Joshua Cohen - Witz

Holding my gut I go down again, weighted to fall and enlarging with every knocked tumble, rotationally increased in this revolting around…until I smack, at the wall of the Town Hall of this nowhere that once birthed my Aba, or would have — brought to a stop, then further dispersion, as I gather myself out from a puff of lacteal snow. Each flake is a number, a tock’s mark, a dendrite’s tooth, the fang of a frozen petal. A weather of myself, of my own making, a sprinkling of cloud rounded above into the clock of the Hall, which holds as if prismimprisoned the face of a different sister of mine every hour — not on the hour but slipping, this slide sororal, a slow tinting change of their lights, of their darks, the bows of their eyes at the zeroes…and it’s then that I realize I’m lulled overheated, feverishly stuffed, not just that but perhaps even poisoned, shvitzing with a pain in the belly and I’m breathing too heavy like I’m snoring awake. Lightheaded, airy. With each flappy uvular heave, as if the attempted swallow of a little white grape refusing to make its way down…I’m growing, it feels, as if in the lunarly regulated shed and regrowth of the dial’s hand I’d kept swept and zipped tight within the skirts of my mother, but more so, all over. My stomach, my poor poor stomach as Ima would’ve said, heaves up a groan, as my breasts like hers, too, they’re stretching, like the striated hairs she might bleach as they stray toward a splotch, the purple and black how we’d match…I’m inflationary, pumping to pop, the ribroped, hipcinched robe of my body now rising, now risen, expanding, while encompassing air — O sweet vinestirred milk, seething to mother my blood…render me unto the care that was hers!

In the beginning I’m filling the Square, the dusky paths in, the pass out…the parts nighted unknown to the high other senses lost in my purge, in my paunching, me smeared wetgreased into doorways to mark them with my greed: fillingout this village’s loose waist of houses and pens, of barns and threshedover clearings, to fill the circling town then the valley it’s breasted within, and the next, down into the valley before that, a womb bearing beyond. Then atop this enormity, too, outerlimits it’s feeling like now, my head floating upward into the void stratospheric, the darkness invisible and so, indivisible there, with all the other nightly ordinance that might float obscured in the light of the moon, and then even the moon itself with all of its seasons and cycles to clock, to gather into orbit — around me; pushed, pulled, and then held, steadied, then moved around and around, spun by my force, the tidal grip and grope of my flesh. Attraction’s what I’m talking, a refusal to give up, let go. No, not a satellite or planetary, I’m bigger than that, I’m a star, for real this time as my sisters would’ve said and been jealously awed — finally, the firmament taking a shine; me holding worlds together, aloft, setting them to motion about the poles of my horns. A body, and what a body! celestial; its catasterism total, destructive — the Milky Way purged from my gut with the flick of a cometlike tail, the boilingpoint of my burning intestine…a Meaty Way horizoning at the other extremity, toward my tush a blackhole into which all time must fall, a God’s malpracticed, mistaken navel. Around my scars and around my marks and my wens, my sores and my pimples: this gathering of constellations, of galaxy, universe; it feels as if the whole cosmos, which is perfect in idea only, if only within me: wholeheaded, requiring no twohanded repair — as if it’s about to burst forth and bang, to explode in dim peals flaking my meat to the milkslippery, milkwhite stones both hewn and geologies found, formed below the steeples of the Church, beneath the spire of the Town Hall’s meridian, amid this Square’s void cleaving a valley past the womb and breast of my mother whose husband converted and so, my father was damned. And, as if in belated revenge or his belfry redemption, I’m borne above the throng of those he’d forsaken, these statues blinded, the deaf and mute rock, the crushed gut of this bridge, that vomitus river, itself a flow stormily swollen…God no better than them, still I’m bursting with greatness, milked as His highness so huge above all, so taken with myself — how I’m ascending unto the Uppermost, if you know it, you should…

