Poetry journal: Car driven by ‘messiah’ hits synagogue
Yesterday I headed to Costco for apples, the oversized and spotless Granny Smiths that they sell so cheap, leaving from the Chatham campus and driving along Shady Avenue through Squirrel Hill to Homestead, and I passed this grand commotion (story, too-good-to-be-true, above), complete with TV newsvans, at Poale Zedeck synagogue, and I even rubbernecked, but I had no idea, no clue even, that it was the Second Coming, as reported. (Can I get a witness? My late and saintly mother, Mary, would want me to be a witness at the Second Coming.)
At first I guessed it was about the exhumation and reburial story, the Poale Zedeck Orthodox rabbi who, earlier in this week, blocked a family’s attempt, citing Jewish law, to remove an ancestor’s bones from the sacred orthodox spot in the suburbs to Homewood Cemetery in Point Breeze–Henry Clay Frick, interdenominational ecumenism–but I digress, that’s just another good story that suckered me in: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10117/1053585-54.stm
Today the story seems to me like a time warp, something that happened earlier in Pittsburgh, or should have, in the late ’60s or early ’70s most appropriately. I love that the synagogue characters are actually named Pollack and Dubinsky, that they pin down the suspect and remove his shoes, so he won’t run, of course, and the quote from the seemingly disembodied & high perp named Disabato, who says, “he and a friend were ‘hanging out at my apartment, and I got a call from God telling me to do this,’ the complaint says. ‘I’m not crazy,’ he said. ‘I’m just doing God’s work.'” God used the phone in the ’60s, not 2010.
But I think the whole experience is better left alone, just abandoned by Oresick the poet here in this notebook, and not shaped into a poem. Billy Collins would write this poem . . . which is why he’s Billy Collins. Oresick drives on to Costco to buy the apples at a great price. And eats them for a week.
_____