The woman for whom the following poem was written—over thirty years ago—was a dancer, an artists’ model, and a poet. She lived alone in New York City, in a walk-up apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Her building stood in the Westside Manhattan neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen, where rats rumbled along the gutters of 9th Avenue; where streetwalkers plied their trade from dusk to dawn, beckoning without hope from the urinous recesses of darkened doorways.
Bacchanal
Bacchanal
sad the thrill-thin blood
of sober being
x __________
sister, sister
incest appeals to an only child
x __________
the canine tooth of doggèd love
can’t bite itself
and requires an assassin—
x
tear out the throat of my urgent cry
drink the blood of reason’s walking corpse
and revel, drunken, in the mess you make—
x
then sleep your sleep
in the bowels of a finished thing
x __________
A little over a year ago, I learned that she whom I am remembering here is now living in California. And she is—are you ready?—a rabbi.
A rabbi. Wow.
How cool is that?
X
