Richard Fein
SIGNING A SONG
And she danced,
not to the music on the radio
but to the cadence of pulsating volume lights.
She faced me,
and her arms were in liquid flow,
first crossed over her heart,
then slowly down her sides then up
when the lights briefly sojourned to red.
She swayed her head,
smiled at me and again crossed her heart.
The other party guests had told me she was deaf.
I knew only one sign, crossed arms over the heart
which means love.
Certainly not for me alone
for this was our first meeting.
Crossed arms over the heart means love,
and the lights then flickered serenely green.
I couldn't translate her lyrics,
nor could she hear the melody,
but her smile was universal.
We held out our arms, embraced,
and for the length of a song
danced to a shared rhythm.
OFFERINGS
Just in time god sent the ram
so Abraham used the knife to cut Isaac loose from the altar.
But before Isaac, before Abraham, there were other altars,
and standing by them were grieving fathers offering their greatest treasure.
And knives were raised to heaven and poised to plunge into human flesh.
But no rams appeared,
and there was silence except for wailing, hopeful prayers,
and whispered doubts.
Did god refuse those precious gifts?
But he must have accepted the bribes in exchange for
commanding rain for crops, vanquishing enemies,
and scouring the land clean of all pestilence.
Why else would loving fathers sacrifice their beloved sons?
But God was silent then,
and even now there are no Abrahams to hear him say
I'll take the ram instead of your son.
So the devil is free to strike his own bargains,
leaving many Isaacs lying on altars
facing heaven and the knife.
COSSACKS
Years ago I was a dabbling pilgrim without a true faith,
a mosque for one month, a synagogue for the next,
and for a while I tried a Russian Orthodox Church.
Under an icon of the Madonna and Son,
a dark-skinned altar boy held up a crucifix during Mass.
I heard an unwanted whisper in my ear
that his mother had been raped by a Negro.
The priest was singing hymns.
The gently swinging censer perfumed the air.
Years later in a Ukranian-American bar in Queens,
one drunken dark-skinned man dressed in military camouflage
called himself The Cossack and said,
"He would rid the neighborhood of niggers
the same way Cossacks tried to free Ukraine of Jews."
A warning was whispered in my ear
that he had almost decked a guy,
and a hunting knife was strapped to his leg.
The ersatz Cossack eyed me and asked if had we ever met.
I dared not walk away.
But armed with ad-lib lies, I called myself Igor, the White Russian,
and that I had been raised in foster homes
and didn't know who my parents were, or cared.
Our reflections were in a wall mirror
behind the bar between the scotch and vodka bottles.
He sat next to me, bought me a beer and bragged,
"we're both descended from Cossacks
who once rode the steppes, taking all kinds of women,
Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Jewish, Turkish."
Then he raised his mug as high as he had once held a crucifix.
And also reflected in that mirror, between our two faces,
a Christmas-season print that hung on the opposite wall
of Mary holding her child.
ALL POSSIBLE PEOPLE
I'm the result of a choice made by a past someone I never knew.
Perhaps a suitor was too shy to ask for the hand of his beloved
or some haughty woman dismissed a would-be groom,
so generations were suddenly unborn,
while new infants appeared and cried for milk
as men had other wives and women other husbands.
Right now I might be surrounded by phantom citizens
of countless contingent chronologies.
They're not realâ€"here in this time and place.
But there are other places measured by different clocks.
And maybe I pass invisibly through their worlds
as they pass through mine.
Sometimes I think I feel them.
And that hum in the breeze,
it could be one of them breathing.
This empty street could be crowded with them.
We could be face-to-face yet totally faceless to one another.
But one, just one, might see us all.
One certainty, it's not me; perhaps it's some other me.
But I also make choices,
and those choices are as meaningless as brushing lint off a sleeve
or as momentous as unstitching the seams of a universe.
One of those citizens of my might-have-been
perhaps is watching me now
and thus subjecting himself to self-examination.
Is he grumbling with envy or sighing with relief?
No destiny is manifest,
so I must try to make him very jealous.
FRICTION
Friction brakes all motion,
turning momentum into heat.
It wears the soles of shoes down to holes,
rubs away the rubbery thickness of tires,
erodes the cartilage between bones,
and lights up plummeting meteors.
It's resistance to all movement forward.
But without friction your leg muscles would vainly spasm
if you pressed your feet against the ground trying to walk.
Friction is the sandpaper of existence, a smoothing coarseness,
and a check on undue acceleration,
for all passages, for all leaps ahead.
Friction is more than just two clashing sticks igniting sparks.
It's also the Yin or Yang of the yet to be.
There's the friction of skin moving against skin,
the friction of fingers tracing along your or your lover's flesh.
But without friction you'd feel nothing.
Friction is a body chafing another body
which even sweat can't lubricate or cool.
Friction is part torrid abrasion,
a stoking of animal heat, an erupting fire,
a passion propelling us to conceive future generations.
BIRTHDAY JETTISONING
Finally down to serious discarding, I
go deep into the closet
and find everyone's threadbare overcoat,
older than my memory of buying it.
In a pocket, a paper
with writing faded almost to illegibility.
Something once was noted,
and I've never been known to throw something important away.
I try on the coat.
It no longer fits.
Now I'm trapped within a hoary skin.
And I clutch
a memento that's as yellowed and wrinkled
as a jaundiced old man.
It's time to pitch this rag heap.
As for the paper, my very unfolding
tore it apart.
Richard Fein says: I have been published in many web and print journals. My second aesthetic interest is in digital photography. I have many of my photos posted on: http://www.pbase.com/bardofbyte
