Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens


I

The paunchy sons of Abraham
Spit on the maculate streets of Amsterdam,
Showing Spinoza, Baruch alias Benedict,
He and his God are under interdict.

Ah, what theology there is in spatted spittle,
And in anathema what sacred prose
Winnowing the fact from the suppose!
Indeed, what better than these two things can whittle
The scabrous heresies of Yahweh's foes,
Informing the breast where Satan gloats and crows
That saving it leave false doctrine, jot and tittle,
No vigilant thumb will leave its orthodox nose?
What better than ram's horn blown,
And candles blown out by maledictory breath,
Can bring the wanderer back to his very own,
The infidel back to his faith?

Nothing, unless it be that from the ghetto
A soldier of God advance to teach the creed,
Using as rod the irrefutable stiletto.

II

Uriel da Costa
Flightily ranted
Heresies one day,
Next day recanted.

Rabbi and bishop
Each vies to smuggle
Soul of da Costa
Out of its struggle.

Confessional hears his
Glib paternoster;
Synagogue sees his
Penitent posture.

What is the end of
This catechism?
Bullet brings dogma
That suffers no schism.

III

Malevolent scorpions befoul thy chambers,
O my heart; they scurry across its floor,
Leaving the slimy vestiges of doubt.

Banish memento of the vermin; let
No scripture on the wall affright you; no
Ghost of da Costa; no, nor any threat.
Ignore, O heart, even as didst ignore
The bribe of florins jingling in the purse.

IV

Jehovah is factotum of the rabbis;
And Christ endures diurnal Calvary;
Polyglot God is exiled to the churches;
Synods tell God to be or not to be.

The Lord within his vacuum of heaven
Discourses his domestic policies,
With angels who break off their loud hosannas
To help him phrase infallible decrees.

Soul of Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza bids you
Forsake the god suspended in mid-air,
Seek you that other Law, and let Jehovah
Play his game of celestial solitaire.

V

   Reducing providence to theorems, the horrible atheist
compiled such lore that proved, like proving two and two
make four, that in the crown of God we all are gems.
From glass and dust of glass he brought to light, out of the
pulver and the polished lens, the prism and the flying mote;
and hence the infinitesimal and infinite.
  Is it a marvel, then, that he forsook the abracadabra of
the synagogue, and holding with timelessness a duologue,
deciphered a new scripture in the book? Is it a marvel that
he left old fraud for passion intellectual of God?

VI

Unto the crown of bone cry Suzerain!
Do genuflect before the jewelled brain!
Lavish the homage of the vassal; let
The blood grow heady with strong epithet;
O cirque of the Cabbalist! O proud skull!
Of alchemy O crucible!
Sanctum sanctorum; grottoed hermitage
Where sits the bearded sage!
O golden bowl of Koheleth! and of fate
0 hourglass within the pate!
Circling, O planet in the occiput!
O Macrocosm, sinew-shut!

Yea, and having uttered this loud Te Deum
Ye have been singularly dumb.

VII

I am weak before the wind; before the sun
  I faint; I lose my strength;
I am utterly vanquished by a star;
  I go to my knees, at length

Before the song of a bird; before
  The breath of spring or fall
I am lost; before these miracles
  I am nothing at all.

VIII

  Lord, accept my hallelujahs; look not askance at these my
petty words; unto perfection a fragment makes its prayer.
  For thou art the world, and I am part thereof; thou art the
blossom and I its fluttering petal.
  I behold thee in all things, and in all things: lo, it is myself;
I look into the pupil of thine eye, it is my very countenance
I see.
  Thy glory fills the earth; it is the earth; the noise of the
deep, the moving of many waters, is it not thy voice aloud,
O Lord, aloud that all may hear?
  The wind through the almond-trees spreads the fragrance of
thy robes; the turtle-dove twittering utters diminutives of
thy love; at the rising of the sun I behold thy countenance.
  Yea, and in the crescent moon, thy little finger's finger-nail.
  If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; If I make my bed
in hell, behold thou art there.
  Thou art everywhere; a pillar to thy sanctuary is every blade
of grass.
  Wherefore I said to the wicked, Go to the ant, thou sluggard,
seek thou an audience with God.
  On the swift wings of a star, even on the numb legs of a
snail, thou dost move, O Lord.
  A babe in swaddling clothes laughs at the sunbeams on the
door's lintel; the sucklings play with thee; with thee
Kopernik holds communion through a lens.
  I am thy son, O Lord, and brother to all that lives am I.
   The flowers of the field, they are kith and kin to me; the lily
my sister, the rose is my blood and flesh.
   Even as the stars in the firmament move, so does my inward
heart, and even as the moon draws the tides in the bay, so
does it the blood in my veins.
  For thou art the world, and I am part thereof;
  Howbeit, even in dust I am resurrected; and even in decay
I live again.

