Like smartphones that have not been closed, we all are flip flaneurs
who walk and run, but fail to jog
our memory regarding what we see. And yet my verse
records what I see through the fog
that wraps my consciousness, and blurs my mental vision
while I am meeting metaphors,
that I mix with reality with which I’m in collision,
oblivious of its closed doors,
imagining that all are open to infinity,
which like reality is quite
incomprehensible, a devilish divinity
by definition out of sight.
The world around us is a world we never closely read,
like a discarded catalogue
we choose to never open, confident we do not need
to do so while we walk our dog.
If only everyone could see it as I do, its rhymes
would open consciousness’s locks,
as I believe I do, not often, but at least sometimes,
inside and outside my box,
echoing the divine consciousness whose shrinkage
is called tsimtsum by kabbalists,
generating pixels which provide the cyber-inkage
of my head’s rasa tabul-ists.
The last quatrain of this poem was inspired by Julin Ungar-Sargon, MD, PhD, who informed me that he regarded as “divine unconsciousness” the kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum. This is a mystical term describing the contraction of the infinity of Ein Soph, the Infinite Divinity, a process that generated this contraction in order to create a void in which there was room for the universe after the tsimtsum of the Infinite Ein Soph.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
