My Favorite Year
1582 was moving along
like any other year –
Russia cedes Livonia and Southern-Estonia
to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
Francois, Duke of Anjou, arrives in the Netherlands,
where he is personally welcomed by William the Silent,
Takeda Katsuyori and his household commit suicide –
the usual parade of royalty recorded in bibles,
recorded on statues, recorded on parchment documents
while everyone else starves and marries in folk ceremonies
bribing some local cleric and fucks and dies of infected cuts
or agues or plagues or simple exhaustion or watches their wives die
in childbirth, tanner and wigmaker, blacksmith and weaver
and seamstress, the odd consort, composer, friar,
and there was that giant party at the Hippodrome in Istanbul,
thrown by Ottoman Sultan Murat III in honor
of the circumcision of his son, Crown Prince Mehmed III,
16 years old at the time. The festival endured
52 days and 52 nights, though the son
does not remember much, even ensconced
in his own splendid apartment attended
by experienced nurses and an equal number
of experienced virgins.
1582 was just fine
until Pope Gregory III decided
to implement the Gregorian Calendar,
(because, said one savvy eunuch,
everything really is about him),
to rectify the problems with
the Julian calendar – namely,
the system exceeded the solar year
by 11 minutes, or 24 hours
every 131 years, or three days
every 400 years, adding up
to 10 days between 325 AD
(when adopted) by 1582.
And so, the Catholic countries jumped ahead 10 days
in the 10thmonth, restoring the vernal equinox to March 21,
and complicated leap year calculations were performed
but England did not follow suit until the mid-18thcentury
and so were faced with 11 days but some in the colonies
and England adopted the new way, so you might find
a date like 13 March 1661/1662, but some confusion
remained – St. Teresa of Avila died on 4 October, 1582
and was buried the next day: 15 October, and if you
felt out of sorts with your astrological sign, you could
say, if within a week of the cut-off, well, I’m really
a Scorpio, I never felt like a true Sagittarius (by
12th century BC, the Babylonians already read
the stars – “omen-based astrology”) – and people
were already disoriented then – some still felt
they belonged in the Late Middle Ages while
others were firmly planted in the Renaissance,
feeling man the “measure of all things,” reason
and dignity leading the charge. Yes, 1582
was a strange time – who knows
what we could have done with
those 10 missing days? What pox
cured? What noble nose roughed
from marble? John Dee
was trying to commute with angels.
Working with scryer Edward Kelley
on the Angelic Alphabet, a language
used, supposedly, by Adam in Eden
to name all things, and then the birth
of Elizabeth Jane Weston, a poet,
born on November 2, part English
and part Czech and one
might be prone to admiring her
knowledge of five languages,
having given birth to seven children
(and dying for the last) but for
her subject-matter: idyllic reveries,
odes to Emperor Rudolf II, odes
to herself and antisemitic diatribes –
ah, Liz, I tire of letting history make excuses, amends –
“I am of my time, no one’s seen a Jew since 1290” –
I say, bah, humbug (to be continued)
of course, you join the best of company, the Bard
and his amorget married at the end of November,
they had planned a summer wedding but with
the pending Gregorian shift and autumn promised
mild, Merchant not writ until the century’s last gasps
while on the Hebrew calendar, 5342 – 5343
is a year like many other, fleeing and setting up
shop – have you seen my printing press?
My neighbor, Giovanni, owns it (law dictates)
but I’m the one who carves the letters on the plates.
* * * * *
My Progress
My rabbi says I have moved
From the certainty of the proverbs
To the uncertainty of Ecclesiastes
From the Davidic stage of knowledge
That craves and yearns and obtains
Toward Solomonic wisdom
That acknowledges our limits.
He may have said this to pacify me
As I stood at the edge of a precipice
Of self-doubt and self-loathing.
He may have said this because
I told him I don’t think I know
Anything, anymore, that I feel
Unmoored. Either way, it made me
Laugh and feel a little better
To think I have anything in common
With these grand biblical figures
Even though I know David wept
For Absalom, and Solomon struggled
With assorted character flaws.
To accompany my minor in aging
I have a Ph.D. in powerlessness
Along with the one where I learned
How to read a text so that it
Revealed just enough of itself to me,
Which has helped, but not enough.
* * * * *
My Excommunication
will be nothing like Spinoza’s.
My wrongs will be trivial,
amateur heresies that should
bother no one, but will get under
the skin of some authority figure:
the rabbi, the butcher, the meter
reader, the prophet at the corner
of 17thand Santa Ana Blvd
who rotates and flips a large arrow
expertly. Some will feel shame
for me, some bemused, betrayed,
some vindicated, and some will
say, do we still do that? What
is the point when you can walk
into a deli and order a BLT
or shrimp linguini on Shabbat?
My excommunication will not
shake the world of philosophers
though their world cares little
for phenomenon. Where I live
we have tremors and temblors
to remind us of our obnoxious
fragility. Angels will not bother
to curse me by day or night,
there will be no name-blotting,
all can come within four cubits
of me and read my treatises.
My ostracism will not be for
cutting a gentile woman’s hair,
or running numbers, or hurling
insults, and though I have been lax
in my attendance and observance,
I do not think that is why I am on
the outs. It may be related
to the slicing sarcasm that slips into
my prayers, my tendency to offer
up petitions when driving, stopped
at a ridiculously long light.
No one can figure out how to time
the traffic signals here in SoCal,
giving much time for lamentation.
The elders were not clear on
which rule I broke and how often.
Spinoza supposedly muttered,
“all the better” when he heard.
I, on the other hand, uttered
a few alliterative expletives and began
a long missive, a diatribe, a poem
that, on completion, I will drop
ceremoniously onto my newly
slurry-sealed street and run over
several times in my grey Toyota
minivan, slamming my gear-
shift into forward and reverse,
creating my own parchment.