Atop the Church of my father’s town — whose worship might have denominated his own had he stayed to be born unconverted, baptized in the worn lap of a spouting gargoyle idol — there’s a crucifix, a cross holy and sacred, and yet so much smaller than the halfmooned, bit crescent nail of my forefinger: a mere crux ordinaria as it’s called Latinwise, as if it’s a species of sentient life, and so cycled mundanely as both predatory and prey — one of the stilled and yet fearsome, toothy mutant dominion perched to threaten, and yet precariously, on its claws at a cornice; this figure promoted supernaturally through the ranks of the demons, risen to lord it above its more featured fellows invested with lesser symbol and wings to top the highest reach of this Cathedral, let’s say it is, there atop the tallest of the innominate, decardinaled steeples as if a rood rod installed to conduct any wrath that might call. Here I’m pregnant with milk in white air, with this cross burying itself into the eye of my navel, gouging spinedeep, its crossed arm barring me, nailing itself into me as if forbidding, in an intervention nothing short of superfluous, and divinely dismaying: refusing me a world I’ve already forsaken — a father’s domain to which I don’t dare tempt return, even prodigally, even if Heavenly proven, made then remade…I belch a brilliant millions of stars, and then — hisssssss…it’s my voice you’re hearing on the wind, of the wind, exploded to weather, to pieces of pieces, my immensity popped, scattering shards; usurpers to shove their ways through my tatters, remains, these patches, those righteous splinters of flesh and boneslivers, badges of me, and rainbows’bands, remnants never to be put back together, never to be revesseled, spitstuck, or tikkuned with whose love, tell me how on a gust — never to be assimilated again into any becoming anew, another In the beginning again, yet another arrival for seating whether at table, in pew…perfection’s hope lost to a lateness, a gap yawning lag, a void purely defiled, immaculate as immaculately unclean, and so, never to heal: the wound wound between clockhands — below, and clasped still — which distance maintained is all that sustains.

As shards of me fall from the sky as if shards of the sky — this weathering of me through the world.

All that remains of me are two horns, here in a Square, having lately grown from my head, then shed, scattered atop the earth, tipped and tumbled, and blown through by wind — Hear O Israelien, the hollowness of their howl…

Mere artifacts, for the museum we know as the future.

One day last, or so it’s been said, they’ll be found, on which end they’ll be sounded with lip and with lung: their blast to bloom up from the fundament, through a cadence toned to the heavens, reflectively pitched low to the grave…an opening, this cadence existing only between pitches, within them, this the moment of every conversion, the last — when air becomes sound, the assimilation of breath into call…a life, mouthforced into summons: a perfect interval, this high note rising ever further to kiss at the face of the void, resolving into a horizon on which the world will rest its revolutions, soon, in our time. And listen — this will be the death of both silence and Babel, of question and answer, all reborn as a freeing of air.

At the outskirts of my father’s dwellingplace, at the furthest limit of His encampment, there amid the ringing of haycocks where land gives way to earth, to pure planet — there’s an emptied barrack or prison thatch that once quartered killers of mine and of any other kind, too, murderers with governments and the sanction of uniform, weapon, and horse. It’s since become all board, nail, leak, and draft, its floor strewn with straw and that and its walls smeared with the sickening reek of wet hair, pelage, daily turd. Inside, inhabiting, there’s only a lone aged ram. It’s humiliated, made modest, as its burden’s considerable: how it’s dually imaged, as if once for each horn, for each half of the cadence responsible; this ram both existing of its kind, as the last of its species still grazing, and then existing for its kind, too, as their most imperfected survivor — most imperfected as their survivor, their last and their only; to be herded humbled, alone, as a herd of one and itself, up the ramp of an Ark, bound express for our covenant’s end: think the species’ lowliest, and most degenerate aspect, made ancient to wizened bellwether with raggedy coat, then hefted here to rume out its life once it’s downed its last golden door; it’s lost its horns, too…how they’d been stolen by night, by a boy and his father, and an angel that’d saved them both from a mountaintop altar. At the sound of my horns, my own shofars these shofarot twinned in the wind, one for each lip ended upon that lip of last day…how this ram despite wormy illness and old age will perk, turn itself dumbly, lean its head toward the gusting, an echo. Hoof mud. Now, charging its brutishly bared head, and with nothing to fear, forward and always, this ram will hurl itself against the furthest wall of the barrack, not east nor west but out, only out and with such fierce and wet woolen force — to knock everything down, to shatter it through, an escape, into unlimited space.