Joshua Cohen - Witz

O spring! on whose unfledged leaves it is verily writteneth, ribbed on rib this prayer: All who art hungry, I forget — let them eat us, maybe; let them come and sit and belch and bench upon nothingness both savory and sweet; the table uprooted, the candlesticks barren, spare chairs down here the waterlogged lees of huge diseased cedars; the whole room — basement unfinished, partially unfinished perpetually, diningroom of the forgotten, recliningroom of the unreclinable and unimaged, the subterranean Heaven of heavens — revealed to Ben in mold, maggoty shag, walls mossed luminously, goatbearded, in iridescent filaments of morning…the entire house, even halflit, wildly en-gardened; strangled in vines as wide as halls, seeping reaches of rooms of one dew’s duration, to be effaced by clouds on the evening, wisped away, rustled forgotten, everything to be gotten rid of, junked, yarded and sold, storage unsorted, cycled to waste: cupboards to be bared to space upstairs, pantry left annulled…Ben bereaved. No different set of dishes wreathed in season, breakables and chipware, to be hauled in from the oilroiling air of the garage, down from the attic encrusted in barnacles to gather breath, entombed in their trunks and boxes of board, nailed and ducttaped, at the dawned rug of the stairhead, atop the carpet, wall-to-wall verdure of dust and mold for Hanna to vacuum no more: the rumbling in the distance the motor, the units of the baseboard heating, the basement’s hotwater heater, more like the final echo of the final storm — for today; a tumult of noise, of life woken and doing, a whirr all around, preparation’s stir gathering its pitch at the vault of the sky that arches, restless, never resting…His house itself now a vacuum, a limit of nothingness, a container of nullity, containment of the nil; the bag of the dispossessed to be gathered up at middle night with death at the door, knocking fists; His sole dispossessed possession, a mound of His father’s old briefcases here in a heap, along with Hanna’s purses, brokenclasped, out of favor, without the succor of candy or coin — essential inheritances, emptied of essentials. A stomach, a mind. Expectations of death dead themselves, voided, though their loss, which is the loss of their promise, is not quite as saddening; to be mourned, but mourned humbly: the idea that ritual couldn’t quite make it conscious enough, or explicit, that a year from winter to winter no divine would ever allow or oblige; anniversary desecrated, deprived in advance; the holy random reaffirming its faith in fate while destroying, debasing, our own; how the cycle couldn’t quite get the packaging right — not a bag, calfskin briefcase, or purse, but a nice neat little bundle of empty, wrapped in skin and tied with hair, left forgotten in a basement corner…Him turning the place upsidedown, insideout, and for nothing; Him searching, setting aside, in a fit, a maddened raising of heirloom dust. This basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished — its lowliest beetles and spiders and worms, its annelids dumb, search through the abandoned for meaning, night and day; day and night, making their ways through whatever remains. To seek out any prophecy left to rot by the rotted — to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death.

O God of Mercy, God of Joysey, Protector of the stopsigns, Maintainer of the sidewalks, Guardian of the dumps, we commend ourselves to the charity of Thy asphalt, that Thou shalt grant us rest amid the rarest emissions of Thy firmament; and now let us open wide and say A then let us say Men, and then shut our mouth and its dark globe and be gone from this earth as were Thou those thousands of years ago upon its first Friday and our making. A funeral’s held at the eastern edge of the Island, the rim of the ice backlit with ocean, tainted by city: the cruciferous spires of the Church of Wall Street, the irreligious iron surrounding the hush of the Battery, there a thin slip of trafficked gray, a glimpse unremarkable, you’ll miss it if not careful: Whitehall Street, site of the first settlement of the Affiliated upon these shores…a swath of flowers, irises and roses still tastefully arranged but wilting their dyes, albescent purples, and blues hued whiter; wreathes are sulking, plasticine hollies and firs, evergreen like money, twisted then bent into hearts and circling circular voids, their silence; the sun with its moon the ghost of a ghost to the west and the birds, which fly low and sated, circle overhead lazily and heavied lower in the bowel, preparing to swoop down and peck Him to weeping. As the only one who might officiate, Ben officially demurs, has been advised to, then ordered; leave this to the professionals, son, and get busy regretting, crank out those tears.

