Deconstructing Babels

Deconstructing Babels

a lyric epistolary exploration

between Yoni Hammer-Kossoy & Abby Yucht

Dear A 

Did you hear the jackals cry last night? 

The air was looking glass still and I couldn’t say

if they were down the street or kilometers away.

Piercing howls, cryptic. One moment you’d swear

they were mourning a lost mother and another 

it’s a party, like teens in a swing park 

                                                  passing a bottle of arak. 

The moon was a sliver past full so maybe those jackals

were surprised by the amber light when it slid 

over a building. Maybe I dreamed it all. 

Part of me is desperate to blur the lines between built 

and wild, wants to stretch them like gum 

and step through. 

                                                  And then what? 

Does it make any difference knowing nature goes on 

despite all our efforts to break it? Sometimes I think 

this city is what’s left after an ocean 

has drained away. That it’s not jackals out there 

but whale song set free from the bedrock,

that wind wishing through yellow brush is a tidal wave’s ghost.

This stillness, this stifle, I know it’s how seasons change

swinging from extremes until a new agreement settles in. 

And I know change just is, as it always will be, but that doesn’t soften

the unease it leaves behind in the night’s fleeting shadows.

So tell me, please, how will we survive summer

                                                  after the jasmine vine withers?

Dear Y

I sometimes hear my neighbors cry, through the gap between buildings by the bathroom window. It gives me shivers, like a sudden change in nighttime air, this portal into distant lives, an excavation of drained oceans, imprints of mollusks on sandstone. 

I live in satellite to many lives, here in Talpiot, but I cannot hear the jackals over trucks and speeding cars on Hebron Road. I anchor myself in the face in the looking glass, not to get swept away by speeding particles of humanity, this congestion, this pulsing ocean we tend to be.

Did you know? They want to take all these buildings and make them reach higher. In summertime, the top floor is already dense with rising heat. 

On a Talpiot street, the jasmine intermingles with garbage. The cats love it, but later the scent will ripen. 

It is never entirely dark here, in the industrial zone. The clouds are tinged orange by streetlamps and window lights from tall buildings. When I glimpse the moon between buildings, it is a gift, and in a primordial shift, I wish I could howl.

Dear A

After the moon sets, there’s a purple envelope of time

when birds come alive and bless the unfolding day. 

Their songs invade my sleep until my sleep 

becomes song and I can almost count them by name – 

first a blackbird, then a mynah – but then I get lost 

in sparrow chatter as if it’s a passing rush hour crowd,

get lost in the crows trying to boss each other around.

I know they like tall lookouts, so maybe they paid

to push up the skyline? This pulsing ocean of humanity 

always wants to go higher, so why not crows?

I say let’s build more towers of babel if it’ll save

some green space outside the city to play in. 

                                                  And then what?

Yes, back to that I’m afraid, it’s a hazard of age, bright ideas 

with no clear end. What’s the point of saving something 

just to ruin it later? This place breaks my heart one headline

by one, but I haven’t figured out somewhere better to love. 

In happier news, below the fold, tucked into a smudged corner,

I read that archeologists found a twelve-thousand-year-old whistle 

made from bird bone, buried in the muck of a long gone 

Hula valley settlement. Even so, they can’t decide if it was used 

for music, or hunting, or some other charm. They say 

its sound matches cries of sparrowhawks and kestrels that even today 

roam the sky searching for prey and I wonder what it must be like 

to blow and feel the vibrations of their unanswered call.

Dear Y

Noises. So many damn noises, I feel like I’m drowning in them. It’s the dryer that bangs to the beat of a silent song, but the song could also be the voices that assault my ear, and the traffic and the water boiling and my car starting, and every moment of every day condensed into noise. 

I’m glad you’ve been hearing birdsong, a shade of silence in a way. Do you mean there is peace that can be found here, in this city? 

Imagine all the noise, of all the places and all the centuries, squeezed into a single space, the linchpin that is Jerusalem, the babel that is constructed and deconstructed at any given moment here. We come together and we collapse, like a burst eardrum. 

Last Shabbat, I lay in the grass. And even there, I couldn’t escape the rumble. Today, I considered going to the beach to see the tides, but this noise I’ve isolated and consumed tied me here to this city, I couldn’t escape. 

And even in my dreams, where there is nothing, no noise, the banality of it all creeps in.  I open the pantry door. I turn on the kettle to boil. I press the brakes in my car. There is no birdsong in my dreams. 

I could devolve to ancestral forms. Spend my days singing with the birds, feel my own vibrations and leave language behind. Did you know? We once lived in trees, too.