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11/22/2009 2:35:42 PM

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1.
And with every page, we start over.
With every sentence, we start over. Try
to start at the beginning.
Where is the beginning?

Or were we born in mid-sentence
like the Huma* bird whose egg
hatches in mid-air and which
never touches the ground its whole life?

No, I like to have a ground to stand on.
Bare'sheesh, 'In the Beginning, God
created the Heavens and the Earth...'
(Mr. Blitz, our Hebrew teacher, told us to read in our books, 
then took out a pile of dollar bills from his desk and started counting them.)

The Earth is a Stage
for the unfolding of material life.
Air, Fire, and Water cry for the completion of Earth.
God's Imagination is our flesh and blood.
'This is My Body —'
All life is Communion.

2.
And so, wake up
in the middle of the 20th century, 
the most violent century in the history of the world, 
smoke still clearing from the War,

wake up in a place that did not get levelled, 
but the blood of whose sons, many of them, 
flowed in the crucible 
fields and beaches of Europe and the South Pacific,

wake up in New York City in 1948, 
look up at a father who lived out the war
in the army but not in the trenches, 
who volunteered however for the Invasion of Japan
and whose life was saved, paradoxically, 
by the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima,

wake up to a mother born with silver spoon in old Lancaster, PA, 
that spoon exchanged for common steel after the Crash, 
going to live in NYC, working for the Army...

I was born to these two, 
does it matter that I was born, 
or should I leave myself out the equation and pose
as the invisible, objective observer?

What I wanted to say
is that the blood line
should have come to an end, 
in my veins the asphalt, the phone lines and electric cables, 
the gas pipes and the smoke and noise all ran amok and the cars

and subways of nerve impulses ran in circles
and did not know where they were going,

and in our home the doors of rooms were all broken, 
the latches would not latch and the locks would not lock
and  the noise overflowed
and flooded from room to room in psychic soup, 
motherfatherbrothergrandmothernoise all running round my head, 
and the sexual trauma bred in such soup,

and it all ran in circles seeking a Way Out, 
seeking the way to a Source, 
seeking the road back to Nature
and my own nature
unglutted from the maze, 
reaching back, back, blindly
for solid Ground,

reaching later through the study of History, 
but that was only chronological, 
a sequence of events: 'Columbus, 
the Mayflower, the Revolution, 
the War of 1812, the Civil War, 
the Industrial Revolution...'

It gave no footing, 
it all had to be destroyed, 
the map, the personality, the psychic superstructure, 
plowed through to find a way
back to the First Cause, 
back to the solid ground
of Being, 
back to the One,

and then dreamed
forward again.
_____
*Huma — the 'bird of Paradise' of Persian mythology. See
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huma_%28mythology%29

Max Reif

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