The future

Once seeing
the future
I want it

Why is
my growth
yet to do?

Mrs. Which,
can you just
close the wrinkle?

Time does not
exist in a
line, there are

older and
younger people
all around us

Journeying

Written during the Hurricane Sandy indoor days, Oct. 2012, while studying at Yeshivat Hadar.

        Sounds like you are really
        journeying,
she said. I knew what she meant, but it still took me by surprise. Woke me up a bit. Hadn’t been thinking of my life like that, hadn’t designated these months as a time for personal development, for growth, for "discovering myself," none of that sort of stuff. I guess sometimes a journey takes long enough that you cease to remember that you're on one, that you're traveling across some sort of internal or external ground. It’s like riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad for three days straight. If you look out the windows you see the landscape scrolling past, but with the curtains shut you can forget you’re even moving, forget that there’s a life to live outside of your companions, your bed, the toilet, the aisle, the water dispenser, the instant soup. You’re stationary. In a space instead of traversing a space. The trip becomes everything that has ever existed—until you arrive, when all of a sudden, it’s like the trip never happened. Your journey, once its own lifetime, becomes some hazy recollection of happiness, a dream bookended by disparate realities, a dream severed from reality. As if you’re a Sorry! or Candyland or Chutes & Ladders game piece that landed on a square, slid along a squiggly path, and ended up on another square farther along the board. For a second you slide along, maybe accompanied by some sort of sound effect, but no one really cares about the squiggle after the fact, not really.
        Except for in conversations about one’s "Jewish Journey." Then everyone’s fascinated. It’s suddenly all about the squiggle, about using calculus to tease out the discrete points and angles and velocities that form the curves of your increasing and decreasing levels of frumkeit. What were the seminal events and people that led you to be where you are today? How did you morph, silently, ponderously, to accept ideas and positions you once ridiculed?...

Foul-weather friend

God sees me still and silent
in the doorway. "It's been a while,"
God says. "Feeling a bit distant
from people again?" I nod numbly.
"Come," God says, and I obey,
let myself down to the tiled floor,
rest my back against God's chairleg.
God tousles my hair. I close my eyes.
"You can stay here tonight," God says.
"I'll let you know when it's morning."

Dirt road

"Come on," he says.
"But the dust," I say,

"It's so beautiful
in the air, it

glows, it sparkles
rainbow in the sunlight."

"Stop kicking it up," he says.
"You've gotta let it settle

if you're ever gonna walk on it."

Learning

Coffee is in the
other building, which is
closer to class, I'll

sit there and finish
my Buddhism reading and
hope it changes me,

as Rav Eitan says,
it's not learning if
it doesn't change you

An acorn spins on
the path like a
compass, one of those

magic ones that don't
point north but rather
to where you should go

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