I never wanted to be a Teva for us all.
I never wanted to hold chaya, chayiot,
rich and roiling, inside me.
I didn’t ask to be responsible, to hold the
reeking, hot, plasticky, darkness, of bitumen pitch,
of chickens and deer and
humanity too, while all life like so much dust from a chalkboard
is blotted out, drowned around me.
I wonder if the Cosmic Sluice (who by opening
her wretched gullet dooms
us all) has enough
tohu v’bohu to
make tov with the faint chalk outline
of the passed.
My small window
hung like a dream
can only let in
so much light.
I could never have been a Teva for us all.
My stiff body, wood and reeds, and pitch,
cannot be the womb of the world,
cannot support the entire world.
I float then through a graveyard,
as the waters become their Teva,
their casket.
Ruach Ha Olam,
why was my first beam cut? Was it
so my Earthenware body could grieve your loss too?
Cyprus trees I knew from sapling,
Cyprus trees I grew alongside,
reach up and scrape at my hull.
My bitumen pitch, Divine-ordered even keel,
leaves flakes in my wake, like the
dust from that same wiped cosmic chalkboard.
I don’t feel even-keeled. I feel
bodies in the water.
Bodies of small animals, birds, and
children scrape against my supposedly even-keel.
A community is too heavy to carry alone,
yet these waters, these
terrible God awe-ful waters,
keep buoying me up.
I don’t want to be a Teva for us all –
but as Noah waits for his third dove to return
I know it all will be over soon.
When I land,
at the peak of Mount Ararat, Uratu
Do I – can I let them go? These
Neshimot, these souls inside me.
Can I feed them to a watery world?
Will I sit and rot? Until my lichen-rich ribs become faded memory?
I wish I could have been a Teva for us all.
Through my small window, a new dawn is breaking.
The dove is still gone, Noah knows. He
steers me, yanks on my stricken rudders,
toward a break in the waves.
