And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said,

If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon

into mine hands, then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh

forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return

in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD's,

and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

–Judges 11:30-31
 
I. Genesis
It helps to have a pedigree

where life–back then–was cruel and hard,

resolved by now into a world

of West Side prep school avant-garde

and Dads who quote Foucault.

I guess that they would know
the contradictions of the world–

Great-Grandpa used to follow Marx,

and though the revolution fizzled,

it shot off very pretty sparks

above the tenement.

They usually made the rent.
And in the reeking one-room flats,

Bubi prayed to Dave Dubinsky,

went on strike, and then sent Dad

to college. He met Robert Pinsky,

and all the stars aligned

with first editions signed.
Marriage, children, teaching job,

manifestos, tenure track,

apartment on West 84th–

but there's a thing you can't get back:

The union hymns they'd sing.

‘The movement's everything,'
said Edouard Bernstein in his day,

but as time passed, the movement changed,

moved to a better neighbourhood.

The signifier became estranged

from the signified.

The sign, though, let it slide.
We've read the books by Philip Roth

and know the tensions as they stretched

throughout the sixties. What's unsaid

is what became of who came next.

La lutte continue.

If only that were true!
And she was born in ‘85,

a babbling thing. Recall the verse.

‘'Let there be light!' And there was light.'

Note, if you will, the universe

began, as we've all heard,

not with Big Bang, but Word.

 
II. Exodus
Then she left home, the clanking downtown A,

the New York scenes we know,

to head to heathen lands out West.

‘Let my people go',

though not unto the mythic Promised Land,

but to the lecture hall

and student cafeteria

with fliers on the wall.
The ghetto residents, just blocks away,

are poor and quite bereft

of what goes on within those walls.

‘But I'm Aesthetic Left!

I do my bit with words and photographs,

with papers and critique.

I'd stay and chat, but I'm afraid

I've got an exam next week.'
The leftists, sagging with their flyers' weight

of exclamation marks

can blend into the background, but

something in her harks

to what they're saying in their tones

of righteousness and rage.

The slender boy who talks to her

looks about her age.
Was her rejoinder parroting a line

inherited like looks

(dark-haired, gray eyes, a heart-shaped face)

or all those fucking books

that she had read before she graduated

top of a top-flight class.

Is hers a revelation, or

just talking out her ass?
She thinks about the kid, the leftie paper,

the spittle on his lips,

the protest that she won't attend,

the classes that he skips.

It's not her problem. All that stuff's passé.

The proletariat

was good enough for grandma, but

it's time to bury it
with geriatric Stalinists back home

who rotted in their flats

not far away from where she lived.

Want to end up like that?

God, no, it's all utopia, and she

is willing to resign

red flags and the May Day march

for the banner of the Sign.
You see, she'll take the system from within,

and if it seems too staid,

she knows about the body, and

she might even get laid

amid the throbs of Underground Du Jour.

She knows it all by heart.

Love is an ideology

like post-Romantic art.
And if she tells her parents what she's seen

or that she knew a man

as Zipporah knew Moses, well,

she knows they'll understand.

The things they say when up for peer review

can sound a little mad,

but on the phone at dinner time,

they really aren't bad,
and in the end, it comes down to support

from parent, friend, or mentor

who knows the dean or publisher,

is slightly left-of-centre,

and knows the proper way to woo a girl,

papers to sign in hand

for what comes next back in New York

or a distant Holy Land.
–
And sometimes, when the iPod's blaring out

that song she loves to sing,

the rhythm shakes her slender bones.

The backbeat's lilting swing

is sensual, of course, but in a way

that's simple, not transgressive.

Who cares what it represents,

explicit or suggestive.
Within the changes of the 1-4-5,

She's still a smiling child

dancing to the Rolling Stones.

Her mother even smiled

as she cavorted through the living room

and past the kitchen door.

Her smiles came easy in those days–

she wishes she smiled more.
Were it that simple! Everybody knows

about the social text

inscribed with horror from the past

or the sell-out that comes next,

so gird the surge of feeling with a smirk

of knowing irony,

as the coda starts to fade

in grand futility.
As the notes reverberate, she pushes,

testing the song's dimensions.

The Christians say the road to Hell

is paved with good intentions.

And when did curiosity transform

into mournful knowing?

The bus to school is pulling in.

She really must be going.

 
III: Leviticus
She keeps the father's faith in the avant-garde,

the tribe of misfits in the wilderness,

scratches of verse, a rudimentary canon,

and outcast snobbery, a course that ran on

to sandscapes and a Chosen people, barred

from settling down, forced to still transgress
against the same old tired Establishment.

It's not the 1960s anymore;

the paths run smoother now, and she can feel

the pebbles smoothed beneath her feet. What's ‘real',

though, is a thought experiment,

a posture and perception at its core.
So many excommunications come

from places well outside the synagogue

or church or mosque. The sentinels of Gog

note the armies gathering at the gate

with words of quick salvation to the drum

of battering rams. She hopes it's not too late.
Heresy's the merest cataract

within a delta flowing to the sea–

the Nile reintegrates the narrow stream.

It is the captive's ever-present dream

to run from Pharaoh, though we know, in fact

she'll end back in the mainstream, probably.
The desert, on the other hand, is dry,

a place of hermits and eccentric creeds,

of grim commandments and a wild-eyed prophet

speaking for God … Really. Oh, come off it!

We say ‘language'. The rabbis say ‘the sky'.

Either way, I guess it meets our needs.
What do we need? Some laws, a rigid stricture,

a covenant to help us persevere.

The regulations sometimes seem… eccentric.

But hey, they aren't crass and Eurocentric–

but come from oppression. Yes, you get the picture,

although the picture's what you see–or hear?
There is no mannequin to represent

the grim Creator; all we have is Word,

a relayed vision, a guarded tabernacle,

an ankle's distant memory of a shackle.

