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Everything is a Middle-Aged Jewish Woman
by Philip Asaph
The blue flowers she brought me
the second day we made love, still blooming today,
and the way the wind
lifts the leaves beyond and above
my dining room window,
which she glanced through
as we ate some potatoes and peas I made--a dish she called
“delicious.” And so she is
not only those potatoes and peas, but the word,
“delicious.” And she is other things also.
Like the white duck in the street
which, in her car, on her way to my apartment, she ran over
but somehow did not kill.
That poor shocked bird, and all white birds forever–
from the heavily symbolic dove
to the seagull eating a Twinkie in a parking lot at the beach--
have become one
with her, the swan on the pond of my mind.
All brown things certainly
are her,
though none are as brown as her eyes and hair.
Even the gray in her hair is brown.
And, by a generous extension of sympathy as natural as The Tao,
so are the gray hairs of gray women everywhere,
as well as the gray beards and chest hair of aging furniture movers,
who, seeing her, forget their burdens.
She widens their heavy eyes,
relieves their hangovers and temporarily cures them of arthritis.
They start dancing with their chairs and cartons.
I understand their transformations.
I have been touched by both of her hands.
She’s left permanent impressions
on the curves of my consciousness.
She’s more amazing than a child’s kaleidoscope.
When she kicks off her heels
and walks through my apartment barefoot,
invisible flowers sprout from the carpet.
Showers of flowers whirl up behind her car, every Friday,
when she drives into my town.
They rise right out of her exhaust pipe.
She’s The Beatles and LSD and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,”
even when she’s almost killing ducks.
We’re talking about a very influential lady,
so inclusive and expansive the laws of physics snap like toothpicks
everywhere she steps.
The world is her dress.
Her expressions have an effect on the weather.
She blows her nose and alters the migration of geese.
I exaggerate nothing.
She makes Shakespeare seem illiterate,
even when she’s only talking about getting a pedicure.
Her gestures are blessings on par with the Pope, The Dali Lama.
In stillness or in motion, she brings new meaning
to every single thing,
including those nebulous items
which compose more of the universe
than anyone knows or is likely to discover
before the bang or the whimper they’ve been telling us all
we’re all supposed to hear
when the world that is too much with us
ends. Not to mention God, Who–let’s get really real--
first bubbled the oceans
and made the ooze
that produced the amoebas
which splashed onto land
and lived and mated and mutated, as God yawned,
and became the monkeys in the trees
that swung down and stood up one day
and faced each other--
naked, as she faced me.
And then there’s the baboons, all the assorted apes
that scratched themselves into Neanderthals
and soon became
Sir Isaac Newton and the mother of Mother Theresa.
In other words, she’s the whole freaking puzzle,
each piece put together,
the sum, the synthesis and the synergy
of every one and every thing that led up to us
taking a shower together,
dripping back into the bedroom
and facing each other so intensely
that both of us trembled, overwhelmed by the gift
of this love--
and chilly autumn air
as it poured through the screens
and made us shiver in our skins.