The hunger is for the word between us,between outside and in, between Europeand America, between the Jew and his other,the word and the non-word.In the museum case, belief has been sealedbehind glass. The gold Yod, fist-shapedwith extended finger, marks where the letteris made free, davar twining aleph into thing.The hunger was once for textured cloth, brocadeof thread, gold-webbed damask, tessellate fringe,for sewn-in weight of lead or brass, the chanterlifting all heaviness from the page, singing outlost richness. He followed the gold yod of divining,alchemic word intoning the throne’s measure indiscarded lexicons of cubits and myriads. The clothlay over Europe’s open scroll between Athens and Jerusalem,between library and dream. What if Athens were to beentered only via the syllogism or Jerusalem’s skywere written over in fiery labyrinth, in severe figures,unerring texts? The hunger was for the lost worldthat lay between Jerusalem and Athens. Later, terrorscame to be its portion, flames beyond remonstrance,synagogue and worshiper in ash. Celan in the Seinewith its syllabary. The words were as burls in woven cloth.They lie across the lettered scroll, ink on paperenveloped in darkness, desperate to be inmixedwith matter. The words were between us, poisedto rise into constellated night as task unto the city,to enter this place unshielded between the Oneand nothingness, if only to exist as from an echobetween hope and horror, between sacred soundand profane air. Between Athens and Jerusalem and America.
Bandelette de Torah
In honor of the Eternal One, it has been made, this band and cloak, by the young and dignified girl, Simhah, daughter of the cantor, Joseph Hay, son of the wise and noble Isaac.
—1761, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
Feature Date
- August 24, 2020
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from Telescope: Selected Poems, published by NYRB Poets
Copyright © 2019 by Michael Heller
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Michael Heller has published over twenty-five volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction. His most recent books of poetry are Telescope: Selected Poems (2019), Dianoia (2016) and Dans le signe (2016), translations of his poetry in French. Other works include This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010, Beckmann Variations & other poems and Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics. Multimedia collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson include the musical/theater works Constellations of Waking and This Art Burning. His libretto/poem for Constellations of Waking, a work based on the life of Walter Benjamin, was published in 2019. Among his many awards and honors are the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Poet/Scholar Award and the Fund for Poetry. A collection of essays on his work, The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: Nomad Memory, was published in 2015.
"As Wallace Stevens explored the shifting relationship between imagination and reality, so Heller explores the shifting and often uneasy relationship between language and that which it purports to name. Other poets frequently touch upon this problem, but over fifty years Heller has developed a body of work that moves from groping toward the ways in which language helps distinguish self from other to a more sophisticated grasp of how the world is and isn’t text."
—William Doreski, The Harvard Review
“In a poetic generation that has frequently settled for small answers, Heller’s work insists upon the largest questions.”
—Rain Taxi
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