No nuance that I know
Can capture all the subtleties of light.
It is the most effusive show
World-fabric has: sun’s dynamite,
Which loves us. Is requited.
As shadows pass and leave no sign
Of passing, so I stand, delighted,
And watch these borders of the borderline.
The Puppet
Some days I look above my head and see
A hand that flexes, jumps, and, startled, vanishes.
Its partings leave
A sense of vacancy,
As if to say, ‘The sort of mind that banishes
Its puppeteer
Begins to veer
Too near
The wind.’
As if that hand,
Now ravelled in unseeable blank sleeve,
Had been the plotting force that pinned
My life in place and made it go as planned.
That’s what I guess but, soon enough, this goes
When, glancing down, I spot organic links
Clasping my feet
And grass about my toes,
Green Earth’s effusive countenance, which thinks
It knows my mind
And, sure, I find
Its twined
Support
And givingness
A gentle guidance, patterned and complete.
I realise that the hand I thought
Was besting me had only meant to bless.
The Ladder
It is the hour when come-and-go
Carouse around the riverbank,
Collect in wish and wing,
And tickle blank
Expanses of the woodland dank.
Light descants on the fields I know
And makes their outline sing
An interplay
Of night and day.
Ivy and trellis, cloud-encumbered light
Conglomerates, then mottles out of sight.
Fierce solace. Loom. Release. Good loss.
A mumble. Mellowness?
No words. A luge within a larger way
I thought I’d lost. Did not
We all? It turns and is a stay,
Convening marvels known and not.
Loosed, these impressionistic phrases,
Because, alone, I am at last
Released from hectic talk,
Resolved to cast
The shaky scaffold of what’s past
Outward, away, and watch the phases
Of fascination walk
Under the eaves
Of stars and leaves
As sunset’s ladder tumbles through the sky:
Soleil couchant with rungs of purple dye.
Despondency turns daring love.
Reluctancy turns lift.
Sight turns ekstasis. Stand-still turns to play.
All thoughts are turning, and
The turns themselves turn to a stay,
Unplaceable but close at hand.
Sand Grains
Almost not anything at all, this particle
Of disconnected shell,
Yet squirrelling and shot
Through with a chutzpah fit for Frank Lloyd Wright.
Sheer angled mell,
A plankton’s cot,
It chuckles mischief, challenging the light.
A miniature motel
Where some detective plot
Might stumble, after rambling, on an article
Of lace, to solve its long-pursued conundrum.
Eureka. Awe. A crux
Hounded between the trees
For donkey’s years, corroborated. Truly,
Eternal flux
(Whatever wheeze
We try to pull), although it seem unruly,
Yields reverence redux.
As everybody sees
Sooner or later, nothing here is humdrum.
The Rowboat
I’m in two minds about the whole affair.
I like the forward-wading dip
Of oar descending through expectant air.
I like the way that wavelets tip
Across the prow,
Which rises now,
Then drops before the rippling waterline
Like pilgrims at a shrine.
But then I catch the sky
Meandering immeasurably over
The windy land
That trembles by
While ecstasy, a supernova
Discovered best when stumbled on unplanned,
Electrifies it with a pang
Of thrill and thought like an interrobang.
Truly, there needn’t be a choice between
The gentle boat and tingling sky.
The one’s a stand from which the other’s seen,
And yet this restive wish to fly
Would have me sail
Above the pale
Well-gardened houses on the riverside
To where the swallows glide.
Impossible to break
The up-and-downing nowness of the boat.
Not on the cards
To lose the wake
That fans behind the place we float.
Right here, right now, is life: for all its shards
And jostling imperfections, who
Would care to speed like flung neutrinos do?
April Shower
Rainforest day! Rain’s free for all.
And here I’m getting drenched
With everything the moody clouds had clenched
But now let fall
In plosive drops,
Startling the land and pulling out the stops.
Torrential fuel. A shapeless rush
Of see-through resin beads
That shatter into absence on the turf.
It is a crush
That nips and feeds
The river where the waterboatmen surf.
