Gates

Tonight, according to Jewish belief, the gates of heaven will open and human souls will come in in direct contact with the sumlibe.

I don't believe in heaven, but I believe in the gates of heaven. The last few days, featuring a visit from a unique character that marked my past, taught me again how labyrinthine life is. It's a succession of gates through which we move on, beginning with our mother's vegina and ending at the mouth of the grave. Do we pop through the gates of heaven once or twice a year in the proccess? possible.

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides.
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides,
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden.

Two columns of stone mark the entrance to Potsdam's garden of palaces. Hinges of green metal squeak before my elemntary school. A beautiful girl lives past huge, sweetly peeling European-like doors, a surprising sight on Sheinkin St. We walk into the traps: the highrises of mediocracy, the rim of the cigratte, the eyelid of pain widening to encompass us. finally, the only gate left is the nucturnal door of the fridge, a gate of heaven indeed, opening to kingdoms of light and consolation.

Then, the following morning, everything is a gate, the lense of a film projector, the nipple, responding to touch, the ringing phone, the keyboard - alive. suddenly everything is electric, heavy iron gates that once shut on your fingers slide open like airport doors or emergency-room doors. They can't be locked, can't be shut behind your back. You've stuck Witgenstein's ladder between the glass leaves, moving on now through the kitchen door, the actors' exit.

Where to? To prisons of love? To the open, unfenced pastures of strangely lasting youth? On the eve of this Yom Kippur my key chain seems wonderfully heavy. Pitkhu li sha'arei sham'im, avo bam, ode yah, with the help of Bob Dylan, who else?

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams,
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means.
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the gates of Eden