Poetry and occasional prose from Yasha Yatskan's archives

Commentary on the Rebbe Rashab’s distinction between Or and Shefa

I open my eyes
again, always greeted
by the same surroundings.
Clay mugs,
the glass of coffee,
Rumi’s poems
sitting on top of the Rebbe Rashab’s,
 
a window,
stark, definitive, light.
 
Nothing here is given,
which only means
my hands are full
and I have nothing to take
from You,
nothing more than take
my eyes opening up
on the same place,
 
saved from that catastrophe
quietly undergone by all invisible things.
 
In truth,
I couldn’t have expected
that same glass,
the same leather binding
or the polyester bookmark
still at the page
where I left off.
 
In truth, I could’ve only seen.
The place again appears
so ordinary,
the loss of words
so astounding,
that this effulgent light can only be akin
to the vastness of forgetting.
 
Because it takes nothing to forget.
 
My elbows rest on the table
comfortable, set enclothed
in a long sleeve,
pivoting my forearms
nearer, farther, hands
taking up the mug or the page
equivalently substantive
like all nouns are,
pieces of truth
constitutive of the same
sentence that comes to my mind
when I ask
the prayer “what is this?”
and the answer comes
invisibly in words
like gifts You’ve given me relentlessly.
 
But like the pane of the window
in which the visibility, the sense of here,
is cast in sheaves of brilliant clear,
 
my shoulders via the length of my back
proprioceive the surface
of the table first of all
before the resting of my elbows takes on any meaning,
before I open up
to the page where I am.
 
Nothing will commence that possibility
of place,
and nothing happens
when I open my eyes.
I’m already talking,
forgive me.
I’m already catching myself in a statement of fact
of the matter,
the apparentness of which I trusted
enough to forget, I guess.
 
But not enough to keep my eyes closed.
Not enough to not choose,
every time,
to face the same b’chol m’odecha,
 
picking up in worship
where I left off,
on the blessing regarding
the revival of the dead.