34 toward the Omer

I didn't finish registration but still have a nametag, a folder, a mug, a crimson baseball cap. Pablo asks what I am looking for in reunion. I say I can't see underneath my memories.

33 toward the Omer

Splendor, humility, gratitude, in splendor, humility, gratitude

Sometimes when I have trouble perceiving the world as real I soften and crouch my own importance and what a gift it is to be a smallness among air, trees, parked cars, houses

32 toward the Omer

What does it mean to count? To mark each number as coming after another? To say we have arrived here? Counting is thanking the earlier years of not knowing but somehow persevering.

31 toward the Omer #2

I restore ease
to my throat
by drinking just
a couple sips
of green tea
from the mug
sitting right in
front of me,
kind of hope she
reads this poem

31 toward the Omer

tiferet shebhod

A balloon rests against the ceiling of my girlfriend's co-op's living room. I do not know where it is from. Is it where it wants to go? How would I know?

30 toward the Omer

gevurah shebhod

After days of feeling my fingers into the thinner patch on the right side of my head I realize people spend to be safe from imperfection and it doesn't work

29 toward the Omer

chesed shebhod

After the show we pose with the Blue Man who had seen me while searching through the audience for human contact and I almost walk away without thanking him

28 toward the Omer

malkhut shebnetzach

The watered brush brought
slow across the cotton,
slow, so color drops
on every single fiber,
or maybe it is
just arising through, a
wellspring seeping resolutely through

27 toward the Omer

yesod shebnetzach

Continuing to be with a friend after both of us have finished our tea I realize it takes going past the end to find the center again

26 toward the Omer

The last thirteen minutes free before the end of the day, not that the next two hours won't contain other personal goodnesses like soup and friend

and I had such high hopes or maybe they were even midlevel, just the notion of space and time and me all smiling with each other

with this notebook and my pen and my hand, and you would be there, whether or not I remembered to notice as such, just like now,

just like that Jen opened the kitchen windows an hour ago and then I forgot and am only starting to know again I hear birds twittering

and even so I have to look to see the wind moving the clusters of burgundy leaves on branches of the tree in the neighbor's yard

and I get it, the pattern of naaseh v'nishma doesn't end, it only fractals, the twin vectors of do and learn forming your tiny little pathways