Among the Giddy Demons

[Ken Wolman]

AMONG THE GIDDY DEMONS
(Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904-1991)

1

In a back booth in the Garden Cafeteria,
someone put a Reddi-Whip nozzle up his nose,
whiffed the nitrous and the cream, both at once: and we all laughed,
a pack of gibbering freaks, outcast among the old Jews sipping tea:
but his face burst open like a fluorescent sunrise,
he tilted back his head, looked upward past the lights,
assumed the beatific grin of a giddy demon,
and when he descended, bewildered, looked lost on earth:
seen only, let me think, by an old man who observed us,
writing in a notebook, uncensorious, unsurprised.

2

He had seen too much death, his dreams were swept by it,
by the green mansions and memories of a vanished land
swept to Heaven in fire: not of Elijah's chariot,
but of Chmielnichki's Cossacks and Majdanek's chimneys:
now, in a land of old Jews sipping tea in cafeterias,
arguing like Talmudists as though their voices alone
could preserve them in an alien world, restore the lost,
he heard in them not the voices of Socialists or
Cabalists or dollar-a-line poets with frayed collars,
but ejaculatory ecstasy, the demonic cry.

3

For the giddy demons spoke through them, fled from that green land,
freed by the killer chimneys: now found anew, remade,
laying in wait, with their passioned torments and dreams, for his heart
to free them: set them loose to lodge in a fluorescent world
of cafeterias and rooming house beds, in the wind-driven
_animae_ of New York, possessed lovers rank with female musk
and the milk of conception, joined not in love but in obsession:
drawn up to Heaven by the hair by forces too lovely
and terrible, not to be described, but to be understood,
except by those who hear and can repeat the voices.

Kenneth Wolman, August 6, 1991
--
Kenneth Wolman |"It takes industrial-strength tranquilizers,
AT&T Bell Labs | A shot of Old Crow, a glass of Budweiser,
Short Hills,NJ | To get a workin' man thru a workin' day."
k...@hlwpk.att.com| (The Austin Lounge Lizards)