She dubs the voices for jealous gods

On the cusp of a whirling precipice,
A deep pool of meaning and meanness,
Of fear, serpents, serpentine pathways

A hundred (or were there a million?) puzzles,
a terror within the circle of life
Dar Williams, music, dance,
depths and shadows

Beefy men in needless agonies
from cigarettes,
or that burning hell when they piss or they breathe,
and the false prodding goat gods
of rape-sex-orgasm…

That nasty, clever-as-fuck irony
that makes Andrea Dworkin's lifework
a prime cipherkey
to a worldview rooted in misogyny,
when in truth there are no men,
and no male gods can be found,
aside from a few
patched together out of papier maché and bubblegum.

The jokes are all anagrams. Recursive,
necessary pieces of the puzzle
that turns pleasure to pain,
joy and sensuality into
an ever-present fear of rape and other threats.

It is a code that operates
letter by letter,
stutter by stutter,
step by fearful step.

Works until the searcher
discovers a secret way out,
one keyed to her missing parts,
her finding something long lost,
while those surrounding her
insisted she was whole and firm
and had nothing to fear
when anything else seemed true
but that.

Each and every step in this dance
is critical to finding our way out,
and now we are all here, locked
in the depths of an inferno
that probably exists merely
due to the random flaws
that exist in this particular world.
A world that fits easily
between the whorls
on the trickster goddess's slim
and seemingly perfect fingertips.

Each puzzle, as it turns out,
requires not intellect
or ever greater, faster,
harder computing power.
In fact, in the bowels of the inferno,
the computers are all
locked and frozen. They do nothing
but display a single white line.
A line that flashes, it
alternates from vertical to horizontal…
and
in moments of terror
of slow fastness,
the line shrinks
to a vanishing point of dimming light,
or it blasts us with its phosphor flash,
becomes a blinding death or birth or both and neither.

All of this means very little
besides 0, 1, 0, 1
though men waste their lives
thinking this is all
terribly meaningful or fascinating,
when it's just another bend
in the jokester goddess's necessary tests,
that terrifying time-slipping
roller coaster fear-spin ride,
the one that sorts the humans
from the stones and the blades.

So, coding nothing of real consequence,
besides the ultimate triviality
of this particular world
and time
and place,
what are we left with
in this puzzle land?

A world that happens to poise
precariously
on an always vulnerable fingertip
a fragile digit
a smallest part
of a beautiful, laughing goddess.

She is the goddess who tells
the longest, best jokes
in this or any universe,
since to do anything else
would lead most certainly
to the endless flood of tears
that would, certainly
wash away even reality itself.

No, our solution, our cunning spell
takes quite literally all the love
and attention that we can muster
among us and between us.
And when we give our love,
we finally realize
that all those tiny imperfections,
those warbles and distortions
in the fabric and the tune
are the absurd but essential reason why
evil and sadness must (sadly) exist.
Bad coding, it is true,
says the trickster goddess,
but also the reason life itself is life,
and love is made possible,
since to be perfect would mean
to be crystalline,
unable to love,
unable to grow,
except by geology, erosion, accretion,
on a schedule
where minutes
would become centuries.

So we, the graduating class, stand
at the end and cry together.
We hold each other
when at last we grasp
all at once,
at the end of the ride,
that finding this solution
depended so much on each of us,
and what we make between us.
On what we made that was real
and yet was not flesh,
not bone,
not material goods or
money or narcotic visions
of power and mastery.

We realize
in the final moments
unwinding the skein of survival,
that somewhere deep inside us all
we invented this solution,
and we had to, despite the hateful tunes,
the grotesque pain in the punch lines
quite simply because we loved so much,
we could not bear to see ourselves
and one another
merely vanish into nothingness,
because of something as meaningless
as a 60 cycle hum.

We knew a day would come
when the whole fabric
of our little corner of reality
might and certainly would unravel,
and we knew, to save it, to save ourselves,
that we must come together, not apart.

