-11-29T04:16:00.000+02:00

Amazingly, Middle East talks are facing serious obstacles.
The discussions between Charlie Manson and Roman Polanski are also in danger of breaking down.
Meanwhile, there is little doubt that more will have to be done
To encourage a fruitful exchange of ideas between lions and antelope
(Of course the antelope must agree, once and for all, to take off their horns).

A Man with a Scraggly Beard

2007-11-28T09:12:00.000+02:00

A man with a scraggly beard was sitting at his desk writing poetry
When a distracted citizen ran pell-mell into his room.
“Why are you sitting writing poetry?” asked this distracted reader,
“When there are demonstrations in the streets,
Not to mention that the rising sun is sending scarlet scarves of clouds across the sky?”
This was at any rate the substance of a poem that a reader sent to me,
In which he described a poem that his mother had written to arouse him from bed.
She had been looking at a green moth with folded wings, she said,
And imagined that it had been thinking,
“As green as I am against the window screen,
There is an apple more green than I
And a thought more green than that apple,
And a window more clear than the sight of the mountain.”
I was thinking of all this when my sister called.
She had a poem in her hand,
But I said, “Who has time for poetry?”
That was exactly how her poem went:
She had a poem in her hand,
But I said, “Who has time for poetry?
Only the gnarls of leaves, only the knots of bushes,
Only the crumpled roads,
Leading nowhere.”
“Leading nowhere?” I cried.
“That sounds so dismal;
Isn’t there a more cheerful way to end a poem?”
But I said (she said) you should listen to the entire thing.
That (she said, I said, he said) is the gist of it,
And the green moth dreamed its green moth dreams.

He Crawled Along the Avenues

2007-11-27T05:39:00.000+02:00

So Norman Mailer is dead.
He crawled along the avenues,
He broke the mirrors that he kept staring into.
Like plaque he has stuck to our brains.
When his face was thrown up against the horizon,
How could we not dream of him,
When his name was scrawled in every prayer book we opened?
Perhaps we need a root canal,
How dazzling our teeth of knowledge will gleam.
We will inhale the violet herbs of the fields,
The moon will burn our eyes white.

How Gentlemen Earn Their Pensions

2007-11-26T05:40:00.001+02:00

The earth isn’t very new after all,
The leaders of Israel have been shrinking and shrinking,
Now they no longer care about their place in history,
They bring a shovel to the negotiating table
To bury their neighbors
So that they can take over their villas.

The Jew smiles at Goebbels, at Torquemada,
At Martin Luther, at Nebuchadnezzar,
Come in, did you bring Adolf?
Let’s negotiate the heads, the eyes of my people,
Their teeth, their children, their water,
Their sky,
In a decade we’ll meet again in southern France,
We’ll all be retired and gentlemen,
And this is how gentlemen earn their pensions.

The more clever these Jewish leaders become,
The shorter and stouter do they grow,
They scurry about, being realistic and clever,
And even as they do the ceiling comes down
And the office cubicles grow more and more narrow,
And the President of Syria and the Prince of Saudi Arabia
And the American Secretary of State
And many other curious onlookers
Jostle to gaze down on them,
As they squeak and twitch their whiskers.