Rosh Chodesh Elul II

Left shul before shofar
So wake me up, wind
Play with my hair
Pull me to awareness

Rosh Chodesh Elul I

I eat pizza
with friends as the sun
descends on a tefillinless day,

talk future
with a new classmate
between sunset and stars,

chuck flour
with grain moths
as my first act of Elul

The Dybbuk Respoken

"I came to watch that I might see a stranger God"

The center and the peripheries

There is a pebble before my cross-leggedness
Its rippled shadowedge darkens toward the other edge of its vertical surface
In looking I hear the whispers stronger than the voices
God is like the negative spaces of a doughnut, in the center and the peripheries
An ant traces its own alphabet in the grainground
It does not have to fall off the face of the earth to reach
transcendence, it can burrow in deeper,
all the way to China

Piles

This time last year
in a dark noisy room
I leaned to my left
and you leaned right and I said

"This time last year
I was crushing on you
so hard!" And you lit up
and said "Me too!"

and like years piling
upon gone-by years
our arms found rest
upon each other's shoulders

and we swayed one more time
to the same old niggun