Beyond Belief

Posted on October 9, 2023 by jillbpearlman

To not know; to think only about the usual mixed feelings of crossing back to “real life” after a holiday, with tender feet and breathing open pores.  To be one of the ravers in the Israeli desert dancing under the starry October sky.  To be an observant Jew dancing wildly over Sukkot-Shabbat-Simchat Torah, giving thanks over three holidays celebrating joy, joy, joy, going into otherness – not knowing about the bloody weekend.

I was counting the hours of those in blissful ignorance, having switched off their devices for another kind of communication as one holiday slid into another into another — before they’d have to rejoin those who knew. That sliver of innocence would not narrow and close in the usual way, with a shiver, a tremble as we cross back over the straits — as poet Yehuda Amichai writes, trying to soak it all up before the flute holes close.

From one kind of abyss to another.  Strewn with corpses draped like black flowers/on roads, on the tops of cars, in one’s hearts and arms.

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All the Days of Awe

Posted on September 24, 2023 by jillbpearlman

The Days of Awe open on Rosh Hashanah and close on Yom Kippur. When my birthday falls on Rosh Hashanah, it gets lost in the birthday of the world; when it falls on Yom Kippur, celebrations turn sober and thin. Gallows humor when fasting, enacting symbolic death? Fat chance! 

This year, the birthday fell smack in the middle of the Days of Awe – and I got a day or two of awe. When your walls come tumbling down (Rabbi Alan Lew’s image), as they did unbidden during this season of introspection, you get some light in the gaps of the rebuilding. That happened mid-week – all in betweens! – in a New England-y place familiar and known (Maine) but charged. I cleared the slate and came with heightened sensibility; came to the sapphire sky with such a mind. Something came to meet me. 

Everything got renewed by the sea, standing on the deck of a fishery
in the presence of a rope coiled, braided, stiff with the sting of fish iodine
and rusted wires woven together with gates, doors, traps
and floats bulbed in mottled white and bright fuchsia 
hanging like a bunch of radishes. 

Yes to Paul Eluard: “Is there another world? Yes, in this one.”

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Blasting Complacency

Posted on September 18, 2023 by jillbpearlman

When the same word floats up from the most disparate-seeming characters.  My yoga teacher. My poetry mentor. A black hat rabbi. The list would be disparate enough without Baudelaire – but the dark prince poet was at the forefront in demanding we slough off our lazy habits that inure us to precision and keep us from paying – drum roll please – Attention!  Attention – the practice my yoga teacher, poetry mentor and rabbi insist we devote ourselves to rather than allow slothful addiction to routine to cloud perception of what is. 

The reason I think about it is that this weekend: Shofar!  The curly ram’s horn provocateur is regularly blown on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  One prayer: May the cry of the shofar chatter our complacency. Another: May the cry elicit the response, hineini, I’m in the moment.  As Maimonides said, “Awake, O you sleepers, awake from your sleep! O you slumberers, awake from your slumber.”  

Then there’s the fact that this Saturday, the shofar took a Shabbat rest; the routine that breaks routine was broken. The rabbi compared us to attendees to John Cage’s 4:33, walking into the hall expecting a blast – and instead we hear silence. Or non-silence: coughs, shoes, heavy breath, pulse of the universe.  Dereglement of the senses.  Music/life in the white space.  Or rather, music/life is the white space.

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Wording in the Rain

Posted on September 11, 2023 by jillbpearlman

Finally it rains. Slapping and paddling the thick leaves; gliding down (d)rain pipes to be spit out onto recumbent weeds, filling puddles that I see mixed with the mesh of my screen window.  Puddles like a running woman, arms outstretched, hair flung behind her, legs poised and bent.  Now a drip, now a piling, now a pulsing on my phone: Flood Watch in your area!

Now at the risk of life and death, to wonder what becomes of rain after a poet dances it into language.  Does it still slap as sound on the receiving mind, as rain but more so? Do we lose it to the beyond, or to a “finely woven curtain – sheer net perhaps – thinly broken, relentless in its fall, but relatively slow, which must be down to the Lightness and size of its droplets, an ongoing, frail precipitation, like real weather atomized.”  So poet Ciaran Carson writes in a poem inspired by the Impressionist painting, “Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877,” the poem a riff on Francis Ponge, ‘La Pluie.’”

Ripples upon ripples in ripples. Enchanting patterns as droplets outside my window dissolve one upon another into larger radiating ripples –teasingly certain, never bothering to answer the question.

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Age, Relatives, Lo-Lee-Ta

Posted on September 3, 2023 by jillbpearlman

My dad used to say, at age 65, I still haven’t decided what I want to be when I grow up. 
My daughter used to say, around age 5, I miss my childhood. 