IX

Think of Spinoza, then, not as you think
Of Shabbathai Zvi who for a time of life
Took to himself the Torah for a wife,
And underneath the silken canopy
Made public: Thou art hallowed unto me.

Think of Spinoza, rather, plucking tulips
Within the garden of Mynheer, forgetting
Dutchmen and Rabbins, and consumptive fretting,
Plucking his tulips in the Holland sun,
Remembering the thought of the Adored,
Spinoza, gathering flowers for the One,
The ever-unwedded lover of the Lord.

For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu



In pairs,
as if to illustrate their sisterhood,
the sisters pace the hospital garden walks.
In their robes black and white immaculate hoods
they are like birds,
the safe domestic fowl of the House of God.

O biblic birds, who fluttered to me in my childhood illnesses
- me little, afraid, ill, not of your race, -
the cool wing for my fever, the hovering solace,
the sense of angels-
be thanked, O plumage of paradise, be praised.

The Mountain


Who knows it only by the famous cross which bleeds
into the fifty miles of night its light
knows a night-scene;
and who upon a postcard knows its shape -
the buffalo straggled of the laurentian herd, -
holds in his hand a postcard.

In layers of mountains the history of mankind,
and in Mount Royal
which daily in a streetcar I surround
my youth, my childhood -
the pissabed dandelion, the coolie acorn,
green prickly husk of chestnut beneath mat of grass-
O all the amber afternoons
are still to be found.

There is a meadow, near the pebbly brook,
where buttercups, like once on the under of my chin
upon my heart still throw their rounds of yellow.

And Cartier's monument, based with nude figures
still stands where playing bookey
Lefty and I tested our gravel aim
(with occupation flinging away our guilt)
against the bronze tits of Justice.

And all my Aprils there are marked and spotted
upon the adder's tongue, darting in light,
upon the easy threes of trilliums, dark green, green, and white,
threaded with earth, and rooted
beside the bloodroots near the leaning fence-
corms and corollas of childhood,
a teacher's presents.

And chokecherry summer clowning black on my teeth!

The birchtree stripped by the golden zigzag still
stands at the mouth of the dry cave where I
one suppertime in August watched the sky
grow dark, the wood quiet, and then suddenly spill
from barrels of thunder and broken staves of lightning -
terror and holiday!

One of these days I shall go up to the second terrace
to see if it still is there-
the uncomfortable sentimental bench
where, - as we listened to the brass of the band concerts
made soft and to our mood by dark and distance-
I told the girl I loved
I loved her.

Heirloom


My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
Writ mournfully upon a blank front page -

Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders;
Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew;
Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders;
And sundry other tomes for a good Jew.

Beautiful: though no pictures on them, save
The scorpion crawling on a printed track;
The Virgin floating on a scriptural wave,
Square letters twinkling in the Zodiac.

The snuff left on this page, now brown and old,
The tallow stains of midnight liturgy -
These are my coat of arms, and these unfold
My noble lineage, my proud ancestry!

And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground,
When reading in these treatises some weird
Miracle, I turned a leaf and found
A white hair fallen from my father's beard.

Political Meeting


(For Camillien Houde)

On the school platform, draping the folding seats,
they wait the chairman's praise and glass of water.
Upon the wall the agonized Y initials their faith.

Here all are laic; the skirted brothers have gone.
Still, their equivocal absence is felt, like a breeze
that gives curtains the sounds of surplices.

