Beginners
Wilk, Melvin
BEGINNERS to Gary Epstein Most of all I miss Shabbes. After the War, a stampede. To get to Queens and the better life of the grasslands. Yiddish signs left behind for the bulldozers. What, after...
...Not in any people, not in any place, not in any language being holy...
...My stillness...
...What, after all, was so much better...
...1 | Melvin As Mordecai I was circumcised, but not for hygienic reasons...
...Yet when I die, wrapped in my Hebrew tallit, I will be gathered with my fathers into their paradise of names...
...At least in Brownsville Shabbes got around Each Friday evening patching the streets with peace, So that even the candy store good-for-nothings, Those trumbeniks on the corner, were reminded Of something snazzier than the Brooklyn Paramount...
...But I have no real faith...
...Melvin Wilk is a poet whose book In Exile will be published by BKMK Press in the spring...
...Will I end up in Arizona...
...I do believe in stillness, ignoramous of a Jew that I am, thrice exiled: from a people, from a place, from a language...
...Solemn...
...I entered the Covenant as Mordecai ben Moshe— a boy marked ineradicably...
...Dressed in silk as dark as the Pale My grandmother blesses the candles, Light established in brass candlesticks, Challah covered in white linen, The dark wine waiting, The roar of the elevated train ratding the window As she prays, Yiddish murmurings, her eyes closed, Her hands gathering the week, the year, Cupping the history of the world over the flames Until all that her hands hold is as if it were not burned, And the world is created from scratch, Like the challah glazed with egg gleaming in the candlelight...
...Not every man can say he will leave so much behind him...
...Not mine...
...Accepting...
...Will I be lowered by machine in the spot reserved for Jews in the municipal cemetery, in the desert, beside my Navaho brother, far from New York, from the Pripet Marshes, from Jerusalem...
...Sometimes I hear it, this stillness...
...The end of career is enforced retirement, or heart attack— usually both...
...Then she yields the prepared creation to Avram, And my grandfather blesses the wine, and the bread, in Hebrew, And the kitchen becomes the Garden...
...Now there is fruit of the vine in Iowa to be blessed And candles to light on Friday evenings at sundown...
...Infinitely generous...
...I felt superior to those beginners Who couldn't even speak American, much less read it...
...But when I was a boy I was bored...
...Safe beyond the ego's clamor...
Vol. 4 • December 1978 • No. 2
