Myth of Arrival

I am vaguely Jewish, in the sense that my father's people came from around the city of Minsk in Belarus; but, since my mother is Italian-Irish and doesn't have a hasidic bone in her body technically I am not kosher. Still, I do have an English-Yiddish Dictionary and that has supplied me with many interesting new words and turns of phrases. Today, I have been thinking of the Golem.

The Rough Guide to Prague has this to say about golems:

Legend concerning the animation of unformed matter (which is what the Hebrew word golem means), using the mythical texts of the Kabbala, were around long before Frankenstein started playing around with corpses. Two hungry fifth-century rabbis may have made the most practical golem when they sculpted a clay calf, brought it to life and then ate it; but the most famous is Rabbi Loew's giant servant made from the mud of the Vitava, who was brought to life when the rabbi placed a shem [in it] (101)

A shem is the magical scroll or tablet placed within the clay of the golem to bring it to life. Usually it is shown covered in ancient Hebrew scrawl. Usually it is placed within the mouth of the creature and this is what animates the pile of dirt. Dirt in Yiddish is shmutz.

There are probably many pros and cons about dating an animated pile of river clay. For one thing, you would probably need to find a good sculptor otherwise your significant other might come out all lopsided or lumpy or be missing things like a nose or possibly ears (which would certainly be a conversation stopper on many a blind date). Also, lacking bones, organs or any ability to use water without melting, you would probably need some time making sure she or he did not wander out into the rain by accident, otherwise the neighbors might complain about the life-size muddy stains all over their front lawn.

Clothes shopping
was a nightmare.
Food bored her.
Often I found her
laying on her bed,
moodily playing
with her shem.

In the end, being
nothing more than
river clay, she left
dirty teeth marks
across my neck and
fingers. Her eyes,
the same sludge gray
that they drudged her
up from, held all
the cosmos, twigs,
a drowned squirrel.

Once she said
she wished to see
a heart break. "Or
a bone! — huh? Oh,
it'll be a small one,"
she reassured me.
But mainly, at
night, she relished
watching my
bruises change
color. "Purple means
love," she would say.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.