GLOSSARY

 

Thesis:

black holes / white holes / wormholes / origin and

     fate — they’ll last me a lifetime sans regret:

what I know I cannot know, I need not forget.

 

 

Hypothesis:

prior translations sprout on scattered tongues;

     hear me’s moss in bloodless mouths: what they

didn’t want to remember, I’m unable to forget.

 

 

Ein Sof:

root of all roots: cause of all causes: unreadable,

     unknowable, except to itself: speaker in numbers:

what I cannot know, I must not forget.

 

 

A priori:

an infant universe of ten dimensions once ripped apart:

     remaindered: reality: three dimensions plus time:

a man, a woman, dimensionless, crossed the sea to forget.

 

 

Note bene:

they include time yet they are timeless: they contain

     the world, but the world would not contain them;

what I’ve come to note, I must not forget.

 

 

Cosmology:

the world is names, the names numbers: Isaac the Blind,

     unfettered by terrestrial eyes, saw ten digits without end:

how do I quote names I can neither recall nor forget?

 

 

Insight:

chapters locked in time: shredded Torah scrolls,

     sacks of flour poured on the road, posterities of pine

flamed to ash: I’ve come to know; I must not forget.

 

 

Empirical:

what is admissible: her knee nudging

     the sewing machine lever, his gun-shot leg:

that which must be scavenged, because we forget.

 

 

Numerology:

arms assembling / reassembling: number my

     stars: number my grass: number my blood: earth

deafened by ciphers indecipherably quiet.

 

 

Themes:

the narrative reveals hints of what it was / is / should /

     could have been: their sisters and brothers read

haven anywhere: even remote islands chose to defect.

 

 

Premise:

black holes roam enfoldments deeper than fears

     trapped in their eyes: never-to-be-known

scenarios sentenced to decomposed alphabets.

 

 

Understand:

I am trying to get to the bottom of things;

     I am trying to open the folds, to unroll the bolts;

I am trying not to forget.

 

 

Leitmotifs:

this meal with the foretaste and aftertaste

     of not knowing: these entrees sauteed in unbuttered

sounds: this meat-starved, chipped-plate banquet.

 

 

Sixth sense:

Safed: in the presence of absence, saying little, intending

     much, Isaac ben Solomon Luria spoke to the speechless

birds: black are the holes’ cavities, awesome the glister of jet!

 

 

Ergo:

we die into life; we live into death; printouts

     torn and seamed, ravelled and patched:

nothing is chaste.

 

 

Ontology:

hollow bowls (graves) of when beneath crazed plates (fields)

     of where beside empty cups (houses) of why :

their tables were set.

 

 

Furthermore:

they wrote letters begging to be read, and got no reply;

     pried open windows of windowless rooms, rubbed out

their eyes with failures of light; swallowed gruel and grit.

 

 

Gnostic moan:

why did you forsake them: why did you retreat

     from your witness sky, your righteous world unbuilt?:

must their candles perish because they’re unlit?

 

 

Epistemology:

theirs is not stillness unnoised; theirs is silence exiled from

     sounds of uncountable generations: theirs is language

with the grammar beaten out of it.

 

 

Rationale:

because they inhaled the air, because they exhaled the air,

     because they occupied space, slept and ate and walked

streets, because their eyes were green, blue, sometimes violet...

 

 

Mandate:

see to it that nothing is lost or forgotten...record...and collect!

     but their history was ending, their families erased:

they sealed their lips and left me to imagine what to forget.

 

 

Affirmation:

let the poverty of my words not be abject; let them

     persist in making and remaking, shaping, reshaping:

to name, rename, unname: not to forget.

 

 

Nomenclature:

for a world never to be repeated, only to be archived:

     trying-to-enter-the-thing, trying-to-name-the-loss words;

survival not as a desire, but as a duty to celebrate.

 

 

Destiny:

a community in the van of the East...a land set for a halting-

     place of enmities, a neutral ground...wilderness become

a pool of water and the land no longer termed desolate.

 

 

Belief:

they didn’t believe in God; nor that they were chosen

     as models for the gentiles; they understood suffering,

otherness: tattered clothes: how well they came to fit.

 

 

Inquiry:

why? was it because their language was never spoken

     by anyone with power, the only tongue without

a vocabulary for war: merely howls and ash to record it?

 

 

Rebuttal:

when you have a great and difficult task...if you only work

     a little at a time...without faith and without hope, suddenly

the work will finish itself. But will it be free and I free of it?

 

 

Tautology:

singing your song without singing your song:

     dashes, dots, commas, deflected threads splicing air:

to disclose what it would impoverish me to forget.

 

 

Hypothesis

cum plea:

what I know is what I need to unknow and reknow:

     a sea of syllables frightening to swim,

bent on utterance before I forget.