Ben Berman
LOVE
Our sages say: "And there is not a thing that has not its place." And so man too has his place. Then why do people sometimes feel so crowded?
—Martin Buber
Sunday afternoon
Whenever I end up at Curtin's Roadside
Tavern, praising the dulling buzz of light
beer and talking to some woman about
the day's cool jacket weather, how the clouds
seemed to threaten before they disappeared,
I begin thinking about all the weird
ways that I've almost died—the warm blood
that trickled down my thighs, the glass shards
on the ledge surely as sharp as the teeth
of the wild dogs circling beneath
me, as sharp as the focus on each step
when I grabbed the weak and bony grip
of a stumbling, drunken bus driver
and inched weightlessly across a river,
leaning on knees that hadn't locked so tight since
a scantily clad saddhu waved his tridents
in the air, then hurled a burning log
at my head—and I can feel my restless legs
burning and aching as they dangle
above the sticky floor, as my ankles bang
against the foot rail. And the more she leans
in close, the more I feel the space between
us, as though I've already crowded
too many stories into just one body.
PRIDE AND HUMILITY
Only when man reaches the highest rung, when he reaches his full stature, only then does he become truly humble in his own eyes, and knows what it is: "to bow before Thee."
—Martin Buber
picking up a friend's daughter
from dance rehearsal
Because work has a way of stretching me thin
I'd always thought of stretching as the ten
minute warm-up before I ran my laps—
push hard against a wall or collapse
into myself and attempt to touch
those faraway toes—I thought we stretched
to reach something, or, at most, to stave off
injury. But watching this woman lift
off the floor, spring into a fragile balance,
you'd think that stretching, itself, were the dance,
as she swivels and folds, streaming and flowing
from bend to arch to bow, her calf floating
effortlessly above the brass rail—
as though delicate were different from frail.
Ben Berman won the 2002 Erika Mumford Prize from the New England Poetry Club, has been a finalist in a few chapbook competitions and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has poems published in Natural Bridge, The Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Cutthroat Journal, The Connecticut Review, Inkwell, and others. He currently teaches in Boston.
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