It would break the legend’s clean line
to say how the rabbi
stumbled in his incantation,
how an angel dropped
a weightless package from the Almighty
and an essence entered the simulacrum
meant to be a man of clay
and nothing else,
that spark wearing stolid flesh
long enough to see a self in the mirror,
soften a thick tongue into saying I
until the confected flesh, a fabricated man
proved too coarse a sieve.
Likewise passing through walls
among rooms of the synagogue
barred to tourists, the mislaid spirit
finds this corner of Prague, centuries later,
alien as the rest of the world.
JD Smith has published two collections, Settling for Beauty (2005) and The Hypothetical Landscape (1999), and is circulating two other collections and a chapbook manuscript. In 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts of the United States. His first children’s book, The Best Mariachi in the World, was published in October 2008.