The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
There is Only One Story
By Yehoshua November
(on the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting)
1.
There are always two stories:
That of the body, that of the soul,
plus the story of Cousin Reva,
who, arriving late that morning,
was instructed by an officer to wait things out
at the nearby public library.
I feel guilty about not dying with my friends,
she said the next day.
2.
It is October 27, 1988.
My friend Robert plays whiffle ball
in his backyard
abutting Tree of Life Synagogue.
It is October 27, 2018.
A stranger passes through
unlocked double doors.
Blocks away, Robert’s son
begins his Bar Mitzvah portion:
Abraham inviting angels, wayfarers,
into his open tent.
Perhaps, Robert postulates,
the soul of my recently deceased father interceded
on high, causing the news to be hidden
until his grandson had closed
the Torah scroll.
And in the afternoon, the scroll is reopened,
and we read:
And Abraham came to eulogize over Sarah
and to cry for her.
And according to the hidden story—
the one the mystics tell—
Abraham represents the soul,
and Sarah the body.
3.
Now it is night. Half a block from the apartment where,
seventeen years earlier,
my wife and I lived when first wed, Jews of Pittsburgh
stand in the rain, holding candles. Eleven souls
ascend to the region of mystery
then swoop down to hover,
incandescently, over their former lives.
Away from the cameras and fanfare,
eleven bodies are ushered through
burial rituals—
pottery shards placed over twenty-two eyes,
eleven mouths.
Water poured to purify physical forms
that had, until recently, housed souls
whose last act on Earth was to whisper a prayer.
4.
There is only one story, say the mystics:
The souls of the Jewish people
throughout Jewish history
form one larger body.
The body bears more wounds
than we want to recall.
No one can explain how it limps forward
but has not faltered.
Hearing Roy Orbison in a Mikvah in Salem, MA
By Yehoshua November
In dreams I walk with you,
Roy Orbison crooned
from the speakers above the indoor pool,
at the Holiday Inn,
steam rising as I resurfaced
from beneath the chlorine waters
of the makeshift mikvah.
If slightly rearranged, the letters
in the word tevilah, ritual immersion
in a body of water,
spell habitul, the self’s dissolution
in the face of the Divine.
“He was quiet, self-effacing,”
Orbison’s biographers noted.
Bathed in spotlight,
he hid behind Wayfarer sunglasses
and never danced on stage.
To submerge beneath the water,
the mystics add,
is to return to the Divine womb,
the way the soul returns to the Heavens each night
as the body dozes.
Claudette—
Orbison’s first wife, whom he divorced
after her infidelities with the contractor who’d built
the couple’s Hendersonville home,
and whom he remarried a year later—
died in the singer’s arms shortly after
her motorcycle collided
with a truck pulling onto South Water Avenue.
It was 6AM. I had the mivkah to myself.
I heard desperation in the operatic voice that hailed
from Vernon,Texas.
I was in Salem for a panel
on 21st-century devotional poetry.
Like the soul climbing
while the body reposes,
Orbison’s voice rose higher
than the sopranos.
In dreams I talk with you.
“The lyrics came to me
as I slept,” Orbison claimed.
“Words I wrote down upon waking.”
Our panel asked what it meant
for a contemporary poet
to speak to our Father in Heaven in this millennium.
Mostly, we do not know.
Two of Orbison’s sons, 6 and 11, died
when the Hendersonville home
went up in flames. Orbison’s second wife,
Barbara, passed away
on the 23rd anniversary of the singer’s death.
Once, three thousand years ago,
Moses asked God,
Who could have made the world any way He wanted,
why He’d created suffering.
Moses, whose name means
“one drawn from the water,”
was the only prophet
to speak with God face to face,
that is, in a waking state.
But he heard only staticky silence—
oceanic, wavelike,
the crackling of a turntable
following a song’s final note.
Yehoshua November is the author of three books of poetry, God’s Optimism (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), Two Worlds Exist (a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize), and The Concealment of Endless Light (Orison Books, 2024). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Prairie Schooner, VQR, and on NPR and Poetry Unbound. He teaches writing at Rutgers University and Touro College.
The poem, There is Only One Story, was first published in Poetry International. The poem, Hearing Roy Orbison in a Mivkah, was first published published in Vox Populi.
Featured image in this post: Tree Of Life memorials 6, Dmitry Brant, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
