Day, Daylong
Day, daylong, how the soul goes staring
At its shoes, expanse that widens nakedly
To world
where each is poised
Assassin, suicide, to wrest
Redemption of the other in its choice: yours
The helpless span narration cannot close.
Route nor spectacle will not go blind
Nor bind their broken conscience to a page:
Learn to be No-one in the voice of none,
Friend in that friendless element forever
Unbegun, a sea, a body, a remorse—
Take up this leaf: what do the dead,
The unborn defend? Your living syllable
Too mute, too loyal to its desuetude
To enter speech that does not speak
Consent, and claim, and failure to conclude.
Used with permission of Princeton University Press, from Corrupted into Song: The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman, edited by Deborah Dorfman, 2016; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Alvin Feinman
Alvin Feinman was born on November 21, 1929, in the East New York area of Brooklyn, New York. The son of Litvak Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe before World War I, Feinman was the youngest of five siblings and the only boy. Feinman graduated in 1951 with a BA in philosophy from Brooklyn College.