But is it real? Just asking … ‘I repent!'

That question is beside the point. Absurd.
Some forty years since 1968.

The desert starts to feel like home, the wind,

harsh with sand, caresses like a lover.

Storms ahead, but she's unused to cover.

Her generation came a bit too late

to understand the ways her parents sinned.
And where the hell's the radical other now?

Shirking its duties as the dialectic

negates its own negation in the waste,

a matter of politics–or is it taste?

She'll try to reach the other side somehow

as the prophets grow more apoplectic.
–
And Mom and Dad would pore through the submissions

that came by mail when she was just a child,

laughing at the also-rans, and sighing

at someone else too obviously trying

to be like them. But all of their transmissions

(subliminal of course) were quickly filed
into the folders of her mind. She knew

they wanted more of her than academics

searching for the tenured job with scribbles

dashed off with a minimum of quibbles

but aiming to slip through the peer review.

The problem, they would say, is all systemic.
But here she is, their greatest protégée,

in cap and gown, scared out of her wits

at somehow failing of an early promise,

dreading the lunch of Zinfandel and hummus.

Solicitous and decent in their way,

their well-intentioned pressure gives her fits–
or rather nervous tics as she surveys

the blasted landscape spreading from the gate

into the city. Christ, she wants a joint–

or maybe just a hint of what the point

of all this is–the disapproving gaze

at what is hers, inherited too late.

 
IV. Numbers
She, I guess, could be the voice

for a latter generation,

a requisite degree,

a well-known family.

But how to speak … now that's a choice

provoking perspiration.

Straight protest? Talk some sense!

There is this conference
taking place next spring at Yale.

It's all in the connections

and good for the CV.

With no advanced degree

(not yet), but not beyond the pale

with Mom and Dad's affections

and clear accomplishment,

the letter soon gets sent.
Faced off against the corduroys,

she grips the bottled water

and somehow holds her own,

although not quite alone.

The topic's ‘mentorship'; her poise

is one of mother's daughter.

Although she steals the show,

who the hell would know?
Written up on the internet,

a minor publication

for the participants,

a pleasant happenstance

for rebels who have not, as yet

founded a new nation

on radical sisterhood.

But fuck it. Life is good.
And if they launch an anguished kvetch

that draws on backlash theory,

it's all a bit abstract,

since we all know, in fact,

that funds come through, and if they retch

when politics turn dreary,

it isn't quite their lot.

Just look at what they've got:
Graduate students, tenured jobs,

gifted kids and spouses

who make a living wage

both on and off the page.

And if they gesture at the slobs

who can't afford their houses,

well, that's for history

(whatever that might be).
–
All seminars are ‘critical',

and every text ‘transgresses'

in a subversive whirr.

But where does that leave her?

Fighting off the cynical

assumptions of addresses

in each colloquium

as mounting tedium
rejects the carapace she finds

enveloping her parents

and everyone she knows.

But that's the way it goes.

It's less a meeting of the minds

than paths gone slightly errant,

veered from an early goal

and that thing once called ‘soul'.
She takes it in and in good stride.

The setting is familiar.

Christ, she's from New York!

As the bottle's cork

arcs across the room, her snide

doubts appear peculiar,

a momentary blip.

She's won a fellowship
to go abroad and find herself

in some grand ancient city

surrounded by great art.

It's bound to be the start

of something better than a shelf

of trophies that look pretty.

The doubts, as yet, still lurk,

so this had better work.

 
V. Deuteronomy
The Grand Canal's no Jordan, she reflects.

No Promised Land lies on the other side.

It's just a fucking postcard after all

for Mom and Dad to tack up on a wall,

and still the words won't come. The mind rejects

the sense of being chosen and the pride  
that father's watching, though she let him down,

a sin she only faintly understands

that he won't mention, maybe doesn't know,

that's either recent or from long ago.

‘Fuck him, fuck them, their stupid-ass renown!'

she thinks, and she regards her trembling hands.  
It isn't getting better, and her doubt

isn't just ennui as she would hope

in summer days before she got this work

in Europe. But it's harder, now, to shirk

that sense that one can never quite get out

of what she signifies. Best just to cope.  
Off-season Venice turns to a museum,

a symbol of itself, with gondolas

and churches and a square and that strange stink

that rises from the water. At the brink

of something … what the fuck … there may be freedom

in someone else's era. But because  
the journey took so long, the destination

is just another pit stop on the way

to … what? Another internship, a culture

of landmarks, books, and avant-gardist sculpture?

It's just another overstuffed vacation.

More of the same. Besides, today's the day.  
The vodka bottle's plastic, and the pills

are over-the-counter, purchased in a rush.

She'd felt a covert buzz when she got back

and set the items by a tottering stack

of books and magazines. The giddy thrills

of possibility turned to a hush …   
Jephthah, stained with blood, victorious

and heavy with fatigue, went up the path

that led him homeward. Israel was preserved.

His cause was won, the Chosen People served.

His service had been meritorious.

He never would have guessed the aftermath.  
She pours a glass and pours the pills across

the table. As she swallows through her tears,

she thinks about her parents and the hope

too overwhelming now for her to cope

with, even face. ‘Well, that's a total loss!'

Twenty-some-odd years are ending. ‘Cheers!'  
Beyond the water lie luxurious flats

and other problems lie behind the light

that twinkles in between the gondolas

as dusk obscures the view from her, from us.

She takes another swig, and then that's that.

Stagger to the futon, and good night.  
‘Who is that on the edge of sight?' the judge

wonders, as he contemplates the life

he tried to save. His daughter's quick embrace

hides the sudden grimace on his face

at hasty promises, a tardy grudge

toward the sharpened sacrificial knife.