One day I guess my mind will slip
Softly out of my head,
And I’ll be left as some I’ve known, sat up
At noon in bed
With fragile grip
Clutching a nearly-gone (or part-full) cup.
The rolling shutter staggers all.
A pigeon’s dappled wings
Are more-dimensional seen through the rain
It does not stall
But as it flings
Against the air it doubles round again.
I can’t not stare. I’m overrun
By smallnesses so grand.
I think of when, a kid, my mother told
Me how to hold
The rain in hand
And drink it as, she said, she once had done.
This is an April shower and I
Am caught off-guard by joy,
Although I know that I, like it, must die.
Let death deploy
Its every trick.
Delight, a deluge, cuts me to the quick.
The Multiverse
In one world, it’s all slides and tinkling laughter:
A monkey rolls you tangerines
And sunshine shows you what you’re after,
With not a flicker. Solar-powered machines
Propel new towns
Above the hills of Martian moons
While, back on Earth, dull frowns
Transmute to sheer elation in hot air balloons.
But it’s a different story in this other world:
Impulsive rocks
Splat pioneers. The hasty flocks
Of herons push an aeroplane off course,
And in the navel of volcanoes what is curled
But imminent destruction,
Eruptive force
And, diametric, slow, some distant plate’s subduction?
Still, in that former world, the life is lucky.
The lovers? They are always true.
The heroes are sincere and plucky.
Your footsteps know, by ins
tinct, what to do.
For now at least,
Warmongers reach a compromise
And shares of land are pieced
Between free shepherds who rejoice below clear skies.
But elsewhere God or restless mathematics meant
To fix it so
That days are short and passions go.
We can’t imagine what the reason is.
It chances that, for all our intricate intent,
We stall where we begin.
To notice this
Can change one’s spin on life, if not the quantum spin.
Ants, Spiders, Bees
The ants are those who seek the bric-a-brac
Of evidence
And run it through the ringer, forth and back,
In search of sense.
Ants like to gather reams of information
And neatly fence
These finds in careful graphs of their creation.
With scatter plots,
Venn diagrams, and Power Point presentation,
They call the shots
On showing solid things that are the case,
And also what’s
Improbable, or would be out of place
Amidst their stack
Of knowledge, which they work so hard to trace.
Contrariwise, the spiders spin their minds
In planned designs,
Inventing miracles of many kinds
With tiny twines
Which gradually accumulate to make
A land of lines.
They never tire, or ever take a break
From making maps.
It seems a thankless task they undertake
And yet perhaps
Sunlight on morning dew may lure some klutz
To try their traps
And thereby wriggle from the usual ruts.
Yes, yes, it binds,
But it releases! And that must take guts.
The bees elect to forge a middle course.
Fierce wanderlust
Wings them to anthers, pollen towers: the source
Of precious dust,
Which they convert to deck their citadels
With waxy crust.
Hexagonal, their labyrinth of cells
Encloses sweet
Effusions, while sheer industry impels
A moving feat:
The manufacture of topography,
On which they meet,
Enjoy their lives and, daily, by degree,
Must reinforce.
It is a brilliant thing to be, a bee.
Till Next Time
How could it end in any other way?
Pastels above and tangled grass about our feet,
Tangential streaks of iridescent grey,
Highrise conjectures on invention’s scope, and wheat
Accumulating, hushed,
By B-roads where a rushed
Commuter hurtles to another day.
Remote, flamingo-gawky, cranes release
Piratic hooks like pensive anglers at a river,
Expecting, wordless, some disrupted peace
To sanction free-for-all: their moment to deliver
Mechanic justice. Who
Could function as they do?
Who grips the nettle, grasps the golden fleece?
Time past lies like a hogshead on a tray.
Fresh salmon surge upstream. Downstream young lions leap.
Time’s yes-man has relinquished yesterday.
All doubts disintegrate. Enthusiasms seep
And gather. Where they flow,
Life flourishes. Trees grow.
How could it end in any other way?
