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PARTISAN REVIEW
Each new death opens
Old graves and digs
My own grave deeper
The dead, unbound, rise
Wave after wave
I dive for pearls
That were his eyes
But touch bedrock–
Not a coral reef–
Where my father lies
I come to grief.
Or we may consider, as belonging to the same area of punning ("pun–
ning" in a broad sense of the word), a tiny haiku-like untitled poem:
A pot poured out
Fulfills its spout
It
is a poem which yields more each time that one reads it. The obvi–
ous and banal sense is that pouring out a pot fulfills the purpose of its
having a spout; but if we read the word "Fulfills" backwards, as "fills
full," we are led to see the spout as, conversely,
filling
the pot-filling
it, that is to say, with meaning. The poem is circular, and this leads us
to a very general feature of Menashe's outlook. His drift, as we soon
come to realize, is that
being
itself is circular-or at least his sense of his
own being is so. In a Menashe poem things are not going anywhere but
rather moving round upon themselves in the same place. The thought is
clear in the first poem in this collection:
Roads run for ever
Under feet forever
Falling away
Yet, it may happen that you
Come to the same place again
Stay! You could not do
Anything more certain–
Here you can wait forever
And rejoice at your arrival.
Notice, here, the typical and brilliant play on the word "Stay." In one
sense it is an objurgation or rhetorical interjection; but in another sense it
is linked syntactically to "You could not do anything more certain" (i.e.,
you could not do anything better and surer than staying where you are).
