my flowers

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what you see 

is what you see 

not what you see

what you read 

is what you read 

not what you read 

I am that I am 

that I am not

what you see

like me

like me

please

like me

please

for who I am 

for who I am not

for who 

I seem 

to be

to you

my garden grows

more beautiful 

than yours

 

my flowers

flower

and who are you

to know

who I am

who can know 

what is

if I matter

at all 

it's only because

someone once

said to me

as I say to you

the only words

you want 

to hear

you matter 

to me

for real.

Our Galaxy

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Einstein imagined it

and a hundred years later

an international team of astrophysicists 

and their instruments 

confirmed the data:

There's a black hole at the center 

of our galaxy

and now we have a photo

blurry as recollection

like a cast-iron skillet 

cooking pêches flambées.

But doesn't it just describe  

every argument we've ever had?

A mad orbit circling a force 

of gravity

no light escapes

a darkness so dark 

so vast and small

quotidian and strange

buried deep 

in a swirl of red hot stars.

 

I go to my empty corner

of the universe 

you go to yours 

in silence

measure our distance

after some time to cool

we reemerge -

once again approach 

the event horizon, 

teeter on the edge

every word 

calibrated carefully 

to hold us steady

for fear 

of falling 

into the abyss

because we know 

what's at the center 

an attraction so strong

and irresistible

a memory

so painful 

it will tear us 

apart.

The Same House

Love and loss

inhabit the same house

and there are ghosts

there are ghosts.

  

Houdini

 

When I was a  kid I was obsessed with Harry Houdini. I had been an amateur magician from a young age, spent all my birthday money on buying magic tricks and constantly nagged my parents to take me to the local magic shop. I'd pore over catalogues of tricks until the pages were ragged, circling my next purchase. I went to the magic conventions, even took a course in sleight of hand. Eventually I graduated to performing at children's birthday parties. But not being very comfortable on stage in front of people, I wasn't a very good entertainer. Even when I lost interest in performing magic, my interest in Houdini never waned. I read every book I could find about him, eventually realizing that there was something about my fascination with Houdini that went beyond his persona as a magician and entertainer. The infamous Montreal connection to Houdini made me feel a certain closeness to him, namely, that it was while performing here that he received the blows to the abdomen that ruptured his appendix which led to the peritonitis that killed him in Detroit. The punches were delivered by a McGill University student. But there was something else that I think drew me to him, although as a kid I was not aware of it at the time. Houdini was a Jew, born Erich Weisz. And it donned on me that the greatest escape artist of all time, the man whose career and worldwide fame were defined by death-defying stunts, whose family had fled persecution in Hungary to America in the late 19th century, was perhaps subconsciously and metaphorically manifesting his identity as a Jew. Houdini died a decade before the Holocaust, but I could not help imagining if a Nazi concentration camp, the gas chambers, or the crematoria ovens, could have held the master of escape.  And that was the inspiration for the following poem, and the accompanying pen and ink sketch, above. Yesterday I was listening to Kate Bush's hauntingly beautiful song Houdini from her album The Dreaming, and it brought me back to the mysteries of the man, and to my younger self.

HOUDINI 

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Outside my window

the maple tree daily yields

yellow leaves gasping

from gallows limbs, pendant cloth stars

stitched in the light

of the long ago dead.

Knotted roots clamber nightly

like arms through frozen, snow-laced 

soil straightjacketing the foundation of my house

and I dream myself Houdini, struggle, contort,

disjoint my supple Jewish frame in all directions:

He was the genius of the century.

Had he been alive to see Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek

would his lungs have breathed the Zyklon B

as if it were the purest Laurentian air?

Would the bullets of the Einsatzgruppen

have passed through him like a spirit?

Would he have metamorphosed from flesh

through the crematorium smokestack 

back to flesh again?

Would the doctors have experimented on him

with poisons and torturous instruments

to disclose the secrets 

of his death-defying talent?

In the morning I wake

knotted in twists of folded linen

like the vaudeville Jew whose artifice

could not save him from one lethal blow

administered like a student quota 

at McGill

underhandedly.

there are some words

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there are some words
once you read them
they mean so much
they must be committed to memory
and recited aloud
some songs that reach so deep
into your soul they must be sung
it's not that you need to possess them
but that they possess you
and so when I taste the apple
experience the sweet juice
and tart flesh on my tongue
expose the mahogany seed
nestled at the core
I think how clever
of the fruit to tempt me
with its lush colour
entice me with its sweet smell
perfect package
so that I or some other creature
may swallow the seeds
and through digestion
deposit them in freshly fertilized soil
to procreate into forests of fruit
and I think of the first time I saw you
in the lobby of the repertory theatre
after the show
you were holding another man's hand
but like a ripe fruit on the cusp
of unclasping from a branch
I could smell in the air
the unspoken inevitability
of our love
and wonder if you remember that day
the same way
I do.

More Sad

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The firing

of bullets and dropping of bombs 

is a familiar cruelty

on TV screens

these days

why do I feel more sad

for the businessman I see 

in his office? This man of habit, craven 

and long past the age of retirement

in his glassed-in corner, hunched over his desk

barely moving

like a pet turtle who couldn't outgrow his tank;

his days should be devoted 

to pastoral pleasures or culture,

playing golf or learning to abstract paint,

but there's nothing left to express,

no inner reserves from which to draw

inspiration, the only occasional rise he gets

is fist-pounding rage

when company sales are down, 

or the value of his portfolio plummets.

