I think I'll read some new poems before my voice goes
completely.
Right.
"I think I came close to being insane a few months ago.
It didn't happen the way I thought it would at all.
It wasn't from love, or from some horrible perversity
suddenly rising in me or from politics.
It was just in a butcher shop.
I was waiting in line in and one of the butchers
was trimming a leg of lamb.
And I was leaning on top of the counter,
not thinking about anything in particular.
Keeping one eye on my daughter, who was playing around
with a shopping cart.
Watching how the butcher was carefully
paring slices of gristle off.
And all of a sudden, I felt frightened.
It's hard to explain, but it was as
though the light that was in the room we were in
didn't quite fit right.
As though the space was going to tilt,
and the light was going to pour out of it
into the street like water.
Whatever it was, I looked away fast at Jessie,
bumping her cart into the sides of the meat cases
and it stopped.
But when I looked at the butcher again,
it happened again even more strongly.
I felt everything slipping as though we were all
balanced on the very tip of a mountain,
and something had moved and we were going to all fall.
I looked at the meat.
If I could have thought of some way
that it represented pain or death to me,
I'd have felt better, but it was just meat.
And the butcher, he was old, heavy,
with a large head that came out of his chest at a peculiar
angle, like a horse's.
He was very methodical.
I held Jessie's hand, closed my eyes.
Opened them again, and looked back at him again
and this time I was really afraid.
It was still going on, even worse.
I tried to do something with my mind.
I tried to remember what had happened today,
that could have caused this.
I tried to make believe I was in love with the butcher,
or that he was my father.
That he was going to turn and come at us with his knife,
to cut my eyes out, but nothing worked.
All there was, was the feeling that the whole reality
we were in was going to wink out of existence.
As though somehow the limits of this dimension
had been reached, and it was going to switch off
like a channel changing.
I left and went home.
I've been back, but it's funny that butcher never
was there again and all this never happened to me again.
I've thought about it.
Was I sick?
No, I felt fine otherwise.
Something to do with God?
I don't think so.
What about that butcher?
What if everybody who looked at him felt the same thing?
Here's a story that doesn't have anything to do with all this,
it's by Isaac Babel.
There is a young soldier, a farmer.
He can't go on anymore.
He's too afraid.
He gets into a trench and trench,
and starts masturbating.
And even when his captain screams at him to get up,
he sits there saying, I can't help it.
Finally, the captain pisses into his face and he jumps up
and bolts, crying for the front, killed before he gets halfway.
Things like that happen too.
Things like putting a sign on your door, go away.
Things like standing in the middle of the street,
screaming at nothing.
Isaac Babel also said, no steel can
pierce the human heart so chillingly
as a period at the right moment.
Things like screams that have no sound and no ending,
that you just stumble through like an odor."