Joshua Cohen - Witz

A headlong incendiary, no greater than the others except in its threat, only nearer. An aeroplane flying low flying wildly, as if almost out of gas its engines down stalled, heaving forward, convulsing, its womb opening slowly, to birth: a bomb on your house, a bomb on your heads, one for each ear. A lone, ribhuddled heifer, the most starved around, the weakest and slowestdriven, the gruntiest, runnysnouted runt, it’s tearing at this huge hulk, an enormous round of gleaming ordnance or mine netted underneath a knot of corpses, an alien body amongst bodies hard and strange, a pearly prickly fallen thing presently parturient from a tangle of fleshy kelp and weather: two keratinous juts coming out of its sides, curving up to the sharp taper of blades; twin chitinous growths, cutting the air to pierce at the sun — strongstalked, one’s a rock, the other’s a stone. Or else, they’re horns. Around these volutinous spans as white as bone, streaked with blood, a mass of lackluster, thinning more than ever but lately kinky hair, unremembered this shade the dark of underground night, such a saddening change from the previous blond, and lately infested, too, with every kind of louse known to mensch and mouse alike: a few lousy species no sage has yet managed to identify, other louses they don’t even know yet exist, though no one does, and the lice hardly know themselves: they’re just simple creatures; all they want is to steal life from the living, their existence an effortless halflung, to suck the blood of a host — which explains these stains trailing to blemish the crescenting moons that are icicles; that are horns. Up from the unbarbered forehead, which is peely and flaking and dandruffed with drift. About that head proper — amazingly, a miracle, we’re speechless, please, still, give me a moment, I’m being torn up…the horns, they’re grown from a head, and the head, it’s grown, is growing still, from a body, out from the earth, a wrigglingly living wracked sac of a soul: it’s B, me, over here, the Untermensch, unto the mensch under the Under-mensch, udderly menscheddown, demoted and dirtied, I’m full of filth and sick horny, having buried myself to hide, amid a copse of corpses, for safety, to think and rest up, to wait it out, eternity and all, just my luck.

My hide uncovered, and with what left of my hair stuck fast in the heifer’s hurl, about to be ground down into the cycle of putrescent swallow and putsch (it can only be hoped)…I raise my head then my body to elbow the earth, to toss from me the corpses that skeinstick my legs, go to poke at the dumb, animal eyes of the heifer with my not sure which they are whether of brilliantined bone or extrudingly calcified brain, newly grown out, you like them, what do you think: windsharpened, weatherfrozen, their weight, the cumbersome balance…goddamn it, they’re giving me a terrible headache. Attacked, wounded staggery and flabbily farmisht for a fodder on its slip-shoddy hooves, the heifer lets out a rounded vowel, a planetary low, which is swallowed into the echo of the explosioning around us; its mouth opens wider, more, as if to take my head in all the way as a cork to its call; it tears my hair to throw me up not into its gape but onto its back again, hairy if warming…I’ve been here before. I’m saddled in reverse, my face to face the heifer’s tush, my eyes, my nose, my mouthy ears, how to tell it to you so fetid with flies, with maggoted dreck…the entire field around us as if flesh itself suppurant with flesh reeking, putrid, a skin smutted with bodies bombed to fly high and land messy and the butchered carcasses of big innocent cows, turned the same bruisy colorlessness of the blasting around; with the cinerulent singe of such undone, letdown, blowncrazy hair filling the air with a gas of bright blond; how we’re wildly spooked through all this in a stampede of one and of me not guiding but turnedaround riding, more like holding on not for my life but by instinct, with one hand on the nape of the heifer’s neck as thin as a sinew of spine and the other why’s it gripping hard to one of my horns as if I’m riding, I’m guiding, myself — our lonely trek out toward the open, with our four horns slashing at the slash of the wind, how we separate the smoke from the flame.

The heifer, it’s a relation don’t ask me what or which to the heifer that’d led me back home to the cedars of Joysey — we’re two of kind, we are, me and her or it, beast and mensch, each of us becoming imbued’s what I’m saying with the soul of the other: with mine, it talks to itself, prays to be relieved of its burden, which is me, prays to be burdened with relief; and with its, what’s new, I’m humiliated, feeling such a bovine bloating inside, a new tonguing out from within, the snub of an animal silence; how in the beginning, we become exchanged, then merged, and eventually one, then ride on. On heiferback, and then with the heifer on my back and me hoofing us on with it horning me hard — I’m bucking, I’m buckling, getting tired, and so, changing again — we’re refugeeing deep into Polandland, toward the brute, campless edge and its Continentally, civilizationally middling fade into what once’d been Asia or so: to ride out the neglected quarters, unto fifths, the eighths, the eighteenths, and further into emptiness divided only by steps, a hoof-length, a cloveclop; to make our time to lose past huts woodthatched, past loose coops and cribs and pens and hutches, haybale bolus caravanical things left wheelrobbed by the roadside…mudward abandonments of corroded concrete lacking cement, and so falling all over themselves as if in clumsy apology for their very existence, alongside reactor collapses that irradiate green like, how to explain, leaky beehives of metal; through every forest and past every tree ever enchanting this Fleedom (like rooted corpses themselves — they’ll never leave, just lean and lave bare), we’re haunting the haunts, ghosting the geist, only keeping my self, and I mean my animalself, alive on the wet I might suck foul from the tail of my ride. As for it, why worry I think. Arrive at a village, a town, whatever its charter, its barren, sharding itself back together with any localized unguent recently prized: witchbrew of arsenic with honey, sap, and a pinch of spit, mortarsalves of bearfat, cowblood, gevalt, the blood of a blackcock and that of a strungcat, too, lime perfume/the linden bloom the spell, accompanied by a sprinkling of raw eggyolks and pulverized cloves…inspired, I claim I’m a rabbi, often a miracleworker, an itinerant preacher, sometimes, while at others I’m the heifer’s father, or sister, a heifer’s heifer myself — but all of these towns, these dorfs and khuters and shtetls of shtum they’re so over, so burnedup, clearedout, burnt and cleared in every direction depending on wind, that my claims the heifer hooves down into the snow in no language, in scarsymbols, piss sinks, and dungdrops, aren’t their lie for the effort, any favor obtained. Trampledover, then salted with rue to you, vulnerary vervain, and a drachm of oil of wormwood. A night in the poor-house, the almshome, a synagoguepew. I tie my ride up, or it ties up me — stay a while, won’t you; to exhaust its patience loopedround the end of my tether, then to take what I take, untie the ride or be untied by, to hitch its rein to my lower horn, which is my putz I mean and its manifold shed, I mount and we’re off again where, the heifer only allowing me to ride backward now, facing tush, wasteful past. If I try to face front I get thrown, my skin goes fored off, stripped away. And so when riding in hindsight, I pass — by enumerating the heifer’s droppings, for lengths untold, length, I’m telling you, long: three turds a day, hard little heads, eighteen turds, explosive shells they seem, six days’ the timers’ worth until, suddenly…we just stop.