PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Philip Terman

Philip Terman
USA

Philip Terman is the author of The House of Sages, Book of the Unbroken Days, and, most recently, Rabbis of the Air. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry Magazine, the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, The Sun Magazine, and PoetryMagazine.com. The Autumn House Anthology of Spiritual Poetry, and Blood to Remember: American Poets Respond to the Holocaust. He has received the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. He is a co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival and teaches creative writing at Clarion University of Pennsylvania.

from The TORAH GARDEN

We would be like the old poets,
who knew nothing but devotion and gratitude,
every word was praise, praise praise—

their bodies as the wind, their lives a poverty, their spirits everything,
everything they spoke sang of creation,
their stomachs empty, lips parched, eyes hungry for the text,

the world was nowhere, even in summer,
even as the apples rounded and the quick birds flew
their quick flights from branch to branch,

even as sunlight spread itself, even dusk,
nothing could sway them outside these pages
to which they swayed.

We would be like the old sages—
for whom it was god this and god that,
nothing is at it is, everything is something else—
that blue jay, that grass, not blue only, not green only—

move closer, closer to the garden, how it floats under the nothing sky, softer, softer,
into that nameless place—

be nothing but an ear, they said.
Have you made arrangements, they asked,

in this hour, such as it was,
this hour of ecstasy and service, this document of mid-summer,
these days of drought and resurrection?

We would be like them,
we would turn into the book completely,
we would walk around the garden seven times
out of some obscure longing
we would ask our ancestors to explain.

We would be like the old interpreters,
whose words had wings,
we would climb the lower rungs of the ladder reaching up to the bird’s nest,

if it wasn’t for those red raspberries shaped like roses in the sunlight,
if it wasn’t for the morning sleep and the midday wine and the children’s talk—

we would be as those scribes,
scribbling our sixteen hours a day, tonguing the sweetness of the letters,
lost happily among the syllables—

if it wasn’t that we were stuck in the midst of all this beauty,
if it wasn’t for these children crouched in the apple tree,
faces flushed like apples, voices shrieking like blue jays—

we would know that the Madonna lilies are not Madonna lilies only,
nor are the grapes their blood-purple, not their sweetness only…

Will our plantings flower as dust?
Will our tomatoes suffer again their blight?

Or will the corn stalks be as scrolls lifted out of their dwellings,
bearing their fruit as plentiful as words?

We would, we think, be among the blessed,
we would be among the unspoken names,
we would be among the stories passed down,

if it wasn’t that we wanted to sing the whole thing,
the flesh of the earth, the consuming flames

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