The Exile and The Shank: Two Poems by Philip Terman

Philip Terman

The Exile

I deliver a box of matzo to the only trailer
with a mezuzah nailed to the doorframe.
She rents from the trucker and his wife, Rhesa,

on her fixed income in Clintonville, PA, county
of Amish and the rural poor, county of non-zoning,
of cars in various states of repair on front lawns

and roaming dobermans, of rusted-out tractors
and burn piles, where the local politicos
always say is a “perfect place for toxic waste,”

backdropped as it is by Interstate 80. Nights,
truckers’ beams crisscross her living room
and she accuses Rhesa of flashlighting

her privacy to catch the poodles she calls
her children at shitting on the carpet.
Weak heart, bi-polar, not-yet-forty, boxes

piled from ceiling to floor her fortification,
stuffed with bargain-basement garage-sale
clothes, books, dishes, tchochkies

she makes her life’s accumulation.
And when the rooms fill up with dust and mold
she moves them with her dogs and medication.

Across the road the Amish farm. Mornings
she watches children in black walk toward
the school their parents built, watches late afternoon

their return. And the perennial black buggy
and the stocky taut work horses, their muscles
shimmering with heat as they furrow their dignity

into the soil, the smallest boy following the father,
shoulders wrapped with the leather straps
of the plow, up and across and down and across

the rows, the sun’s light slanting across the field,
blazing their horizon the color of fire or God’s face
on their daily routine of returning back to the world.

Does she wonder if this is how her great-grandparents,
also orthodox and curiosities, balanced their lives,
bunched together, working their land with their strange rules

and eating habits, their mysterious worship?
This is too far away from any public agency.
On the first of the month when the check arrives

we take her shopping and on Passover
to the synagogue fifty miles away in Butler
where she sits off to the side and her lips move.

And only Elijah can distinguish her voice.

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The Shank Bone

Our dog swipes the shank bone from the sedar plate,
shakes her muzzle from side to side, takes off
through Elijah’s door: this roasted symbol of the sacrificial

lamb we offered in the Temple to remember our exile
and commemorate our liberation now clenched
in the jaws of this overgrown golden retriever puppy,

this what-we-call-in-Hebrew zeroah, meaning “arm,”
meaning how our God outstretched his enormous arm
to help his people in our times of aggravation, what

we’re undergoing now, the guests arrived, the table
set with plates and wine glasses, Haggadahs and candles,
bowl of salt water, bowl of roasted eggs, the charosete—

our laborious mortar—chopped and set beside the bitter
herbs, what we will mix in with our dog’s Alpo once
we can coerce her to give it up, but she’s clamping

and sloshing it around her drenched tongue as if
this were the last bone on earth, as if she understood
that this was from the original lamb our High Priest chose

when we all put down our weapons and tools to gather
and witness this primordial offering: to assuage our guilt,
to accommodate our primitive desires, to draw nearer

to the source, our surrendering—before the destruction
and therefore absence of our assigned place
so the scholars say we can sacrifice nowhere

until the source returns and now my five-year-old daughter
has tackled our dog in the yard and pulls hard at the bone,
all of our guests approaching closer in mesmerized silence.

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