JONAH

JONAH

It's a mockery!  A mockery! And I'm sick of it.  
I want to die.
Why doesn't this molten hot sledge of sun that hammers
my forehead finish me off?
It's a mockery  
a curse 
and a mockery.
And I have good reason to be angry.
Into the blackest of blacknesses I was interred,
into the gaping mouth and gullet of an enormous
floating grave 
deep beneath the waters.  
And for three days, under the roots of mountains 
under the soil of centuries
I was a sentient corpse in my own coffin:
I saw only blackness, 
was confronted by blackness:  
my own emptiness, and my own terror.  
But I prayed, I prayed to you, Lord, 
I prayed until vision came of the flowers round your holy
temple 
and I heard Your sweet voice.

It was You who brought me back here 
You who coughed me out of the blackness into this blinding
white Assyria 
You who said You'd speak with my mouth, my tongue, through me.  
And in that city, amid the many ways of its ignorance 
its grovel of money, its flash of whore
its cryptic, calculating glances
I cried out 
I shouted 
as You Yourself counseled,  
"Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! 
Yet forty days!"  
Yet forty days passed, and nothing.  
Oh a few heard me, or shall we say, pretended?  
In their glittering mansions begemmed and bejeweled
they made a great show of it with sackcloth and ashes.  
Then the others followed 
as others will always follow 
like sheep under King's orders:  
half-comprehending, half-believing,
observing their own last rites with occasional jibes 
ironic laughter 
and toss of bitter lots in back alleys.
                                                                                                  
Oh they all should have been condemned 
as You said they were condemned
to descend, naked, into their own dark graves 
into that blackness far blacker than the wombs of their own mothers:  
then this light some now claim to have seen 
would really be light.

For that, yea, I curse you. 
I curse You and everything about You.  
I curse the stars, I curse the depths, I curse this earth
beneath my feet, 
I curse men, I curse women 
I curse my blood!  
There!  
Now why don't You just burn me up?  
Burn us all up in Your wall of flame?   

Maybe I'm nothing.                                   
Maybe all this is nothing:  
this desert, so vast-horizoned before my sight, 
that lost city
and the ocean, so far away, that spit me out like a putrid
thing it could no longer digest:
nothing.

All my life, I have yearned, thirsted in this emptiness:  
even in those swarming streets, surrounded by hundreds,
by thousands of people, 
I was here, in this desert
where my tongue cleaves, cuts the roof of my mouth.
I still see those faces grimacing in laughter 
telling stories as hands gesture vainly in air 
wager lost shekels or entwine in other hands --
my own face among them,  
twisted, laughing with them, 
my hands shadow-gestures thrown by flames against a wall -- 
as my own throat burns within me
my heart   runs out    like wax! 

                                                               
And in long days and nights alone 
crouching in that dim-lit, solitary room
watching the four clay walls
press deeper, ever deeper 
into my skull 
was I not imprisoned in that same black belly that
sidewinds so far beneath the earth? 
It was You who put me there -- 
You and You only --
there is no escape from the blackness, none, 
and it never ends, never!  

And those wings, those whispers that graced my eye and
ear in dreams,   
what were they?  Also nothing?
And that command, that ordinance 
that stilled the waters, made me shout
what was it? Again nothing?  
It may as well have been.   
And You, too.  
And me, and all this:
nothing.


Here by my side, 
a green shoot has wormed its way up through the parched
white soil.
It's been two days since I first noticed it:
already it's grown half a hand's breadth.
How ridiculous it is!  
Why does it even bother to grow?  
There's almost never water here.  
Even if it does manage to curl out a leaf 
some locust or rot-bringing worm is sure to get it.
Then why does it grow?  
To suffer alone in this sandy waste, as I do?  
But it's so green, 
so supple, 
so very, very green.  
When the wind blows, it bends,  and you can see its minuscule roots 
clinging to the soil 
clinging to hold on to its tiny life.  
How it fights!  How it battles! 
And there, you can see stem parting into bud
and there, below,  another stem 
into pale, winsome feathering of leaf. 

Why doesn't it  too
want to die?


--From the "Genesis" series.  First published in Guatemala & Other Poems, 1994


A note on lineation:  following the idea in Charles Olson's essay, 
"Projective Verse" (The New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen, New York: Grove Press, 1960 pp. 
386-397) that verse should "register the acquisitions of [the poet's] ear as well as the 
pressures of his breath", I recorded this poem a number of times with a reasonably 
sensitive mike and put the line breaks where I consistently drew my breath or made dramatic 
pauses.  It seemed the "projective approach" suited a character with so much wind in his throat...