Joshua Cohen - Witz

There’s an Ocean around Land, there’re lands around a Land, there’s land around a village, there’re villages around land, there’s land around towns, there’re towns around villages, there’re villages around hills, there’re hills around a wall, there’re walls around cities, there’s a city around a Square, there’s a Square around a Church, there’s a Church around an Affiliated — crucified, he’s been nailed up to hold everything in place, keep it together; this is all pointed out to them, duly noted (understand, that if this tour seems somewhat disjointed, appears somehow confused, then it’s been conducted about as well as any could hope: plopped down with a foldingmap with arrows popping sharply everywhichway, and with all these sobbing disconsolate kinder wanting, needing, to do just about everything …his personalized armband slipping down the starve of his sleeve, icecream melting down the cone of his two fingers holding he’s licking, his parents’ patience tested by the whim, the desire, the demand, fedup, wearing thin, what would you expect — he’s been excited for weeks, counting down the days, blacking them off on his calendar, a secular luach, not many of them left nowadays, secreted under his bed he’d countup the hours, the minutes, the clock the beat of his heart, despite how they’d discouraged); the city’s around a Square around a Church around this mensch, you know Him, an Affiliated, too, crucified, starcrossed, the center of every universe at once, and here, too…the city has a Square around a Church around an Affiliated, an Affiliated has the town around, the village, the Church, the Square, the city, the world, their Guide repeating again and again: a formality, memory; like, how many times do you say a Kaddish — before it becomes less than the sum of its words, its vocables and gutturals, just Amen noise, perpetuo static, no summons? Zusammen! The other Affiliated, the rest of them, though — they always lived downhill, turn, point, where the sewage flowed to, flows, the wounds of puddle, perfectly imperfecting scars (manufactured stains populated with ash, louse, and the vomitous remains of seven species). And everywhere’s like that, with huge fields between everywheres, plains: this quarter of Polandland, bombed, incendiaried, blownup, what do you call it — gone, didn’t rebuild its square; all roads here lead to all roads there and not to expectation, road, the nakedness of late night denuding earliest morning — to stand alone amid nowhere, surrounded only by the sacrosanct and furious quiescence of the ancient, made modest only by the light of late noon…at the markets: there in which numbers, for a moment, a bark or a cry, had other meanings; in which hands, so often put to violence, to death, here merely gestured for profit, the satisfying murder of urge, the gross indulgence of an object desired; at the festivalbooths: amid the gurgle of crated livestock and birds, suspended high amid the scent of the tree and the glow of its lights, always lesser. Prosit! Prost! Servus! Rooted in dregs. The Church here an ancient cockroach grown fat in a crack in the sky…a gargoyled snake (maybe the stillborn son of the river’s or river that cleaved the town, that cleaves here from banking flow to ebb of bank) swallows other snakes and islands, the jutting, falling slips, the dilapidated docks, boats and barges that themselves, in their feathered wakes, cut new forks into the snake’s tongue, the snakes’, corrupted limbless without current, to slow the flood of speech, unremitting, the water of words, as if in punishment for unknown, inchoate, sins. The snake of the river swallows rats and the snakes swallow whole plaguecolumns whole. Waters recede into mute twice daily, at noon and at midnight, then silence reigns again — that great holy and maddening still.

During reconstruction, doorposts had been spackled over in reddened night, the mark of where mezuzahs used to mark, when.

Last latest evening the Square gets klieged, shorn and drowned, the ganze obliterate: an oblation of light, beamed pitilessly from behind spires and turrets. Hordes of tourists walk in walking shadows, footed to shade, shuffling, limping, walkingshoes and galoshes, weatherproofed, wellheeled on tank-treads: a Miss Angelica gets herself caught, between two cobbles she trips, falls and sprains herself hurt, that evening to consult with this goy named she forgets who he once posed as a Goldlust, one of the handful of old Unaffiliated lawyers still around if out of practice of late, to ask him about the intricacies of negligence, liability: ideas of suing Polandland, Inc., gosh darn it all to heck, she says to him, while we’re at it why not sue the whole religion, the race, the world, to which the lawyer will have to admit ignorance of international law obtaining, especially now, though he’ll ask her a few questions she should ask her insurance provider should she ever again find herself home and alive. She can’t walk, the Group continues on without her, no one hears from her again, not a postcard. Here to make the circuit across the water to the Castle, house roomed to house from Square to Bridge felled — not the trafficked bridges where the cars would swerve to avoid the trams, where the trams would stop to avoid the horses, where the horses would throw riders over the railinged edge to avoid trampling the lowlier passing: but the pedestrian bridges, the historic crossings no vehicles allowed, the oldest spans, of ancient arches, their ways lined with statues, of saints and others, the saintlike, the sainted, the saintly, those beatified and still waiting bruised with rust in the purgatory of holiness, Salve; St. Whomever who died whatever death, who knows or should, St. What’s his name or hers who they were martyred together in each other’s arms for something under the reign of another. Polandland, Inc. knows they’re in mourning even if they don’t, and so Management’s gone and covered the statues of the Bridge, and those of the lit and touristed Square, too, with these flattering red tarpaulins: untenable to let those old Saints out alone into unsupervised night, to grant them the honor of a moon, who knows what miraculous madness they’d get into, what they’re liable to do damagewise; crosses and swords, crossed swords bulge out from under their coverings, Cupidic arrows and roses of silver and bronze. At night, the Bridge’s statuary, like the Square, shot through with a bright river of light, an air luminous and rare above the dark river flooding below. Here on the Bridge, there’s the miraclerub, that in the light, be it that of the sun, moonlight, or artificial, flashed from the bulbs hidden behind the statuary plinths, shines more golden than anything else. A handful of stragglers lift the tongues of these tarps, to get a glimpse: how they’re turned to stone, into statues themselves to bridge high the banks, above the rocks that fork quartered the flows: uncovered, they’ve beheld eyes without pupils, faces without noses, cut off to spite, torsos unlimbed, dismembered by weather; swordhands of St. Who Knows holding tulips wilting and yet petrified, frozen, fists with macle for knuckles, or jewels, their emptily suppurant settings; a starveling dog with a mouthful of genitals prowling still at the feet of St. Anyone bound in crystalline vein. The plinths, the pediments, which are left uncovered and so visible to everyone, haven’t weathered well either, hundreds of years of thousands of precipitations would do that, and worse; as always, words are easier to efface than the fame that is form. A few, though mostly the clerical crowd, stop to make themselves rubbings of the fundament Latin, which is inept, terrible, an imported language of no one now, having been churched out of existence, its conjugations scattered, and muddled, frozen then thawed into incoherence, again — epitaphs to the stone itself, themselves… here lies, here lies