In a bad yarmulke, Ben nods His head along with the Service, under His veil under the veil of the sky, dully gray and webbed in fog — to trap the clouds to be sucked of their wet, then left for empty, a sunset’s clearing. As for the veil, it’s not for the stench of death, which has been frozen, but for the mystery, for the delectation of the assembled, the coverage columns fallen wide, a tumbled pantheon of typefaces jumbled, an edifice imposing of hype to raze; and to discourage invited paparazzi kept penned to the rear. Him, He’s perfunctory, disengaged. It hasn’t yet sunk in, and neither them. Without doubt, something must have been offered, some eulogy delivered, memories shared, a sermon, a drash, remarks if not extemporaneous then just scripted to sound; all have agreed, a Kaddish must’ve been said. V’imru, a new translation. Doctor Abuya stands unbowed atop the pulpit of piled coffins, comforted by the Nachmachen armbanded, hooded in black. Der mourns to their left, alongside the Mayor and the President and their wives and the swollen lips of their mistress’ eyes. Ben nods through the lull, the incessant lapping of the wake on the ice, the slow dumb thud thud dulling insensate thud, then the fierce rabid white withdrawal back into the swelled body to flow on amid floes and on further, among the floating glaciers and bluewhite golden bergs that don’t seem to receive or take the light of heaven but hold it, or emanate it, as if they’re but the fallen cooling and cooled flesh of the sun on a flank of the moon. Against this restless ebb, this wake endless, endlessly hazarded with icicled sharps, a slough of badeggy, brownblack pickleweed and sick saltgrass, decomposed phragmite, starvelimbed spartina, and trash above the enabling sink of the previous dead, two Kush attired in the deceased’s ripped, tattered black judges’ robes arise from their chairs, which are seats that’ve been hewed from ice by workers wielding picks at the dawn, and proceed to the bier of coffins stacked low before the coffined pulpit, stoop together toward the white, bend at the knees to bow, to lift the topmost casket: Steinstein small in a cold cocoon. A band plays on a barge far out freed in the open water, so southerly gone that no one hears its music, which has been programmed funereal, joyously sad: accordionwind, flutefog, sounding brass, timbrel with tinkling cymbal. A mandolin plink, the call of birds without sky. That’s no butterfly, He thinks, that’s only winded trash. A leaflet engraved by weather, denoting the agenda of the morning. Rest assured, there will be memorials. Blown city trash. An invitation to a light buffet. This is no metamorphosis. There will be no emergence. This, for however long, is an end.

Dark servants uniformed in old law robes blacker than a blotting sentence struck without names and proceeding somberly, the Kush in lockstep, lock and step, lockstep, flagbearers follow raising their standards, then the drums and fifes with which to taunt the gulls that whirl above in their own private, griefstruck revolutions: each, they test each step, every weighted forward, fraught, to test the ice whether it’ll hold their fall heading out by south, over the veining, the ice crackling like locusts underfoot and on fire, extinguished by the boot; they walk the body out, to freeze; then, at giving edge, the sinking vale, they go to heave, to throw this poor huddled Steinstein in an arc, like a white wished coin to plash down deep, to plop atop the sunken flesh, the last body atop this mass of limbs and hearts and minds, bobbing then bobbing then sinking forever sinking down, never to decay. A great clap, a crack and crumble, a final fall — the ice gives way, hot floes are let out loose and the Kush, they’re separated, the two flagbearers, each to their own floating island, iceislands enough for one; a wailing, then silent gesturing, as they float out beyond the ceremony’s appeal, their black robes billowing as if sails set for nowhere, if only off, far beyond the crusty barge, the marshy glut, their flags to merge with the horizon into a band of color colorless below the flag of dawning night. And then as if intended, too, He follows, as if pulled out, tuggingly towed who knows, Ben making His way seemingly somnambulant, a vessel Himself, out to the newest holding edge. As ordered, to honor tradition, He digs in the lone slit pocket of His new funeral suit for a handful of dirt, crystalline with frost, to toss to float atop the bare skin of the ocean — to scar. And then, when He turns around from His husky fling, the entire crowd’s dispersed; their backs are turned to Him, they’re making for the press conference already, for its warm buffet of unleavened bread, which is matzah, and boiled eggs and shank, bitterherbs to dip in water made bitter with their tears; the funerary sleigh’s retired to blocks of ice; the pulpit’s disassembled for future use; in an Islandround queue to the Great Hall, the invitees — as if on cue — stand mute, and bored; as they wait they use their programs to mop their icy shvitz, wring out print, headlines lined to forehead, Gothic wrinkles; they consult their watches unwound, hands clasped in pity then wrung in shame. He turns from them toward the ocean again and untucks His shirt, which is white and dressy and replete with a million, starnumbered tiny buttons too small for the bumble of His clumsy thumbs, exposes His navel, the proof of His humanity and the little stone He’s stored there. A lower, harder heart. A solitary island of floating ice; a lone white square of the ocean’s game; a souvenir yarmulke gusted from the head of a visitor then turned loose as litter upon the face of the deep; a tombstone estranged from its Steinstein, just one Stein of many lately, too many latter days. Pinching His pants at the knee, stooping over the open atop the thinning wick, then tweaking the stone from the gape of His navel, a mute name, an empty filling. Palming the pebble, the gravelet, He sets it gently atop the ice, purses lips and cherubically exhales, to blow the tiny island out, passing an offering to the horizon, eventually of the horizon, on this day passing over, this night — this Exodusk. A kiss as if in thanks for His fortune, the wetted recompense of lips. How He’s been saved, redeemed, what have you. On a merit He cannot claim, in favor of the dead who was a friend. Deal with it, why so sad. It’s that I maybe wasn’t worthy. Am not, perhaps. Condemned, to have been freed.