The hall is yellow with light, and jocular;
suddenly some one lets loose upon the air
the ritual bird which the crowd in snares of singing

catches and plucks, throat, wings, and little limbs.
Fall the feathers of sound, like alouette's.
The chairman, now, is charming, full of asides and wit,

building his orators, and chipping off
the heckling gargoyles popping in the hall.
(Outside, in the dark, the street is body-tall,
flowered with faces intent on the scarecrow thing
that shouts to thousands the echoing
of their own wishes.) The Orator has risen!

Worshipped and loved, their favourite visitor,
a country uncle with sunflower seeds in his pockets,
full of wonderful moods, tricks, imitative talk,

he is their idol: like themselves, not handsome,
not snobbish, not of the Grande Allée! Un homme!
Intimate, informal, he makes bear's compliments

to the ladies; is gallant; and grins;
goes for the balloon, his opposition, with pins;
jokes also on himself, speaks of himself

in the third person, slings slang, and winks with folklore;
and knows now that he has them, kith and kin.
Calmly, therefore, he begins to speak of war,

praises the virtue of being Canadien,
of being at peace, of faith, of family,
and suddenly his other voice: Where are your sons?

He is tearful, choking tears; but not he
would blame the clever English; in their place
he'd do the same; maybe.

Where are your sons?
                                   The whole street wears one face,
shadowed and grim; and in the darkness rises
the body-odour of race.

Elegy


Named for my father's father, cousin, whose cry
Might have been my cry lost in that dark land-
Where shall I seek you ? On what wind shall I
Reach out to touch the ash that was your hand?
The Atlantic gale and the turning of the sky
Unto the cubits of my ambience
Scatter the martyr-motes. Flotsam-of-flame!
God's image made the iotas of God's name!
O through a powder of ghosts I walk; through dust
Seraphical upon the dark winds borne;
Daily I pass among the sieved white hosts,
Through clouds of cousinry transgress,
Maculate with the ashes that I mourn.
Where shall I seek you ? There's not anywhere
A tomb, a mound, a sod, a broken stick,
Marking the sepulchres of those sainted ones
The dogfaced hid in tumuli of air.
O cousin, cousin, you are everywhere!
And in your death, in your ubiquity,
Bespeak them all, our sundered cindered kin:
David, whose cinctured bone -
Young branch once wreathed in phylactery!
Now hafts the peasant's bladed kitchenware;

And the dark Miriam murdered for her hair;
And the dark Miriam murdered for her hair;
The relicts nameless; and the tattoo'd skin
Fevering from lampshade in a cultured home,-
All, all our gaunt skull-shaven family-
The faces are my face! that lie in lime,
You bring them, jot of horror, here to me,
Them, and the slow eternity of despair
That tore them, and did tear them out of time.

Death may be beautiful, when full of years,
Ripe with good works, a man, among his sons,
Says his last word, and turns him to the wall.
But not these deaths! O not these weighted tears!
The flesh of thy sages, Lord, flung prodigal
To the robed fauna with their tubes and shears;
Thy chosen for a gold tooth chosen; for
The pervert's wetness, flesh beneath the rod;
Death multitudinous as their frustrate spore!
This has been done to us, Lord, thought-lost God;
And things still hidden, and unspeakable more.
   A world is emptied. Marked is that world's map
The forest color. There where thy people praised
In angular ecstasy thy name, thy Torah
is less than a whisper of its thunderclap.
Thy synagogues, rubble. Thy academies,
Bright once with talmud brow and musical
With song alternative in exegesis,
Are silent, dark. They are laid waste, thy cities,
Once festive with thy fruit-full calendar,
And where thy curled and caftan'd congregations
Danced to the first days and the second star,
Or made the marketplaces loud and green
To welcome in the Sabbath Queen;
Or through the nights sat sweet polemical
With Rav and Shmuail (also of the slain),-
O there where dwelt the thirty-six, - world's pillars!-
And tenfold Egypt's generation, there
Is nothing, nothing ... only the million echoes
Calling thy name still trembling on the air.