Traveling in their heads, forward, backward, time moving faster.
Who has decided? Who doesn’t miss roaming around in her head? 

Brown campus now, all these child freshmen.  I was 17 then. Walking around campus now, thinking all that freedom, to be the odd girl out, to suffer, to remember, to extinguish, to wear diaphanous skirts and lay clothes out on the green to sell, to revel in contradiction: the Brown Green.  To read wandering the hallway of the dorm, as I did to anyone with ears: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul.  To draw out: Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. To hear kids say about me today: she was from then, she didn’t know yet. The hell I didn’t!  To walk into traffic talking and assume all cars will stop.  To not see the cars.  To be somewhat girl, somewhat boy.  Somewhat woman, somewhat man.  Roaming around in her head; putting logic on a vertiginous axis.  To be double-sighted, to become someone else inside the same person, to surf time, to be here now. 

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Slanting

Posted on August 27, 2023 by jillbpearlman

Who knew, at the bend,
a long slant sun would meet me,

we’d eat a burst of tomatoes 
at night, already in shadow,

a wall of sound, sonic crickets
like monks in saffron robes 

lined from here to the mountains,
soft, soft their silken chant, hand clap.

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The Past, Fellow Traveler

Posted on August 13, 2023 by jillbpearlman

Sometimes the past is pressed against the present, or another present is present. While traveling in Europe you feel it like a veil of wind on your skin.  You scratch the surface, the past rises up through the transparency of summer.  Sometimes you get at origins — Blue sky of Greece with a handmade white church.  Gray slate and zinc rooftops of Paris which started a dream you dip into and which will continue after you.  Previous city dwellers were seduced – are you there, Emma Bovary? –by a profusion of pinks and reds, silks and taffetas that inhabit the ground floor of a department store like Bon Marché.  Romantics swooned over a bunch of flowers pinned to a dress, a hat, to the swirl of a hem that swirls at recreated 19th century dance ball, where mesdames et messieurs dance in period costumes in the Luxembourg Gardens.  But simplicity: a bowl of eggs.  Wild cats.  The umber stones that came from the earth, were gathered by anonymous hands to make fences, return to the hillsides leaving sign that humans, and some gods were there. 

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Homer texting from the islands

Posted on July 31, 2023 by jillbpearlman

Cycladic villages – how is it that they never get dirty?  In Athens, age drips rustily down the walls; on a Cycladic island, the white of village houses is brighter than white, beyond pigment, beyond age. They are like sugar cubes divided by a wet knife. Some islands are ringed by fire but not on fire; they are both dazzling and cooling. White doves tiptoe on the ledge of a white houses.  Villages wind mazelike with steep stairs and plastered passages, bursts of bougainvillea and jasmine.  

Then there is the blue.  If Homer were to describe it now, he might still say that wine-dark sea is agitated, full of shifting, intertwined patterns. Underwater you can see the chain of sailors’ shaped phrases, one hooked to the next.   Blue that dissolves as if in a dream and blue as solid as heaven.  If Homer were writing now, he might be sending postcards or texts about Ulysses’ long travels. Saw the blue – unfenced.  Full of monsters and simmering grudges.  Blue – to die for. 

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Simone Weil: Happy Beachgoer

Posted on July 24, 2023 by jillbpearlman

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that ships are sometimes wrecked by it.  On the contrary, this adds to its beauty,” says Simone Weil, French philosopher in a poetic mood.  She’s right: the endless surface of the sea, whether navy or aquamarine, has the abyss tucked into it.  Summer used to be billed as a time to shed every care; now we know it will be ringed by wildfires or panting hot temperatures, by enclosures on the tarmac or by encirclements of algae.  How else to reach paradise but by snaking roads, switchbacks and old goat paths that flirt along unguarded cliffs?  But those 300 degree views of the sea!  That dizzying compact between danger and thrill.  Even when lying passively on a beach, you are in the solar eye.  Remember Weil: “On the contrary, this adds to its beauty.”

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How to Break the Ice in Paris

Posted on July 16, 2023 by jillbpearlman

People suffer and throw themselves 
into the Seine. The buildings have scars 
which grow lighter like our skins. 
Shop women roll their cat eyes jealously,
hearing we’re American.  

But what provocateurs they’d be, 
their loving presentation of breast
set like cake batter inside a bodice,
the body as curse or chalice.  
So frank, so chalice the flesh in Paris. 

So I was reminded of giving birth
27 years ago – while buying vintage
clothes, the owner and I discovered
we shared the same gynecologist!

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