Excerpt from “Equations”
from Lee Sharkey, Walking Backwards
My white cloth by candlelight is your white cloth by candlelight
I remember a meal the covenant once served me
My violin is your violin
The rain of the land in its season
Witness, set out
I rub the door post where the mezuzah held its prayer
A prayer is a tiny camera
Sharkey’s “Equations” seems, at first, to point toward parities between
the speaker and the reader. And yet that parity is questionable—the reader may not own a violin. Is anything ever equal, or stable, or familiar? But soon the reader sees that perhaps the speaker is not addressing the reader but instead addressing another persona and finding connections through the tangible: perhaps a Sabbath meal. The poem moves forward, not answering the questions it raises, toward a double reading. “Witness, set out.” Is this an address to a witness, or do the words mean the act of witnessing, which the speaker wants to achieve? The reader gathers meaning, gleans it from furrowed lines (white cloth, candlelight, covenant, mezuzah), finds the poem’s Judaic center. And then the mind reaches the stunning figuration: “A prayer is a tiny camera.” A prayer, like a camera, can capture a moment, focus it, abet the eye, and preserve light. One carries a camera to bear witness, to record, to prove, to document. The image gives faith, thus prayer, a radical purpose beyond supplication to an unseen power. Like a camera, prayer becomes a tool for seeing the world, a tool we must carry, and that we use to shape the world and to manifest some small part of it. The poem continues, and then it arrives at another startling image.
At childhood’s gate, a snake
In the act of swallowing
A toad, legs first
Transfixed, we watch until
The one looks out of the other’s mouth
Childhood is a physical site. It has a gate, and before its gate, the reader sees a memory. Imagine then a viewer holding a camera before an eye, one eye before another eye. The eye looks out through the lens of the camera, and vision consumes the world. A reader might consider history then and the camera’s role: the lenses that have recorded the horrific and poignant images of war, holocaust, devastation, cruelty. Yes, the image is right: “A prayer is a tiny camera,” an act of faith, supplication.
“Equations,” from Lee Sharkey, Walking Backwards. Tupelo Press, 2016.