ZOHAR ATKINS
I wrote these poems over a seven-year period, while pursuing a doctorate in Theology at Oxford and rabbinic ordination in New York and Jerusalem. For me, poetry is the discipline of subverting discipline; it is theory in reverse. Or as Heidegger put it, ‘the thinker says what being is; the poet names what is holy’. As a scholar, my task is to analyse, demystify, explain. As a poet, however, I am summoned to confront what courts analysis only to flout it. My task is to let the mysteries I encounter in daily life reveal themselves as yet more mysterious than I could have presumed.
Poetry is my argument with myself. But it is also my argument with argument. In following its leads, I hope to arrive at a clearing where the words that brought me there seem both trivial and providential, utterly contingent and omnisignificant.
Protest
No sooner do I say
‘Let there be light’
Then a horde of angels arrives
With their signs.
‘No more oppression of darkness!’
‘Stop occupying our empty wild.’
‘Down with the visible!’
‘God Should Know Better Than to Speak.’
Even the walls of my hotel lobby seem
To sing out against me.
But then I remember, I’m God.
Soon the angels will want to go home.
In the end, nobody will remember how they
Held hands, soaring together, like a school
How they laid their celestial torsos down in a row
To prove my world a desecration.
Nobody will hear their words of lament,
‘Holy, holy, holy,’ as anything
But praise.
System Baby
I was six when I first filed for moral bankruptcy
I was ten when they told me language is inherently classist.
At thirteen, I started defining kindness
as ‘making nice to those who like your favourite teams’.
At twenty, I hired a ghost to write my LinkedIn profile.
At thirty, I started radiosuctive parole therapy.
At forty-one, I began to look sideways and call it inward.
At eighty-six, I’m a work in progress.
Today, at 120, I’m a proud piece of gum,
who’s almost forgotten the countless nights it took me,
locked in the shoe of the human mind,
to get here to tell you: don’t let others humanise you.
Don’t let them take away your objectivity
no matter how much they brutalise you.
Song of Myself (Apocryphal)
I am my own listserve,
advertising job and fellowship opportunities
for myself by myself to myself.
I sing of unpaid internships to my soul, O soul,
and of passing controversies on which to take sides
is to take the side of the self.
I re-post myself and forward myself
and respond to myself with emojis
for I am the screen and its anticipation,
the pleasure of being liked
and of commanding myself to like others.
For all pages are contained in my potential
for sharing, scrolling, even viewing
incognito. I sign in on myself
and log out of myself and yet remain
more than my usernames
and forgotten passwords.
For I am the great web itself
and every parody known to it
is known to me, and every troll
who devastates its comments section
is of myself. I am celebrity culture
and conspiracy theory culture –
the metastasis of meaning
that nurtures both political
gossip and culture wars,
food blogs, parenting blogs,
and cat videos. What you
shall click, I shall click,
and where you shall cut and paste
I shall be cut and paste.
Do I make myself redundant?
Very well then, I make myself
redundant. I am a paywall
(disambiguation)
I co
ntain metadata.
Poetry TedTalk Notes
Most poetry has the same shelf life as the technology of its time.
Therefore, poetry is less about the individual poem, than about the brand, the update, the
plan, the package, the network, the merger, the deal.
The question isn’t ‘Is this a good poem?’ but, ‘Is it scaleable?’
A poem, like a business, should always have an exit strategy.
A poem is a platform.
You can’t solve all of poetry’s problems in one poem, but you can use it to build your
profile, make connections, plant seeds.
The poverty of poetry is an asset.
The meaning of poetry isn’t liquid.
Carried interest in poetry is essentially tax-free.
Reading is a better return on investment than writing.
Without without Title
A poem that admits there is no meaning
besides the gathering of syllables
into little bouquets of desire,
placed, somewhere, between light and dust,
is said to need, as winter needs,
the beauty of visible breath. If
wisdom is not to be had, it is
to be sung. A poem is nothing
but the sound of emptiness
enfleshed, or else the sound
of a half-naked emptiness
caught between an urge to strip,
a want to decorate,
and a lingering contentment
to stay here
Fake Judaism
Abraham, says Deleuze,
could only become a Jew
by first being a goy.
Inside every pintele yid