For the Wandering Jews This room is reserved for wandering Jews. Around me, in other rooms, suitcases whine like animals shut up for the night. My guardian angel, Stein, fears sleeping twice in the same bed. Constancy brings Cossacks in the dark, he thinks. You don''t explain fear to fear. Despair has no ears, but teeth. In the next room I hear a woman''s laughter & press my hand to the wall. Car lights burn my flesh to a glass transparency.

My father was born in Novo-Nikolayevka, Ekaterinoslav Guberniya. Like him, I wear my forehead high, have quick eyes, a belly laugh. Miles unfold in the palm of my hand. Across some thousand backyards his stone roots him to the earth like a stake. Alone in bed, I feel his blood wander through my veins. As a boy I would spend whole nights at the fair running up the fun house''s spinning barrel toward its magical top, where I believed I would be beyond harm, at last. How I would break my body to be free of it, night after night, all summer long, this boy climbing the sky''s turning side, against all odds, as though to be one with time, going always somewhere where no one had been before, my arms banging at my sides like wings. The Artist & His Mother: After Arshile Gorky Such statuesque immobility; here we have it: the world of form.

Colors muted, a quality of masks with fine high brows. Light & its absence. Alchemy. The hands are unfinished. But what could they hold? The transitory bliss of enduring wonder? Mother, Mother & Son; here we have it: consanguinity. The darkness inside color. Space. In the beginning there was space.

It held nothing. What could it hold? Time? The continuum? Mother & Son, forms suspended in color. Silence. Her apron a cloud of stillness swallowing her whole. Her eyes roots of a darker dimension. Absence. Here we have it: the world of absence. Light holds them in place.

The pulse of time is felt under the flesh, the flesh of color. Continuum. You feel such immensity. The anger of form. The woman locked in the Mother; the man in the Son; the Son in the Mother. Their hands do not touch. What could they touch? Here we have it: the world of gift. The gift too terrible to return.

But how could it be returned? In the beginning there was anger. Mother & Son. The islands of time. The passion to continue. Such statuesque immobility. The hands, the hands cannot be finished. The Stranger in Old Photos You see him over my uncle Al''s left shoulder eating corn at a Sunday picnic & that''s him behind my parents on a boardwalk in Atlantic City smiling out of focus like a rejected suitor & he''s the milkman slouched frozen crossing our old street ten years before color & his is the face above mine in Times Square blurring into the crowd like a movie extra''s & a darkness in his eyes as if he knew his face would outlast him & he''s tired of living on the periphery of our occasions. These strangers at bus stops, sleepwalkers caught forever turning a corner - I always wondered who they were between photos when they weren''t posing & if they mattered.

It''s three this morning, a traffic light blinks yellow yellow & in my window my face slips into the emptiness between glares. We are strangers in our own photos. Our strangeness has no source. Letter from Jake: August 1964 Never mind that uncle business my name is Jake. In college they try every thing there is this girl at Wegmans supermarket who is to busy to join protests who is right takes more than me to figure out. Cohen died last Monday. He owned the deli on Joseph Ave. The democrat running for supervisor is a Puerto Rican.

Don''t ask me why. You are young and have to take things as they come. Some day you will find your real niche. I wrote poetry to but this July I''m a stagehand 40 years. I''ve seen every movie Paramount made believe me. Now theres a union but I remember when you was happy just to work. Meantime have a ball. Yrs truly now has kidney trouble plus diabetic condition, heart murmur, cataract in rt eye.

Yr mother Lillian is well to. Cohen was just 58. We went to school together. Loews is closing in October. If you ask me the last five rows was no good for cinemascope. Yrs truly, Jake.