Mad Poet Passes

b.Ber. 55B I.22.D Said Raba, “People are not shown in dreams [such impossibilities as] either a golden palm tree or an elephant going through the eye of a needle.”

The mad poet has occasion to undress.
The moral socks, learned leggings, and sophistic
long johns (the logical holes make them useless),
belt and sword-frog, hair shirt, stained jeans, the pricked
leather bag with his papers: a no-name man
wears his whole self on him or he dies,
Nemo without a story. But he must go sans
all of it to pass through the needle’s eye

so narrow a serpent can’t pass through, nor rope,
nor even a knotted thread. To it he trudges
pachydermatous in his habits and grudges,
low thread-count affections and frayed hopes.
He cannot see what’s on the other side
till he strips, slips through, and his eyes grow wide.

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