ROAD'S SCHOLAR

If Truly were a Chasid
with fur hat, not
a secular mongrel with
fur, he would be buried
in Torah, immersed in
Talmud, in fine points,
the molecular minutiae
of truth,

for this would-be scholar,
this Spinoza with canines,
sporting tail in place of tzitzes,
leads me on lengthy walks of
excessive inquiry, teasing out
trails, searching for smells,
dissecting every odor, taking
meticulous notes, studiously
decoding the cryptic text of whole
snowbanks, pulling me like a blind
man through arcane archives, a pure
pedant footnoting each find with
lifted leg, reminding us of the many
ways of knowing, all needed
to crack the Big Mystery.


March 23, 1993


All written material © Bill Schechter, 2016
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