“I look for you,” writes Solomon ibn Gabirol in eleventh century Spain. “I don’t know how to look for You,” writes Annie Kantar in twenty-first century Jerusalem. What about me? This summer, my fifth book of poetry, The Loneliest Monk, will be published. As I discovered while reading and rereading the collection of soon-to-be-published poems, I realized that I had spent close to four years writing about a character who longs for some kind of ultimate connection. Connection to what? To whom? A parent? A woman? A plum? A painting? A poem? The Divine? The Divine as present in every thing, every being, human, animal, plant, work of art?
Here’s Gabirol’s poem in its entirety [in the original publication in the Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, there are indentations of various kinds every third, fourth, seventh and eighth line of each stanza]:
I look for you early,
my rock and my refuge,
offering you worship
morning and night;
before your vastness
I come confused
and afraid, for you see
the thoughts of my heart.
What could the heart
and tongue compose,
or spirit’s strength
within me to suit you?
But song soothes you
and so I’ll give praise
to your being as long
as your breath-in-me moves.
In his poem, Gabirol looks, worships, approaches (“I come”), questions, and, finally, sings praise. As he seeks God, he sees clearly his own insufficiencies. He is confused. He is aware of thoughts and feelings that may not, in Leonard Cohen’s words, “please the Lord.” He is not like David, who is credited with writing many of the Psalms, and who, in Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” played “a secret chord” that found favor in the Lord’s ears and heart. Beyond his personal shortcomings, he also becomes aware of some more universal human limitations. What could the human heart, any human heart, tongue, and spirit create that would “suit” God?
Gabirol’s poem is intended to help a worshipper see him- or herself more clearly as she seeks the presence of God. Indeed, the poem was written as a reshut lenishmat, an introduction (reshut) to the Shabbat morning prayer called the Nishmat. That prayer begins, “nishmat kol chai t’varech et YHVH; the breath-of-every-living-being shall bless Thy Name, O Lord.” The final words of the poem—both in the original Hebrew as well as in Peter Cole’s translation here—are the first words of the prayer, nishmat kol chai.
Written in the first person singular, the poem weaves together language from various Jewish sacred texts—Psalms, Job, Lamentations, Chronicles, Judges and more–—to create a poem that is at once deeply personal and communal. Its “I” speaks personally: “I come confused and afraid.” As if to insist that the poem represents one specific man’s experience, Gabirol signs his name within the poem itself. In Hebrew, the poem is written in four lines. The lines begin with the following letters: shin, lamed, mem, and hey. Read from top to bottom, they spell the name Shlomo, Gabirol’s first name in Hebrew. The poem is an acrostic.
At the same time, the poem speaks with the voice of Torah, which, one could say, is the root language of the Jewish people. Gabirol’s “my rock [tzuri] and my refuge [misgabi]” come straight from Psalm 62:7. His “I come confused / and afraid, for you see / the thoughts of my heart” comes from several sources, including Chronicles 28:9, “For the Lord…understandeth all the imaginations of the heart.” So, though Gabirol’s poem is written in the first person singular—“I look for you”—the “I” here is an expansive, inclusive “I.” It’s intended to be read as my “I” and your “I.”
Must one look to the heavens (God’s “vastness,” as Gabirol writes), even beyond the heavens in search of the Divine? “You’re in the details,” writes Annie Kantar in “Ghazal for Two.” Kantar finds the Divine in blossoms and birds. She even finds the Divine in herself.
I don’t know how to look for You,
or me and you, the me that’s You.
You’re in the details, it’s true–
and True’s one of the names we call You,
but that must be found, and only by the few
who wait without looking for You.
Soon the blossoms will imbue
my room with the aroma of You,
unraveling back to that view
they say belongs to You
and birds will come, taking their cue
and my window again will fill with You,
and in their thrall, I’ll confuse
myself with the sound of You
and know the things I shouldn’t do
and do them anyway with You.
For us it’s nothing new,
nor is this form, which will have to do
until it breaks (with birdsong)
through a window into You.
Kantar’s poem, as the title informs us, is also written in a tight form, the ghazal. The ghazal, writes Edward Hirsch, is a version of a praise poem. “Another meaning of ghazal,” writes Hirsch, “is the cry of a gazelle when it is cornered in a hunt and knows it must die.” So, the ghazal may express both praise and love—of humans or the Divine—and sadness and grief. Some ghazals are also noted for their songlike quality.
Kantar’s poem includes implied praise. She writes, “True’s one of the names we call You.” She’s also in “thrall” to the sound of the birds and the view of blossoms that fills her window, a view that “belongs to You.” However, she retains a little bit of doubt as the poem progresses. Having stated that one of God’s names is True, or, we could say, “truth,” she notes that that name and characteristic of God can be found only “by the few / who wait without looking for You.” And it’s others, not her, who say that the field outside her window, brilliant with spring blossoms, “belongs to You.”
The speaker of this poem may not know how to look for the Divine. Nonetheless, she speaks to God, as evidenced by the fact that “You” is said ten times in the poem, twice in the first couplet and then once in each subsequent couplet except for the penultimate couplet. Ghazals are written in couplets. In the first couplet, the same word ends each of its two lines. That word then appears in the second line of each subsequent couplet. Again with one exception, the poem is written in monorhyme, a particularly challenging pattern in English: “You, You”; “true, You”: “few,” You”; “imbue,” “You”; “view,” You”; “cue, You”; “confuse,” “You”; “do,” “You”; “new,” “do”; “birdsong”, “You”. As you will have noted, the final stanza breaks the monorhyme pattern. There’s also an exception to the use of the repeated word “You” in the next-to-last couplet.
Like Gabirol, Kantar recognizes the limits of her attempt to find God. In the penultimate couplet of the poem, she writes, “this form [the ghazal] . . . will have to do”. Immediately following this, as in the Gabirol poem, we get song, birdsong in Kantar’s poem. Earlier in the poem, she confesses that she “know[s] the things I shouldn’t do / and do them anyway with You.” When we first read those lines, we may understand them as referring to moral failings or as actions that violate God’s commandments. By the end of the poem, we reread those lines as also preparing us for her breaking the rules of the ghazal.
What may appear to be the constraints of form in each of these poems may in fact be the very features of the poems that enable the poets to, at last, sing to the Divine. We can seek the Divine in its vastness or we can seek the Divine in the details. “You’re in the details, it’s true,” writes Kantar. When we read a poem closely, including its formal features, we may, if we are so inclined, experience the Divine in the poem’s details. If nothing else, when we read a poem closely, we encounter the brilliance of human creativity. And if that’s not a direct experience of the breath—or soul, another meaning of the word nishmat—of every living thing, the breath that the Divine breathed into each of us, I don’t know what is.
Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .
Close Reading is now available on Substack, where you can sign up to receive all posts directly to your inbox. To learn more, click here.