Look down, O Lord, from thy abstracted throne!
Look down! Find out this Sodom to the sky
Rearing and solid on a world atilt
The architecture by its pillars known.
This circle breathed hundreds; that round, thousands,-
And from among the lesser domes descry
The style renascent of Gomorrah built.
See where the pyramids
Preserve our ache between their angled tons:
Pass over, they have been excelled. Look down
On the Greek marble that our torture spurned-
The white forgivable stone.
The arch and triumph of subjection, pass;
The victor, too, has passed; and all these spires
At whose foundations, dungeoned, the screw turned
Inquisitorial, now overlook -
They were delirium and sick desires.
But do not overlook, O pass not over
The hollow monoliths. The vengeful eye
Fix on these pylons of the sinister sigh,
The well-kept chimneys daring towards the sky!
From them, now innocent, no fumes do rise.
They yawn to heaven. It is their ennui:
Too much the slabs and ovens, and too many
The manshaped loaves of sacrifice!
As thou didst do to Sodom, do to them!
But not, O Lord, in one destruction. Slow,
Fever by fever, limb by withering limb,
Destroy! Send through the marrow of their bones
The pale treponeme burrowing. Let there grow
Over their eyes a film that they may see
Always a carbon sky! Feed them on ash!
Condemn them double deuteronomy!
All in one day pustule their speech with groans,
Their bodies with the scripture of a rash,

With boils and buboes their suddenly-breaking flesh!
When their dams litter, monsters be their whelp,
Unviable! Themselves, may each one dread,
The touch of his fellow, and the infected help
Of the robed fauna with their tubes and shears!
Fill up their days with funerals and fears!
Let madness shake them, - rooted down - like kelp.
And as their land is emptying, and instructed,
The nations cordon the huge lazaret,-
The paring of thy little fingernail
Drop down: the just circuitings of flame,
And as Gomorrah's name, be their cursed name!

Not for the judgment sole, but for a sign
Effect, O Lord, example and decree,
A sign, the final shade and witness joined
To the shadowy witnesses who once made free
With that elected folk thou didst call thine.
Before my mind, still unconsoled, there pass
The pharaohs risen from the Red Sea sedge,
Profiled; in alien blood and peonage
Hidalgos lost; shadows of Shushan; and
The Assyrian uncurling into sand; -
Most untriumphant frieze! and darkly pass
The shades Seleucid; dark against blank white
The bearded ikon-bearing royalties-
All who did waste us, insubstantial now,
A motion of the mind. O unto these
Let there be added, soon, as on a screen,
The shadowy houndface, barking, never heard,
But for all time a lore and lesson, seen,
And heeded; and thence, of thy will our peace.
   Vengeance is thine, O Lord, and unto us
In a world, wandering, amidst raised spears
Between wild waters, and against barred doors,
There are no weapons left. Where now but force
Prevails, and over the once-blest lagoons
Mushroom new Sinais, sole defensive is
The face turned east, and the uncompassed prayer.
Not prayer for the murdered myriads who
Themselves white liturgy before thy Throne
Are of my prayer; but for the scattered bone
Stirring in Europe's camps, next kin of death,
My supplication climbs the carboniferous air.
Grant them Ezekiel's prophesying breath!
Isaiah's cry of solacing allow!
O thou who from Mizraim once didst draw
Us free, and from the Babylonian lair;
From bondages, plots, ruins imminent
Preserving, didst keep Covenant and Law,
Creator, King whose banishments are not
Forever, - for thy Law and Covenant,
O for thy promise and thy pity, now
At last this people to its lowest brought
Preserve! Only in thee our faith. The word
Of eagle-quartering kings ever intends
Their own bright eyrie; rote of parakeet
The laboring noise among the fabians heard;
Thou only art responseful.
                                       Hear me, who stand
Circled and winged in vortex of my kin:
Forego the complete doom! The winnowed, spare!
Annul the scattering, and end! And end
Our habitats on water and on air!
Gather the flames up to light orient
Over the land; and that funest eclipse,
Diaspora-dark, revolve from off our ways!
Towered Jerusalem and Jacob's tent
Set up again; again renew our days
As when near Carmel's mount we harbored ships,
And went and came, and knew our home; and song
From all the vineyards raised its sweet degrees,
And thou didst visit us, didst shield from wrong,
And all our sorrows salve with prophecies;
   Again renew them as they were of old,
And for all time cancel that ashen orbit
In which our days, and hopes, and kin, are rolled.