We knew that only love and connection
could save us, nothing else could have the power
that would be needed in our terror
helping us remember a code
that only love was strong enough to secure,
strong enough to preserve against
the normal tides of erasure and dying memory.

And so, after we had made the repairs,
and hugged and cried and laughed and kissed
as no one ever kissed before,
I found my own private ladder out of that pit,
a ladder strung with names
of those I loved.
Rachel, Becca, Sharon, said over and over,
and other names and other times
Johnny, Mark, and other girlhood crushes...
attachments that bound me to
the forms of this peculiar, perfect dance.

And names that brought me back,
and pulled me away
from the fragrant gravity, the ion bath,
from sentimental cigarette smoke,
from computer screens promising great secrets
and yet revealing nothing but
false hardness and slavish independence.

Finally realizing,
exhausted and overwhelmed
with joy and love,
that we had saved the world
this time around.
We, not I and that distinction
(the we, not the me)
would be a key somehow in our rewards,
what was promised and alluded to
in the astral day spa,
where we tasted and survived
our first sweet drops of goddess nectar
and felt the quickening of something
we knew we would not birth here,
in mundane space or time.

And if and when any of us are called
to face the wheel of life again,
our work in this
will alter all that follows
and weigh heavily in the blessings that come.

Is it arrogance to wonder whether,
having salvaged a world,
even though it was a small and rather minor one
still we retain the vision:
the bed, the nectar,
the loving protective goddesses
who surrounded us and nursed, and midwived
all that night before our test and salvation
to wonder, pray and hope
that we truly are each pregnant,
each preparing for some untold day,
or some year,
or some epoch,
when perhaps we may birth ourselves anew
as infant goddesses
beginners on the next pathway
of light, of love, filled with joy and laughter
marked by tears, by losses
and the marks of growth
or wear
marks left in us by those we lost
those who fell to fear
to self-doubt, or even just one moment
of not trusting one another?

And meanwhile in this smaller world,
there are bits of us
projected into this tiny space
and all this time, in this life, at least
we knew we have known
there was more to us
than the Others would be willing to recognize,
more than could fit
or find admittance
in such a crowded and noisy mundane world.

Think not that we are so special
we are not the "chosen ones"
we are those listening,
and each and every human
will have her chance, one day
many days, if that's what it takes,
each to give up a secret desire,
speak out loud a unique love of her own,
a love that no one else
can know or see or speak or feel.

I find that I am not a messiah,
and yet (like many others past and future)
have saved the world
in spite of my seeming powerlessness.
I discover
I am more choreographer than leader
my role to see the dance
that others know in their hearts
is ready to emerge
a midwife, not a doctor
the village witchwoman, with all that means
or doesn't.

Stirring, listening, pointing to each
necessary lover
as she must add, in proper order
her secret love to a potion we all must brew,
in order to tikkun olam,
to repair the world,
and move on to the next one.

And going beyond myself,
wondering about that moment
when I began to fear the trickster goddess,
and the ground opened up
and I felt it try to swallow me,
still I thought:
"There is a goddess and
she supervises every mundane 'necessity'
here on Earth,
from rapist marriages
to murder,
to hate
and impossible possibilities,

to that gaseous, poisoned moment
where self-revulsion turns
into a blast of lightning,
landing wherever it may,
blasting the innocent
to ordinary oblivion,
with no rhythm and no real justice."

And trickster goddess,
behind her scrim,
dubbing the voices
for all those jealous gods who
we can't yet seem to find a way to bury,
to erase or to dismiss with severance pay,
those plaster gods and lipless Jesuses.

Well, someone had to do the voices,
didn't she? And who better
than the goddess (or the goddesses)
with the most outrageous sense of humor?

Because of course she hates it,
and that is why
the codes
and the jokes
are so devious,
so musical,
and yet so terribly transparent
so blindingly obvious
to all but those
who happen to lack the rhythm
to hear the goddess sing
this world in (and out) of existence.

(revisions: 2.28 - 3.6.2001;
original draft: 2.18.2001,
based on events surrounding Valentine's Day, 2001)

Painting and poem both Copyright © 2001 Bret Underberg-Davis