KAREN ALKALAY-GUT -
THOMAS UNGAR, who managed the computer laboratory of the School of Mathematics at Tel Aviv University until his untimely death in 1997, had written a great deal of poetry in Czech before he began to sit in on my classes on Women's Poetry. Under the influence of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and some of my own poems, he began to write about himself, and about the inner world. When he became ill with a virulent cancer, he found this discovery useful and comforting – "I'll write a sonnet a day," he said, "and it will be like an apple keeping the doctor away." He would e-mail me these sonnets and I would comment, absurdly, trivially, but knowing that he just needed to know I was reading him in order for him to grasp each time a greater and greater control over a more and more uncontrollable situation. After he died, I wrote a poem to him, and discovered his influence on me was much greater than mine on him.
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Karen Alkalay-Gut teaches poetry at Tel Aviv University. Her many poetry books include The Love of Clothes and Nakedness (Sivan, 1999) and High Maintenance (Neamh, 2002).
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KAREN ALKALAY-GUTOn the Statistic Probability of MiraclesI You would have said the cards were badly shuffled – After all the actual probability that so many unrelated friends would die this summer is in no proportion to this little epidemic, this cancer – one up north, one next door, one overseas. I try to change the context, grumble that I'm fixated on disease, ignoring the majority who remain. But changing the field means nothing to the heart. II “So what should I pick you up at Lourdes?” Your tired voice on the phone answers my weak flippancy with a real request. “Armanac.” As if lifting your spirits would change the odds. To make sure, I buy the cognac even before I leave. To leave no stone unturned I visit the Cave of Miracles as soon as I arrive. And as my fingers pass over the rocks of Bernadette's cave, sweeping up her tears in a prayer, I try to become one with the country wives before me whose faith may just shift the odds. Once out of the cave My cold objectivity returns: It is known that a crippled man in a broken wheelchair was sprinkled all over with the water of Lourdes and when it was over, his wheelchair was like new III I think of your sweet obsessions, so childish for so big a man, so inappropriate to a scientist, and then consider your proposed article on “The Scientific Probability of Miracles.” It came down to – If I can beat the computer at three-card Vegas solitaire, the chances are I can stay alive
copyright 2003 KAREN ALKALAY-GUT
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