Reyzl Grace
Dialectics
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel says, ‘On three things the world stands: on judgment, on truth and on peace.’ –Pirkei Avot 1.18
Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of milk from the cow’s dug into the pail, the slender blade of green corn upon the ground, the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman. –The Triads of Ireland 75
Research shows arranging
in threes makes things
easier to remember. Hence
Hebrew’s three-letter roots.
Still, I can’t stop
confusing חלב and חרב,
“milk” and “sword”—the slender
difference between naming a land
of sweetness and cutting it in two
to see to whom it belongs.
I was born in pieces,
bottle-fed and seeking honey
from the page. חרב,
used as a verb, means both
“to fall to destruction” and
“to dry up”. Irish
bainne (milk), is from
a root meaning “to drop”.
It’s hard to mix up with clíomh
(sword), pronounced like,
but not related to,
cleave—a contranym, or “word
that means the opposite of itself,”
as in, “Solomon threatened
to cleave the baby in half,
and the true mother, for love,
did not cleave to her child.”
I remember the cows on my uncle’s
farm. Pitching hay
was work that would make a man.
Féar (grass). Fear,
(man). One of them
is a lie. I’m allergic to grass.
As a child, I was marched
through prairie, arrived at picnics
with welt-covered legs.
Itching was an excuse not to lift
the cob, afraid of getting
butter on my clothes. My father
didn’t understand the fear
of grass or butter, thought me
prissy. Did he know
the truth? When coined, prissy
was defined as “nothing but a girl’s
word,” but, originally,
a girl could have any body,
welts or no. Now
I walk through tall grass.
I don’t talk to my father.
The body doesn’t lie.
It is marked by what is real.
My father isn’t Irish;
for him, it’s just דשא,
which looks like Aramaic, but isn’t.
The slender thread in a woman’s
hand is like wisdom; it makes
whole what was asunder:
the wall of the womb I came from,
the halves of the baby I was,
the body that broke out in welts
when forced to walk a lie.
Sick women and cattle
got the caibe-sídh—a stone
of peace (sídh), from the fae
(sídh), who gave for a price.
Not for nothing is שילם
(to pay) the changeling of שלום
(peace). It costs to be whole—
מושלם. All from three:
a giving, a taking, a thing
exchanged. Each stands
on another. The one who is not
at peace—how will she judge?
The hand that is not skilled—
how will it milk? This
is what it means to live
in two bodies, to read
from two books—to confuse
two words and become
a third thing that wonders
which thing is third.
Reyzl Grace is the Jewish descendent of 19th-century emigrants from Connacht. Her multilingual work reflects her roots in two diasporas, as well as her personal journey as a transgender woman. You can find her in the mastheads of Cordella Magazine and Psaltery & Lyre, at reyzlgrace.com, and on Twitter @reyzlgrace.