Ed note: We first posted this poem on September 30, 2008. — sdh
L'Shana Tova
[for David Shapiro]
I hear the ram’s horn.
Do you? Do you remember
father, son, mountain?
L’shana tova
old friend, mentor, fellow Jew,
you from New Jersey,
I from Manhattan,
and we met not in temple
but Columbia
and do you recall
when I visited Cambridge
I left you a note
with the Clare porter.
The world is charged (I wrote) with
the grandeur of you!
And then you came home
and I took your place over
there: at Clare College
Peter Ackroyd came
and asked me if I would speak
to the group on John
Ashbery whose new
book The Double Dream of Spring
had just been published.
How could I say no?
They told me you had spoken
on Frank O’Hara
and Aaron Fogel
had spoken on Kenneth Koch.
It was a good omen
I thought but then what
happened was rain rain rain and
more rain. And no mail
because of a strike
in England. There was always
a strike in England.
No mail, no phone calls
to America where my
father lay dying.
The gardeners burned
the leaves and I crossed the Cam
on Clare College bridge
daily, and daily
I went to Heffer’s and bought
books by Holderlin,
Mann, Gide, Henry James.
I imitated Rilke.
The sonnet for you
ran in Poetry.
More rain. Cold toilet. Bad smell.
And I couldn’t find
an English poet
younger than Larkin to like.
No mail. Pub hours.
Beer better than wine.
Awful food. Always hungry.
Had to learn to cook.
And that’s where I went
– to the sea of memory —
in temple today
when I heard the sound
of the shofar and prayed for
the living and dead.
— David Lehman [9 / 13 / 07]
During September 2007, David Lehman and David Shapiro corresponded by haiku. This set of linked haiku appears in the September / October 2008 issue of Tikkun.