First Things RSS Feed - Paul Mariani

In Search of a Psalm to Sing in Dark Times

Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

What shall I say, Lord, now that the words
keep stumbling, tumbling like loose marbles
across the table then down onto the floor,
bouncing and scattering this way and that?

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Word by Word

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Before I formed you in the womb, my son,
I knew you. Knew you long before that high
spring day in the sixth year of the reign
of FDR, when the full-leaved sycamores

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First Light Last

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0400

And did you really think there would ever come a time
when things would go as you’d dreamed they should?
That you—you!—could hold the reins of some phaeton-
fated Seven Thirty Seven as it whinnied and shrugged off
what you ordered it to do? You, poor forked thing, you
cursing as the plane bucked then nosedived down,
down and down into the unforgiving earth below?

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The Wheel, The Wheel

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Sixteen and a half with a brand new driver’s
license in my wallet, driving my father’s
’47 two-toned old clunky Pontiac, I turned
left off Hempstead Turnpike when a car swims
shark-like in front of me and I’m twisting
the steering wheel left right when somehow
the wheel takes over, spinning this way then
that and suddenly it’s over, the danger past,
and the shark disappears into the past, and I
can breathe again. Sixty-five years ago this was
and I still don’t understand what happened.

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Snow Moon Over Singer Island

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Black velvet darkness, tufts of shredded clouds heading slow-
ly up the coast, the lamp-like February snow moon the host
the celebrant raises at the Consecration steady above the coast,
transfiguring the empty sands of the Atlantic coast below.

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Mitzvah

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

A Saturday night, late February. Eileen and me
in the back of the cramped car, Julie driving,
Bruce riding shotgun. We’re heading down
to Amherst for an evening of Borscht Belt vaudeville,
Fifty Shades of Oy Vey at the local Jewish temple,
and Julie’s taking all the back roads, so that, though
I’ve lived here for fifty years, I’m already lost,
when we see a car stopped, lights dimmed,
stranded at a crossing like some lost sheep.
Julie stops, pulls over, walks over to the car, knocks
on the window and asks the driver—a woman in her eighties—
if she’s alright. It takes her a while to answer, her voice low.
“I, I think I’m lost,” she stutters. “I was visiting
my daughter, as, as I have so many times, but now
I’m lost and don’t know where I am or what to do.”
All this is taking time, precious time, you have to understand,
and meanwhile I want to get a move on to where the fun is
and hear some Jewish jokes. In fact I’ve got one myself.
This blond broad—a goy—is at a Jewish wedding
and the waiter serves her soup. “What’s this,” she asks,
and the waiter says, “Madam, this is matzoh balls soup,”
and the blond looks down, then up, and says, “Do you have
some other part of the matzoh you could serve me?”
A joke no doubt followed by a rim shot off the snare
“Bah da dum.” Instead, here we are, in the middle
of who the hell knows where, and Julie’s trying
her best to calm the woman, telling her to follow us
down to the package store over by the railroad tracks
so the woman can call her daughter—embarrassed
by the fact she’s lost—and get her safely home. And
to make matters worse, the woman can’t remember
her daughter’s number, until finally she does.
But Julie won’t leave her till she gets the daughter
on the phone, who says she’s out the door and coming.
And the young woman, who was just closing up
the store for the evening, says she’ll wait and make sure
the poor woman’s picked up and sees her on her way.
She can leave her car there overnight so the daughter
can rest easy and drive her mother home. That’s it, and
we’re finally good to go and get down to the temple.
Three women—four, if you count my wife—all
anxious to see the episode resolved and the woman
safe again, and me, internally rehearsing the joke
about the blond to get the timing right and hear
the laughter and a clap or two. And then of course
it hits me, that what I’ve just witnessed is a mitzvah
(though I confuse that with a mikvah, a Jewish bath,
which is like me). But no, this is a genuine mitzvah
I’ve just witnessed, there on a dark road among
the shadows and the stark maples, which even now
have begun to pulsate with the sap of life again,
and though I surely don’t deserve it, I’ve just been
blessed again by another random act of kindness,
something heartfelt, something real, this—how
do you say it?—this loving your neighbor
as yourself, someone nameless and confused and, yes,
embarrassed. Someone as lost as your sorry self.

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A Distant Purple

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Mid-September, dear woman, and the monarch
lights once more upon the purple panoplied
butterfly bush in the now-decaying garden,
as it has for these past thirty Septembers.

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Pantoum for East Fifty-First

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

And then, in an instant, it’s gone: the world of East Fifty-First.
Gone the round-the-clock clack of the Third Avenue El,
the clutch-grinding rattle of Fords and the clop clop
of those gray dun dray horses down on the cobblestone street.

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What's in a Name?

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

A paralyzing gelid vortex of a January morning.
He lay under the covers as the beckoning New Year’s sun
began to manifest itself through the curtains of his bedroom
window, but unlike the busy old sun unwilling

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They Shall Beat Their Swords…

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

With my father’s Army ballpeen hammer I’d found
down in the cellar, I kept banging on the swordblade,
trying to turn it back into a plowshare like the ones
the prophets sang of. Plowshares? Hell, what did I know
of plowshares? Once more trouble was stewing”

you could taste it”what with old Shermans phosphoring
into ash across the desert, and all those blackened corpses
on the road to Tripoli and Hell. My right forefinger
stood poised on the passage from Isaiah, searching for
the recipe for peace. Too late, the pundits wagged. Too late!

Too late for anything like peace. A thousand generations
since Cain clubbed his brother in some field, and a million
cries for peace, for plowshares, say, and what’s to show?
The bells keep tolling in their broken towers for the dead
at Megiddo or at Manhattan’s smoking prow, as at Shiloh,

Passchendaele, the Bulge . . . and now in some hell hole called
Abbottabad. Four Blackhawks in and one already down.
And the ballpeen hammer bangs once more as some blinded
prophet scrambles from his bed. Ah, my father, look how
the plowshares keep turning into bullets, and the bullets into brains.

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First Things RSS Feed - Paul Mariani

In Search of a Psalm to Sing in Dark Times

Word by Word

First Light Last

The Wheel, The Wheel

Snow Moon Over Singer Island

Mitzvah

A Distant Purple

Pantoum ​for East Fifty-First

What's in a Name?

They Shall Beat Their Swords…

Pantoum for East Fifty-First