What is it that can penetrate
the pliant human heart?  Rabbi Akiva asked,
just weeks or months before being laid out 
on a coffin-sized stone, interrogated
by Tyrannus Rufus, whose name speaks
for itself, and flayed with an iron comb, 
which, by all accounts, is described as 
“similar to a miniature garden-rake,
only stronger,” heated directly in a fire, 
and pulled across the skin while the victim is still alive. 
This particular victim, who asked the above question about the human heart—
his was still beating as they flayed him, and his mouth
was still moving, mouthing the words to the one prayer
that calls every Jew to God, or is supposed to, 
if it is working properly, and if God is working properly,
doing his job, sewing little crowns to the letters of the Torah
in Akiva’s name—as he looked into their faces, 
those Levantine faces, turned up to the light 
that they thought for a while was theirs.

I’m not talking about what is true,
I’m talking about what is remembered. 
What is true in the small history of skin reveals 
that a lot of it can be flayed while your heart is still alive
and while your lips are still singing in praise
and while your followers, 24,000 of them,
wait outside for the spectacle that is your piety,
bearing rapt and genuine audience to your pain.  
Arendt has it at least partially right, banality 

is sleeping with a newspaper over your head
in a train car stopped right next to a train car.
And the parents who send their children out into the world
with I am but dust and ashes written on a slip of paper 
folded and carried in a pocket over the heart
have it partially right, the humble know
 
humility needs a compass, the smug and the righteous
a map. What is remembered: Being a child 
during the era of dust and ashes.  
The parents of what is called the silent generation—
and by this I think it is meant that they lay silent 
because they knew not what else to do—met the toils 
and injustices of the world 
with the twentieth century’s favorite 
barometer of pain, the great trump card of parenting,
the grand dismiss. At least 
you are not on the train. The way parents
in Akiva’s era must have said to their young kippot,
At least you are not being flayed alive
with iron combs. What is remembered.  
This tactic works on everything 
from the injustices of weeding in midsummer
to the long hours of sadness and nothing 
endured in the life of a child 
to the minute of grief you are allowed to feel 
just before and just after a death.
This is not what is true, but what is remembered.

The first cry we shriek upon being born
translates to something like this:
For my sake the world is created! This is what the Talmud
tells us must be on the other slip of paper
in the other pocket worn over the other heart, 
it is how we enter this place, 
stomping at the mothers and the fathers
as is the will and right of being alive.
Then the space between stomps is explained
as a curl of smoke made of children’s bones and little teeth,
and the sky smallens and shuts with the velocity of a clam.
This world is revealed to us in tiny pieces 

that make no apparent sense; parcels the size of sand
and anti-sand, rubbed and worried 
by the rabbis and the scientists,
who daven with Talmudic fury over every particle.  
Is it true? Does it bear scrutiny?   
The peas on the plate that don’t want to be eaten,
the mothers parting our hair, the laws against firecrackers, 
sodomy, chainsmoking in public,
the disappearance of bees and of love—
all of it bears scrutiny, all of it relentlessly bantered
on the bima and in the laboratories until the loudest cry
to the sky wins. Here is what is true:  

Goebbels announced with pride in the newspapers
during the summer of 1937 that The Fuhrer is very happy. 
He had visited the Kundsmuseum,
where the opposite of degenerate paintings 
were hung with the greatest of care.
No pockets at all on the shirts
or above the hearts, 
just the black sorcery of emptiness 
hung with more emptiness
hanging next to a cleanliness
born to rinse the world, bottled and sautered
in the space where the heart should be. Tyrannus Rufus. 
It sounds like Latin for ‘he who would kill even the dead.’
Had you flayed them alive, 

their blood would run clear and glad 
as the grease of a dybbuk, 
their bones malformed by the pressures
that live beneath the earth, seizing the stones
with the long slow violence that is matter.
I’m not talking about what is remembered now,
I am talking about what is true. In this cold world
spiraling with loss and fossils 
where humans get boiled like soups, 
there is always another sadness
to bear and endure. To the children 
who fall to us like rain, 

to the sea, to the stars, to the holy ozone
that screams in the wind, to scrutiny,
which has failed us miserably, as scrutiny so often does,
here are the pockets to sew over your heart.  
And then, do as you will. In the end, 
Akiva told his students, All my life I was worried 
about the verse in the Shema, ‘with all my soul’ 
and I wondered if I would be able to fulfill its command.  
And now that I am finally able to fulfill it,
I should not? Even in the end it was a question.
His body was taken by Elijah to Caesarea, 
on a night, we are told, bright as day, 
to a cavern where only a book,
a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp waited.  
His body was left on the bed. When Elijah departed,
the cavern sealed of its own accord 
and was never found again.
We have only what is remembered.
We can only carry the chairs 
and the children on our backs
and the notes in our pockets
and the light that for now we can claim 
as ours.