Dark Lady Poetry - Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

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Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

Cat Lady’s Request

Forget it all, every last wisp.
It can’t be recalled, anyway.
The quest for antecedent,
for the contours of primordial meat dumpling,
for the steps marched en route to annihilation,
however noble, is doomed, in the end.
Don’t imagine otherwise. Don’t be lulled
by branches waltzing by on gray silk,
by the ache of your blurry yearning,
into conclusions of grandeur or imagined connection.

Pulp the maps and the guidebooks;
burn the photo albums.
Circumvent the archives,
municipal and otherwise.
Why face the natives pissing at the tour bus?
Don’t go to the tombstones,
tottering in drunken gloom.
You won’t find anything.
I come from the garden of nothing and nowhere,
and to there I shall return.
You too, you know.

But, if anything should happen to me in the by and by,
she paused,
her many chins aquiver at last,
peering through the lace of bramble and tangle,
take care of my children.
This one is X,
and this here is the angel Y,
my twin integers against the apocalypse.
That’s all I ask. And thank you for visiting.
Come see us again soon.

Walking with Sarina

All the schoolyard taunts initially came to mind:

He--beanpole, tower, tree trunk, ropy, Lincoln, skyscraper, pillar.

(But now with a twist—the ripple of sinew, the strain of bicep.)

And she far below—a speck, paramecium, toy, bobble-head, Weeble.

An odd couple, sure, but also wondrous to behold.

With Sarina, you see, Marvin made sense.

His long limbs formed a fortress around her barkless muzzle, her tiny body—

more places to hide, snuggle, get warm, even in summer.

A light bore through her rheumy eyes at his approach.

His every move, his very touch transformed her into ecstasy.

With Sarina, Marvin removed his mantle of self-deprecation,

the voices from long ago, the stares of today.

In the fog of her declining breath, he could loosen the fortress of his discipline.

Hovering around his ankles, her limp was if not healed, then irrelevant.

Her wiry gray curls became damask under his massive hands.

Throughout their strolls the neighbors eyed, not the tower and the toy,

but me, the one behind them. It was so obvious: none of this was about me.

Even when Marvin pooled Sarina’s drool and I saw myself

hobbling to the toilet of an old age home—

a scrim on the eyelids banished to the cobwebs of foreshadow, even then I knew this.

So don’t let this poem be about me, the ghostly lover outside the frame.

If you have to see me here at all, see me not as interloper,

but as chronicler of a gentle love. Listen to me as I walk with them,

whispering my incantation, my mantra of well-wishing:

Sarina, Serena, serene, serenity, Sarina, Serena, serene …

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Insatiable Psalm (Hershey, Pa.: Wind River Press, 2005) and What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot balykhtn (West Lafayette, Ind., Parlor Press, 2008; Free Verse Editions series). His Yiddish and English language poems, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, have appeared in numerous publications, including Eclectica Magazine, Loch Raven Reciew, The Orange Room Review, Prarie Schooner, and The South Carolina Review. He was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage asa one of New York's best emerging Jewish artists. Visit his website at http://www.yataub.net .