Joshua Cohen - Witz

At this twelve with its ring donging above from the bell of a church…it explodes into seed, in all pulpy seeds — which hit the rounding, impotent sun, in a great spot of stain…sticking only to drip off that orb as latterday fug — throughout the afternoon dropping away in failed viscous globs.

As nearing sunset again, what’s to expect…it’s gone flaccid again, snakes around itself as if to sleep away a next dark, fenced in and gated safe by its wild pubes sticky and hard at the foot: these wickety weeds I’m stepping on, these slatted stalks I’m stepping around…to smite one off and step on with a staff.

That evening, to ascend the mountain next into night, trailing behind me what still call me by motherly things, they give me no rest was what she’d always say…left dirtied pots and pans over my shoes, I’m stepping mixingbowls halved, dragging threadpulls, unravelings, broombristles and mop-heads and feathers from dusters, knipls and kvitls a tittle yidl zidl yi di di yi di di, clanging and tangling up to the summit one over, upon which I behold another valley below. Here, too, villaged with yet another town, the last of them this last Shabbos, I hope: my father’s town, Aba’s, I’m sure of it, from whence my father’s family had fled or once left, who knew…I do, only now. A town Unaffiliated, maybe, with my mother’s, though it’s been forever a neighbor; or, perhaps unaffiliated in any other, lesser, sense of that slur: that of its rare tidiness, its neatness it’s almost shocking; its relative order as compared to the waste of the barren maternalized just over the hill, down the mound. Never been sacked is what, or not much — at least not as retribution for the imageless worship of a God without son, or in retaliation for the grace of a minority ethic. Unlike by my mother’s, there have never been any pogroms here, nor ghettowide pillage — no prunestewed, beerbothered, sausagestumped rape. From here, my father’s it’s so clean, so beautifully perfect: everything in its proper place, at its proper time, yet abandoned…a clock stilled but still secure in the promise of tick, safe in its jewelcase, the glassy sky clearer, and bright (if only you knew how to wind, wheel its dial the horizon around) — a relic that is its own reliquary’s more like it, as it’s both the object holied and its holying set.

At the summit, I stumble…panting, I trip to fall over this well, halfopened, exposed — in my shock stubbing its lid off to scatter round down the scarp of the next prospekt promised, which is only the manicured furtherance of the previous mud. It flies wildly — skidding its way toward the purity of the village that once iced patrimony, home to the goyim who’d melt down to my father: a townspeople of immaculate surface, a townsfolk cold and of glaciate calm, whose regularity and slowness seem only quaint to me now — though if every once in a century they’d be mannered faster and louder toward strangers surrounding, and even angry, at times, furious and violent, abusive…still, the worst they could ever be accused of within their own world would be the reticent, the reserved, the brutally civil: pleasantries toward one another by which to service every occasion, fathering each other with specific forms of formal address. Du, tu, to you, too — I shouldn’t expect the same from myself, halved between valley and vowel. Abandoned alone to my shriek, an echo of the throb of my toe through the straw and a loafer. To curse out of spite that quiet sleepy town down below me — to curse its Church and its steeples, its cross high above as if the tongue of the sky’s bell stilled silent at compline — and that with a mouth lamed by that very Imagelessness all of us bless whether as Father, or God…the gummy gape of the Square, wideopen, welltended, soulless. As if a crumb to poison the churchmice, a collectionplate coined even smaller, or distant — the grating puckish and spun, as if a lid without eye, the knee’s patch of a skullcap, it hits, at long last, to a skittering stop against the westerly wall of this village Town Hall, denting a mark on that venerable frontage, which is as impassive as the ice is gray and yet, now imperfect.

I stand at the rim, the lip of the pit…what, you think I’d only recognize a well I fall into?

Inside, there’s a nipple…just deal, get used to it, will you: after all, this is the very end of the tip, hard up from the puffy. Down there it’s halfburied, not so deep I can’t reach. A giver of life this earthbound nipple, as if the whole world’s a tit and this, its summating jut — springing forth with gainful fluid. A pap that after I go to take hold, it grows, to poke high out from its setting. This, then, a sacred sucklingplace. I fall myself to the ice that surrounds. A nipple of nipples, The Nipple of, an impossibility made mythic, the mythical made possible, pasteurized or homogenized down, skim a percent then decide whether bile or curd…it’s handhard, fistswollen as it seeks at my mouth: all flesh and fiery areole that rises to rim, as a lip at my lips, its tip distended to glory my pucker. I’m thirsty, hungry for edge, even a lick, would settle for swiping…prostrate, initiatory of suckle. I swaddle my beard around its overcast red, Adam’s red, Edom’s red, the unnaturally bloodcoursed, applerashed…having a difficult time because I’m sucking, or trying, and nothing, I’m losing my breath. My mouth stabbed by a phantom. I stroke the whole length, then, attempting to milk the flabelliform thing with hands filthy and rough — in a satisfaction unwashed, and unblessed, this resurrection of the breast of every mothering woman: my sisters’, Ima’s and her mother’s, her mothers’ Imas’ yadda and blah bladdering forever around and around this hefty sphere, this sustenant orb…

What milk it gives is intermittent, initially, comes stuttering spurty, comes darkly soured, but with gum and gulp begins to flow whitish, then wholesome to nourish, what could be better — lo so it smacks to my tastelessness, though, going only on the quality of the swallow: at first flecked with pebbles, shot through with gritgravel, then lukewarm this nectar, an alb ambrosially smooth; I guess what I’m saying is, yum. I pinch the nipple, flick it and flex, lying flat on my stomach to flail my shoes down the hill. A crop of boulders surround, a ringing that might only be pimples as if this nipple’s goosed flesh, horripilation of sorts, but it’s not — they’re stray ordnance, gyres of shrapnel and frag weathered idolatrously into the forms of stray heads without feature: the senseless halo of my sink.

The milk begins to redden me rosy, it honeys, it makes me, remade. Remember your pity as the lowerlip of indulgence, from my mother I only knew of such suck for a week. I feast, dribble lust from my lips, smack and stump, suckling beyond my fill or any, to bulging, to bust…and so intently that I don’t register the slight welling, an intolerance flaringup in pricked, pinching swells, lactose, lactarded pains, not yet worrying me, though they should, so fitfully nervous soon shaking my tract. Warning of hurt, of bloating, and cramps, of gaseousness but it’s more, it’s larger than that and any ignominious lack of an enzyme. It’s that the symptoms themselves surge, egoistically huge. Limbs marbled. Until it’s milk and milk only that’s the flow through my veins, the stuff by which bones are made strong for the strain. Within this strange cradle I feel like the only babe upon earth, slurping at final immeasurable squirts until the nipple gives guzzle no longer. One last spurt, then a drizzle absorbed into the skin I’ve been warming — with beard, with handstroke, my face brought close to snuggle, to cuddle with breath…the last drop dripping to the rim of the ice, and freezing there, as a harder, barer, crueler whiteness — lavan, lavana. With the world entire beneath me, below, left deflated, a teat sucked wrinkled and dry, this mammary spent, crumpled thanks craven, hollowedout, as if for the discard.