When the non-Jewish Sundays turn colorful and cool,
they sit – Valenti, my courtyard watchman,¹
and his pock-marked, red-lipped, porcine wife,
back to back on a wooden stool.
They sit and stare the whole afternoon –
and don’t get bored: they’re realists.

They do what?  Rest, stare, and say nothing;
they look at the dogs, at a child with a bagel,
at smoke, at the beggarly birds of the city,
at wisps of cloud, taking the shape
of transparent hats where you might toss some change,
at buttons in the sand, or a Rabbi with side-curls.

And when I, a mystic and a newsman,
I, a contradiction of fear and facts,
(and so how am I better than my people,
a reporter whose bloody tears
make good copy, yet reflect the heavenly spheres)  –   
when I run home on Sunday, half eagle and half worm,
with a stack of newspapers under my arm,
hating my life, with agonized blood,
waiting wide-eyed for a crystalline moment,
I come upon Valenti and wife at the gate,
sitting and looking as if half awake,
enjoying the things of this world as they are.

I look at them with contempt and with envy,
and think – I never could do what they’re doing,
not in any incarnation!
I, Aaron, nicknamed Orlik, beloved Shekhine’s paradox,²
adherent of abstractions artistic-ideological,  
writing his verses for no one at all,
not even for art’s high and mighty sake,
but only in the harsh service
of his own commanding God,
I, grandson of Kabbalists.
While at night –
in my dream rises up the radiant Crown³
and bends down, lost in thought, toward the lips of the Kingdom,
and Moses Cordovero sings the Mother exalted,⁴
and in fury walks Frank and his lovely Avatsha,⁵
until my great-grandfather, the Cantor of Lubavitsh,
breaks into a Kol Nidre generations old,
and everything ends by the cave of the Ba’al-Shem,
by two-and-seventy of the Name’s dancing letters,⁶
among the angels, riding on high walls,
blowing on shofars to announce the Messiah…

While in another week it’s Sunday, Sunday,
and again sit my watchman and his pock-marked old woman,
back to back on their wooden stool
with eyes of grey, staring at what is,
simply enjoying it.

----------------------------------

1. In old Warsaw as in much of Europe, apartments were often arranged around a central courtyard, with a watchman or woman stationed at the entryway who oversaw maintenance of the building, collected mail, and scrutinized visitors.

2. Polish “orlik,” small or young eagle, is a play on words based on Yiddish, “Orn,” Aaron.

3. Zeitlin includes several layers of Kabbalistic allusion in this part of the poem.  “Crown,” from Heb. “Keter,” is the highest of the ten “sephirot” or mystical formations which constitute the basis of the “Kabbalah.”  (Compare Zeitlin’s use of this image with that in “Point of Origin.”)  Here, he portrays the “Crown” as embracing the lowest of the “sephirot,” “Malkhut” or “Kingdom,” another term for the “Shekhine,” or Divine energy as it enters into physical incarnation.  The unification of the upper “sephirot” associated with “thought” and the lower “sephirot” which have to do with physical incarnation is a central Kabbalistic motif.  This unification is also one of male and female principles. 
The “Shekhine” is a Rabbinical term for God’s mode of appearance in this world, as for example in the fire on Mt. Sinai.  In the Kabbalah, the Shekhina becomes an overtly female designation (following the female grammatical form of the word, which is derived from the root, “to dwell”) and comes to symbolize the “female” aspect of divinity which is so to speak in “exile” in our physical universe, a motif of which Zeitlin makes frequent use in his poetry, as in the poem, “Shekhine.”

 4. Moses Cordovero (1522-1570, probably born in Spain) produced an important synthesis of Kabbalistic material in his book, “Pardes Rimonim” (Garden of Pomegranites), and the “Mother” of whom he sings here is the higher or intellectual female principle, often called, “Bina” or “Understanding,” attainment of which represents the object of mystical aspiration. 

5. Joseph Frank (1726-1791) was a Polish Jew who followed in the steps of Shabbatay Tzvi by preaching a form of mystical antinomianism which led many Jews to convert to Christianity.  He hoped that his daughter, Avatsha, would eventually be revealed as a personification of “Bina” or the Higher Female principle on earth.