Not That There's An Answer

Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan

Not wanting to lose it all for poetry.
Wanting to live the living. All this year
looking on the graveyard below my apartment.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is the acquiescence to death beginning.

Jack Gilbert

Coffee Break

You walk down your street, past the party where the Portuguese kids are running around on the sidewalk, in and out between the recycling bins, working off their sugar high, and past the fancy lingerie shop, the outside of which has been painted this daring and actually quite charming pink, and past the Japanese restaurant where the chefs seem always outside and smoking and unhappy, and past the Indian place where the tiny, pretty waitress once shyly asked why you never use the straw she brings along with your Diet Coke, to the coffeehouse that just put in new chairs and the pretentiousness level of the students working/appearing there has to have a set Sunday-night record, where you get an extra shot in the cappuccino because it's going to be a late night, and you head back, noticing that your new shoes are finally breaking in, and nicely, and these old jeans of yours make you a sexy beast, at least in your own mind, and better there, yeah, than anywhere else, and the fleece pullover is softer than Lorie Stone's kiss in 8th grade when you took a break from skating and it was "Y.M.C.A" playing, and the night is inky blue and the blown-around clouds are a gray that reminds you of campfire smoke and as you fumble for your door key, somehow, campfire smoke makes you remember a girl from high school gym who changed her name midyear to Sunshine and how long her legs were and the impossibly white Nikes, and you wonder, opening the door and returning to the desk, when she finally was embarrassed by that ludicrous, lovely choice, and it became something to blush from, to joke about, to forget, and you boot up and find the file you're working in, hoping the coffee helps you finish what's due by 10 next morning, and yet you still see her, falling down in the dust of the track around the football field, turning onto her back, rolling from side to side, laughing a breathless girlish laugh in snorts and gasps, long tangled hair the color of weak coffee fallen across her face, the one you don't remember no matter how long you sit there, screensaver casting falling stars down the reflection in your glasses.

Tehillim

Crusher is fascinated by the differences between the biblical Jewish worldview, expressed in the Hebrew, and that of later translators (Jewish and Christian). This short article by Robert Alter concerning his new translation of the Psalms touches on a lot of the important ones.