Yehoshua November: Hearing Roy Orbison in a Mikvah in Salem, MA

In dreams I walk with you,
Roy Orbison crooned
from the speakers above the indoor pool,
at the Holiday Inn,
steam rising as I resurfaced
from beneath the chlorine waters
of the makeshift mikvah.

If slightly rearranged, the letters
in the word Tevilah, ritual immersion
in a body of water,
spell Habitul, the self’s dissolution
in the face of the Divine.

“He was quiet, self-effacing,”
Orbison’s biographers noted.
Bathed in spotlight,
he hid behind Wayfarer sunglasses
and never danced on stage.

To submerge beneath the water,
the mystics add,
is to return to the Divine womb,
the way the soul returns to the Heavens each night
as the body dozes.

Claudette—
Orbison’s first wife, whom he divorced
after her infidelities with the contractor who’d built
the couple’s Hendersonville home,
and whom he’d remarried a year later–
died in the singer’s arms shortly after
her motorcycle collided
with a truck pulling onto South Water Avenue.

It was 6AM. I had the mivkah to myself.
I heard desperation in the operatic voice that hailed
from Vernon,Texas.
I was in Salem for a panel
on 21st Century devotional poetry.

Like the soul climbing
while the body reposes,
Orbison’s voice rose two octaves
higher than the other sopranos.
In dreams I talk with you.
“The lyrics came to me
as I slept,” Orbison claimed.
“Words I wrote down upon waking.”

Our panel asked what it meant
for a contemporary poet
to speak to our Father in Heaven in this millennium.
Mostly, we do not know.

Two of Orbison’s sons, 6 and 11, died
when the Hendersonville home
went up in flames. Orbison’s second wife,
Barbara, passed away
on the 23rd anniversary of the singer’s death.

Once, three thousand years ago,
Moses asked God,
Who could have made the world any way He wanted,
why He’d created suffering.

Moses, whose name means
“one drawn from the water,”
was the only prophet
to speak with God face to face,
that is, in a waking state.
But he heard only staticky silence–
oceanic, wavelike,
the crackling of a turntable
following a song’s final note.

Copyright 2023 Yehoshua November

Yehoshua November’s books include Two Worlds Exist (Orison Books, 2016) which was a finalist for both the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize.