After this much time, it’s still impossible. The SS man with his stiff hair and his uniform;

the Rabbi, probably in a torn overcoat, probably with a stained beard the other would be clutching;

the Torah, God’s word, on the altar, the letters blurring under the blended phlegm;

the Rabbi’s parched mouth, the SS man perfectly absorbed, obsessed with perfect humiliation.

So many years and what is there to say still about the soldiers waiting impatiently in the snow,

about the one stamping his feet, thinking, “Kill him! Get it over with!”

while back there the lips of the Rabbi and the other would have brushed

and if time had stopped you would have thought they were lovers,

so lightly kissing, the sharp, luger hand under the dear chin,

the eyes furled slightly and then when it started again the eyelashes of both of them

shyly fluttering as wonderfully as the pulse of a baby.

Maybe we don’t have to speak of it at all, it’s still the same.

War, that happens and stops happening but is always somehow right there, twisting and hardening us;

then what we make of God—words, spit, degradation, murder, shame; every conceivable torment.

All these ways to live that have something to do with how we live

and that we’re almost ashamed to use as metaphors for what goes on in us

but that we do anyway, so that love is battle and we watch ourselves in love

become maddened with pride and incompletion, and God is what it is when we’re alone

wrestling with solitude and everything speaking in our souls turns against us like His fury

and just facing another person, there is so much terror and hatred that yes,

spitting in someone’s mouth, trying to make him defile his own meaning,

would signify the struggle to survive each other and what we’ll enact to accomplish it.

There’s another legend.

It’s about Moses, that when they first brought him as a child before Pharaoh,

the king tested him by putting a diamond and a live coal in front of him

and Moses picked up the red ember and popped it into his mouth

so for the rest of his life he was tongue-tied and Aaron had to speak for him.

What must his scarred tongue have felt like in his mouth?

It must have been like always carrying something there that weighed too much,

something leathery and dead whose greatest gravity was to loll out like an ox’s,

and when it moved, it must have been like a thick embryo slowly coming alive,

butting itself against the inner sides of his teeth and cheeks.

And when God burned in the bush, how could he not cleave to him?

How could he not know that all of us were on fire and that every word we said would burn forever,

in pain, unquenchably, and that God knew it, too, and would say nothing Himself ever again beyond this,

ever, but would only live in the flesh that we use like firewood,

in all the caves of the body, the gut cave, the speech cave:

He would slobber and howl like something just barely a man that beats itself again and again onto the dark,

moist walls away from the light, away from whatever would be light for this last eternity.

“Now therefore go,” He said, “and I will be with thy mouth.”