He's ditched the suit and tie, 

I'll give him that, can't stay home, 

can't stand his wife nor she him,

(on that they agree) so he

still comes to the office every day,

arrives at 7 and sits there until lunchtime,

reads emails, circles letters 

in the daily Wonder Word upwards 

downwards backwards forwards 

and fantasizes about fucking the Chinese interns

in accounting

younger than his granddaughters.

Despite the triple-bypass

he steals the occasional smoke, 

not 'Craven A' like before, Cohibas 

'he doesn't inhale', the big "C" 

always in the back of his mind

(so many he knew are now gone).

Along with a statin and a beta blocker, 

glucose is lately a concern

but controllable with diet,

so at the stroke of 12

like Cinderella fleeing the ballroom,

he's off to the local eatery

where all the businessmen go -

he'll show them his powers are not slipping

away, he hasn't lost a step,

still makes deals they can envy.

His car is washed weekly,

he over-tips his barber and manicurist,

the local rabbi comes for a donation

and he gives, (just enough each time 

to keep him coming back) he cares 

about what people say,

and for how much he leaves behind,

but not for the sadness of others

he's never had much use for sadness

(or happiness for that matter)

only anger and fear, emotions

that take you places.

At home in the evening

he watches the latest dispatches 

of the war on cable news, he's hooked 

on the TV fetish for violence and suffering,

the peddling of atrocity and injustice  

to the numb addicted audience,

he kicks his feet up on his Laz-E-Boy recliner

and sips Crown Royal on the rocks,

soothed to be safe from the world's general shittiness

and gently stoned he slowly drifts off to sleep.

Jewish Man Praying

Okay, so a black and white photo of a young Jewish man, siddur (prayer book) in hand, donning a kippah (skullcap) and the traditional talit (prayer shawl). Perhaps it was taken in a synagogue during afternoon or evening services? He looks intent on his prayers, a serene pensive moment. Nothing terribly unusual.

When I saw this photo posted on social media that was my reaction. Then I started reading. And I took a closer look. The face looked familiar.

The photo was posted on social media by Terry Foxman. This 'Portrait of a Jewish Man Praying' (as I began to think of it) was taken by her younger brother Robert. I knew Robert as my older brother Randy's friend when they worked together in the early 80s at the Seville Theatre, a repertory cinema near the Montreal Forum downtown. I worked at the Seville (thanks to my family connection) for a few years too. I remember Robert as a guy with wild ideas and a wicked, iconoclastic sense of humour. He was always coming up with hilarious stunts and pranks. This one shows Robert in his heyday. Randy remembers the day that Robert took the photo. It was for a school project. Robert staked out the Forum and waited for the Montreal Canadiens players to leave after a practice. It was not unusual for fans to ask the players for autographs and photos. This portrait is not in fact of a Jewish man, it's Montreal Canadiens hall-of-fame hockey icon, Guy Lafleur - the 'flower' as he was known for the grace and beauty of his skill on the ice passed away last week, at the age of 70. As the story goes, after the team practice, Robert somehow convinced Guy to go to the nearby Alexis Nihon Plaza and take the photo, but not a selfie with a fan, rather wearing the bar-mitzvah boy costume with all the traditional religious paraphernalia. 

This photo surprises on so many levels. One, imagine a professional athlete doing something like this today. Impossible. And not any athlete, but one of the greatest, an elite athlete who at the time was near the top of his game, a local icon - you have to understand how Montreal Canadien hockey players are worshipped. Second, imagine that the fan who wants to take your picture also wants you to go with him to a nearby mall to do it. Third, imagine that the fan wants you to wear some strange clothes to take this picture. It's simply nothing short of astounding that Lafleur went along with it. What a mensch. It was a different (much more innocent) moment in history for sure. Now think of the chutzpah the photographer must have had to try a stunt like this.

I saw the photo and had to make a double-take. Then I thought about its genius. One small piece of information, the identity of the figure, and the entire meaning of the photo changes. And isn't that always the way it is when you look at any photo or work of art. The more you know about the subject matter of the piece, the deeper the experience of what you're viewing. And in this case, what seems like a typical, even boring, traditional Jewish moment turns into a resonant cultural commentary. It suddenly depicts two disjunctive iconographies, the (gentile) Quebecois hockey player worshipped like a god in his popular culture, and the classic religious accoutrements of the historically marginalized and persecuted Jew. 

I talked about it with my brother this afternoon. He said the day Robert told him about the project, he was horrified. He felt it was below Lafleur's dignity and felt embarrassed for him. A stunt done at Lafleur's expense. Looking at it that way it hearkens to the history of Quebec, when many Quebecois were demeaned by their English overlords. But that might be a bit overly exaggerated. Robert was a prankster and maybe he and his buddies got a good laugh out of it at the time. It may have been just a lark, a school project that if they could pull off was sure to get an 'A'. But in retrospect, it has so much more resonance on multiple levels, that today the photo reaches the level of art.