by Joshua Cohen
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.
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 claspe
d 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.
A new world.
One day, one night soon, in our time—we await.
The Museum of Museums
A lone long, thin reflecting pool as if a finger accusing in the image of which you only encounter yourself and your failings, though placid, usually—if not for the drizzle slowly descending; an eruptive fountain beyond, its hot, vitreous bubbling burbling the surface of the pool into which it flows sharded freeze, liquid glass smashed over, again, reflecting in sharp tawdry lights the limousines and taxicabs lately arriving, depositing, departing, dropoff; this melt of miniature ice floes, too, sounding like the joyous tears of attractive, in shape, wellinsured widows, loudly through the overprivileged, entitledly adolescent whine of the sirens: police escorts driving into skids, then straightening out again at the curb of the narrow redcarpet unfurled, soaked then shod dirtied halfway to black…at least the snow’s stopped, for now, heavy weather relented, RSVP’d regrets only, leaving us all with only the belated consolation of spring, its droolingly lazy rain not doing the least to distract Security’s athletic attention: strong menschs blondish and big, earpieced, vested and armed, crowded in a circle at the helipad up on the roof, readying the site for its arrivals due in from behind the clouds, any moment; snipers with scaleless eyes and snakeskin gloves hold down their rooftop positions; every available soldier’s either plainclothed on the ground or inside and dressuniformed, stationed Uptown east, to secure the Museum for tonight’s homecoming gala. A flow of fluttery dresses, the funereal austerity of blueblack tuxedos…who’s the corpse, he’s my husband, you have my condolences: notoriously bowtied bodies, they emerge from rare leathers to the fire of bulbs, a crowd mouthed mad for a glimpse or a grope. Menschs hold umbrellas for these guests, for the distance between door and carpet kept dry, then up the stairs, the landing, the stairs again and then in through the doors, into the specially decorated lobby: the thought that maybe they’ve got weather there, too, interiorly, those dim monstrous skies of galleries and halls leading to galleries further, with their own weather coming down from the ceilings, cathedrally vaulted, the swirling atmospheres of high domes.
A Museum, whisper insidevoices—a question, is there anything more indicative of the decline of the universe than a Museum, you think? too many reporters here tonight, watch your words, mind your mouth—though the universe, that’s a Museum itself, a Museum unto itself, isn’t it, wasn’t it? Questions, too many unanswered…is there anything more horrendously depressing, I’m asking? Who’s awake who would know? A Museum isn’t the end of the world, no, it’s the world itself ending, dying, happening as we speak, here and now—the as slow then only more terrifying murder of everything; the lightblind casechoke, display’s duststrangle, the peccant poison known as culture—which itself ’s only to be preserved, to sterility, never to engender again.
And then there’s nothing more repugnant than a fundraiser for a Museum, especially if it’s a formal night like tonight, a tails with a tie and an evening-dress everything down to the pearls affair, out with the jewelrybox, out of the safedeposit box, then the bowtie you tie by hand not the clipon, God forbid, how there’s nothing optional, never is. Mothballs roll their ways down the slick marble stairs, bouncy chuckles, they tripup the salaried slaves in attendance. Take pity, this is the first night they’ve dressed up in a while, have permitted themselves the luxury of…to become the lover of their own sin, an embrace black and cuffed, its enjoyment—how to explain it? please, provide us their thinking. How lately, they’ve reached this permanent stasis, nunc stans and all that, the fat reunited with his brother happy again, in the middle of the metropolitan desert—the goy showing up bearing gifts in the form of simple household solutions, such as variously blinking and beeping organizational helpers, it’s said. Call it another Enlightenment, call it a selfemancipation, a realization, an actualization—call it what you will, you’re already late.
Aleph is for the Alist unfurling up the stairs, each entried step a dark scrawl of angular socialites and their squat, loopy machers being checked off by the door…reformed representations of oldtime Division Street fabricants here with their brotherly cousins, a host of warehouse winners grew up in Midwood now officed in the Army Terminal, Brooklyn, sitting on a pile of home furnishings both used and likenew, the repentant scion of Bowery pushcart poets and their whorish, redheaded Pomeranian landladies I’m talking sixfloor walkup ugly, with socialist leanings escorted by their daughters become correctly cold Yorkville obgyns, explain that—their own daughters, married into the Battery’s recharged investment bankers, corporate moguls in from a Siburbia beyond Connecticut and with kinder of their own lately heiresses doing the dos, jetting the charity circuit, balancing balls—selfmade menschs in every racket and trade that can be legally listed, so far I’ve written over five grand in new business and I don’t even read, can’t even spell; them and the women who made them, they slowly slacken their pace to meet the press just assembled in a row on both sides up the stairs, always upward, Uppermost and then what, you expect a brass ring, take your coat…journalists pent behind cordons lik
e pedigreed livestock who talk, who ask too many questions, too many of the wrong ones, at least, squawky without answer: who are you, who do you think you aren’t…they’ve come in hordes, to barren the buffet, to drink the fountains dry and then the mooned pool, skinnydip, eclipsing in their spectacle what’s hung high from lunettes—entering under a raft of tautblown, entablatured banners proclaiming an exhibition, an eternal exhibition, it’s said, of the way it was, sentiment, nostalgia, Ostalgie if you must from that language itself an exhibit (besides which, we’re kitsched in the East after all—82nd & Fifth), a Museum of an Extinct Race, of a not quite Unconditional Surrender…gevalt, it’s okay, only richtig, go ahead and admit it, of their old lives just skinshed in this very pilgrimage Uptown, up from the overhauled system, the redone 6 Train if they’ll take it, anything green…or trekked on over from the West Side across the darkling Park upon the wings of the crosstown bus, M86 be its name blessed forever and ever—pulled up in their commissions and liveries, not as guests anymore but as hosts, not as visitors of late but at home, masters of ceremony and the attention attendant, making their last adjustments after stepping to sidewalk’s sopping carpet, a remnant of a God’s tongue gotten for a good price right off the floor, off the rack (one woman mortified at how her husband’s schlock satin pants they have too many pleats and break only down by the heel, that and his shirt it’s pleated, too, or maybe just wrinkled, showing a full two inches of cuff, is how crazy, how far we’ve come), them tugging, pinching pulling, a flush wind, hair askew, blown big and unstyled, these gusts of dress exposing scandal, toupees with their yarmulkes still pinned go flying like demons through air. A sweep of light stains the night, swirling carbon arc searches…all turn their heads to the judgment descending, a buzz, a whirr, the noise of skykashering knives: Shade lands on the roof ’s helipad; nothing can begin without him, he’s a sponsor of the evening, the guest of honor and the honored host both, as reelected Head of the Sanhedrin, turned out for the occasion in a slimmingly fitted white tux, frilly lapels baby blue, a matching blue & white kippah atop, alternating colors seamed to its quadrants; it’s trimmed so heavily in platitudinal platinum, it’s amazing he can still keep his head high.
