Elegy Poem by Tamir Greenberg

1.

In John Donne's poem about
the second anniversary
of the Progress of the Soul
I found written:
'...think that they close thine eyes
that they confess much in the world amiss
who dare not trust a dead man's eye with that
which they from God and angels cover not.'
Despite the bone-chilling cold.
Despite the fact it is the last night of November
and I'm unable to imagine a candle's flame
casting quivering shadows across the white drape,
nor the bright mercury light of surgery.
I sit in my room and gaze ahead. With
deliberate and clear thought I focus
the white square of light on the face and wait:
I concede that my naked body is but
the total sum of thirty-one-year-old Democritus's
tiny creatures. Part of my body
evaporates as water, another transforms
into something which is meant to be but is not - particularly
during sleeping hours - and part of it forms the one
who looks fearfully into the small mirror
in the bathroom. I also concede
that soon I'll be dead. I'll be but
the imprint of my teeth on a plastic blue pen,
a scratch on the desk, the injury
I suffered in my knee when I was four,
and a single recording of the persistent voice:
'one two three testing
one two three testing.'
And what if I weep? Over whom? In one moment
the body will convex the checkered blanket,
and later - the featureless absence;
the one who embroiders with a fine thread of pain
the gods of physics and the bite of love,
balancing vacant hours
with faceless days.
I'll fade and become nothing. I won't walk blindly
in the rooms of my lover, now
three years dead. The branches of the pine
won't stir and the chords of the cold air
stretching from the ridge of Mount Carmel
up into the clouds won't shudder with surprise as if rushing
to the gap left by the body's emptiness:
I'm not Linus, my love. My flesh as yours
discharges sweat, and my hand touches names
only if the blade of time strikes.

2.

The pen will dry up. The book will rot
in the trash can. The kid on his bicycle,
driving past my balcony every morning like a ghost,
is a reflection of the dead lover; one day he'll grow
into a smiling man, imprisoned in black-and-white-photos,
an artistic copy of longing exchanged
for silvery coins of one shekel and one hundred-dollar bills.
Blood molecules will become
molecules of asphalt, and on both winter will descend.
Rains will flood Herzl Street, will be drawn
to the post-office square and dry up in the air with a thin wail:
There's no comfort in love.
No comfort in machines.
No comfort in angels.
(An angel is a biological drea(m) ry mutation
of a thirty-one-year-old man whose vain torments
grew wings and his poem turned
into a silver B.M.W. bike
to ride into the groom's arms.)

3.

(Not across the asphalt, but
on the sea. In the still, heavenly, almost
anachronistic sea, on a warm, wintry
afternoon of a Tuesday)

4.

As for the black-and-white-photo -
I concede, and even dreamed, that time is finite.
I mean, the time that is a spherical ring.
A ring that diminishes to zero at the soft touch
of a lamp-light. I also dreamed
that finite is the distance to where
a hidden beauty can drift
when the sky above the city is blind.
For a moment only the seam came undone.
For an instant the bridge spanned between
the abyss of nothing and the abyss of nothing,
and atoms, as abstract as love
but immortal, hurried and gathered
from the ends of a universe forever expanding,
from points that even the telescope
on Mount Palomer hasn't sighted,
to become a gentle, dark body,
on which my fingers played
a mute quartet on a January night. For more
than a billion years your body, broken down
to its tiny parts, roamed among cold and aloof stars
until it dared to form against the waves of chaos
into a delicate, fragile architectural structure. For another
billion years it will yet roam, doomed to infinite drifting,
like that clear persisting recording
transmitted on radio waves
to empty space, granting the reciting voice
lovely lines of poetry by T.S. Eliot,
immortal life devoid of human touch.
The yellow light of stars blends with the yellow light
of the reading-lamp. Traversing together through
two memory slits the weight of the blue light
refracted from the arm will wane. How miserable
we will be on the third anniversary of the soul's progress in soul:
The body is immortal
but the memory of its warmth
is transient.

5.

The pressure of wind on a billboard,
the small wet stones
on which the bare foot rests,
and the small, round stones
moving in a circular motion in the inner ear:
This is the life of the everyday. Evening,
as I return from the office, I'll recline, weary,
on the armchair and imagine: You've written a poem.
'The Twentieth Century is dying, my love, and so are we.'
I've forgotten who of the two of us, crossing each night Hanevi'im Street,
stopped to investigate the exact compounds
of an after-shave scent, 'Aqua-blue.' The chemist?
The dejected lover? Certainly not the artist. The artist -
his name is poetic, but his life is selfish and remote,
lacking the sweetness of time and place.
On a filthy shard of glass he inscribes
reflections of mathematical equations
and gives them names:
Birth. Serpent. Neon. Year.
(Names whose end is sorrow, ignorance and deception.)
'The Twentieth Century is dying, my love, and so are we.'
New names fill the room:
The uncertainty principle. The wave's function. The moment's
alteration in the warm body. The alteration of the body in the open sea.
The alteration of the open sea in its salt. In the bubbles of air released from the mouth
of the drowned; in his wet curls; the nothing in the spaceless
void threatening to flee the bounds of the household ball of light;
the nothing in the void in which a fragile ball of light floats -...

6.

Who will remember how on the second week of February, Nineteen-
Eighty-Seven, a camera flashed on your dark face, and you,
silent and somber, looked past the shoulder of the anonymous photographer
toward some hidden point in space? In your right hand you held a small book,
blue-green. With a magnifying glass I read the tiny letters
on its cover: 'The Second Law of Thermodynamics.' Your open mouth
suggested: In the middle of a word the moment had been severed from time
to be buried in my wallet. For another year or two the word will float
in the space of the black-and-white-photo (measuring
two and a half centimeters over three and a half centimeters) ,
and then will be tossed to the garbage with unpaid
electric bills and my notebooks. Blue-green will be the color of the last experiment,
desperate, pathetic, to hold on to the simple harmonies
and the pre-Le-Corbusier proportions - - -
- - - - - -






7.

The first experiment:
Impulse. The infinite digital line. A green screen.
A green sheet. A green face. A green angel. Beep beep.
A wave of zero amplitude. A green Michael Angelo. Pieta:
M=
M=the mass of the thin, lifeless body.
C =the square of sharp light falling on the face,
on the pallid cheekbones and on a frail shoulder.
E=the faint energy of memory, weeping,
trying to challenge the laws of nature,
fastening with diminishing strength
the remnants of a green magnetic tape:
2=2
2-1=1
1=1
1=1
1=1
1-1=0
0=0
0

In the other experiment, based on what's written on page seven
of the blue-green booklet, perhaps comfort is hidden. In thin, pale letters, I found:
Auyler, thirsting for love, proves the existence of a divine father
in a simple mathematical configuration:
love, weakness, sorrow and deception. And immediately after -
e +1=0
all the connections are given: the crease in the page, the height of the wave, the glow of light and its absence.