Jerusalem

Abstract

Jerusalem Shelley Salamensky (bio) My father sent a postcard sent a postcard to my dreammy dreamI am not really dead it said I’m in Jerusalem I’d bank on it! My mother said My mother said that in thedream Forty years passed granted but your dad sure was some prankster And why we never made it out there thenGod is one thing I said she said but you’ve seen what the heat does to my hair Yet at the end how I did pray night night she said nightnight and day O Hear O Hear the Lord is One Whatever Thou hath judged I’ve done please Please Gnawed gleamingice out of my sodas Dozed atop the bony rim of waiting room seats with the Times Travel pages tented over my faceto break the hard fluorescent haze I threw in all my grist she said Offered up my last pith to save him And not nice but trueI offered you The body? Oh I saw I saw I saw It But my sight was raw So my mother said don’t hold meto it And for all I know he made a fake one That joker [End Page 70] your dad could be handy When he wanted to Now wait shesaid I bet he jerryrigged a twin! A duplicate that shed the scoopedout shell the rest of him clung in while I criedon the payphone And then it rose Way way way up on twinkletoes Shook off the clotsoaked linen loam and doveoff of the crusty continental floe and through the seas to pop up spluttering chlorine at the Galilee Hilton And me she said If I’d just thought to pack a bathing capand rollers Then you see this tragic history But regrets Let’s let them slip crack as they may Dinner’s at five here andthe holypoly ancient old ancestral homeland’s half a globe and forty long years’ charter flight away Flanks rent and tender Organs taut Blood strainedthrough tin machines my father’s body did him in in increments In yellows pales In hopes gayer and frailer Make a new man sixfoottwo and what from? Desert bloomsmountains manna moons? Even on my secret screen dreams lie Too lean to be true My father sent a postcard to my dream my dream ThePromised Land! Weather is great here See you soon! [End Page 72] Shelley Salamensky Shelley Salamensky’s books include Talk Talk Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation (Routledge, 2000, as editor), The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Home: Housing and Homelands in the Global Age (pending, University of Michigan Press). Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals as well as The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Formerly a tenured professor of literary, performance, Jewish, and global studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, she is currently based in Western Massachusetts and New York. Copyright © 2021 Purdue University