Witz: A Novel

By Joshua Cohen

On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt . . .

Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, "real" world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: May 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781564786173

Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the author of several books, including A Heaven of Others and Witz. His nonfiction has appeared in Bookforum, The Forward, Harper's and other publications. He lives in New York City.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR WITZ

"Reversing and resisting what Cohen sees as the contemporary Jewish novel’s tendency to market the past as a ‘fashion,’ with ‘minorities overcoming obstacles,’ this novel is a linguistic extravaganza that negates reader expectations …Witz is a brave and artful attempt to explore and explode the limits of the sentence."

—New York Times Book Review

A reminder of the serious import of the literary novel, the novel as linguistic artefact.

—TLS

The kind of ambitious, intelligent novel of ideas that will demand your full attention for 824 pages and repay you by rewiring your cerebral cortex in a fundamental way.

—The Stranger

Entertaining, adventurous and delightfully absurd.

—Time Out New York

A compelling…primal plea for the return of a tradition to its messy, marginal, but living roots.

—BN Review

The great lyrical sweeps of Cohen’s writing must be applauded.

—Library Journal

[Cohen] reminds us what literature is: the self-conscious representation of the world using language.

—Forward

Cohen packs whole histories and destructions, maps and traditions, into single sentences. He employs lists, codes, and invented syntax with the sure hand of a visionary, his prowess and passion further emboldened by a boundless sense of scope.

—Believer

Witz

other works by JOSHUA COHEN

The Quorum

Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto

Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed

A Heaven of Others

Witz

A NOVEL BY JOSHUA COHEN

DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

CHAMPAIGN AND LONDON

Copyright © 2010 by Joshua Cohen

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Joshua, 1980-

Witz: the story of the last Jew on earth / Joshua Cohen. -- 1st ed.

p.cm.

ISBN: 978-1-56478-617-3

1. Jewish fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.O42434W58 2010

813’.54--dc22

                                                     2009046093

Partially funded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

The publisher and the author would like to thank Rick Fishbein, Ahron Weiner, and Rabbi Alan Lucas (Temple Beth Shalom) for their generous support of this project

www.dalkeyarchive.com

Cover: design by Danielle Dutton.

In one of our many pious books, we are told the following:

One should not stack books of a lesser holiness atop books of a greater holiness.

Tellingly, in another one of our pious books this dictum is turned on its head—in a story:

A rabbi stacked a book of the Talmud atop a book of the Torah. Another asked him, Why are you doing that? And the rabbi answered him, In order to preserve the book of the Torah, because by covering it with this I will save it from the dust and the ashes that might fall upon it.

Regardless of which one follows, the book you are holding now should, when stacked, always be placed in the middle.

This book you are about to read contains no holy words or letters, neither words nor letters in the Holy Tongue, and nowhere within it are mentioned any of the many names of God.

Therefore, this book may be ripped or torn, burnt, otherwise destroyed, and whatever remains require(s) no burial.

            

—God

DEADICATED

to mine enemies,

without whom none of this would have been possible

and Thy write hand shall save me…

Witz:

being, in Yiddish, a joke;

and, as the ending of certain names,

also meaning son of:

e.g. Abramowitz,

meaning son-of-Abram

(also found as –wic, –wich, –wics, –wicz, –witch, –wits, –wyc, –wych, –wycz, –vic, –vich, –vics, –vicz, –vitch, –vits, –vitz, –vyc, –vych, and –vycz).

Contents

I

Over There, Then

A First Helping

II

III

2

IV

V

Preparations

6

Welcome to Whateverwitz

In the Church

The Last Supper

The Museum of Museums

Punchlines

I

Over There, Then

IN THE BEGINNING, THEY ARE LATE.

Now it stands empty, a void.

Darkness about to deepen the far fire outside.

A synagogue, not yet destroyed. A survivor. Who isn’t?

Now, it’s empty. A stomach, a shell, a last train station after the last train left to the last border of the last country on the last night of the last world; a hull, a husk—a synagogue, a shul.

Mincha to be prayed at sundown, Ma’ariv at dark.

Why this lateness?

He says reasons and she says excuses.

And so let there be reasons and excuses.

And there were.

A last boat out, why didn’t they catch it? They didn’t have their papers? their papers weren’t in order?

He says excuses and she says reasons.

And so let there be excuses and reasons.

And there were, if belated.

Misses Singer strokes her husband’s scar as if to calm him. But what she calls a scar he knows is his mouth.

Late because they’re stuck in one exilic fantasy or another; late because the adventure of ingathering doesn’t seem all on the up and up; late because they’re owed payments, and you’re goddamned right they’re going to collect…what’s yours? I’m just waiting for this one deal of a lifetime to come through, and, when it does, God! the moment it does, you’d better believe I’m out of here…

Singer stops, stoops to pick up a shoe, sized wide, fallen from his withered foot last step.

Nu, it’s been like this ever since he was born, and those long, hard years have all been as yesterday’s toll: the bridge crossing, the bottomless price of a boat full with holes, an aeroplane cast down from heaven, betrayed of its wings. And it’s not as if he hasn’t crawled his end of the bargain: wriggling ever forward from garden to grave, he’s trying, just ask him; if he hadn’t married so well, he’d have to gnaw down a branch for a cane. And then what: you pray for a splinter, you get a tree in return, from whose flesh is made paper and from whose fruit is sucked ink, both of which collaborate in God’s writing of Laws whose words and even the letters of which bless you beholden to meaning; and so we receive knowledge, such as the following, and the preceding, and this: in seeking only to stay upright, you fall, are banished then cursed and reviled, condemned to wander a continent you don’t even know where you’re going, only when you’re expected, which is every Friday at sundown though your calendars were never coordinated and what you always thought had been west was really only a left turn taken with your back to the north, in haste and with little sleep, then upon your forehead, the development of a worrying mark.

A meal after Shacharit, which is the prayer of the morning, praising God Who made the light only by saying it illuminating, also, our own saying of thanks to Him for not making us unto them—the animals, women, or sick; for not yet giving us over to the darkness of death—shadows that have no souls for which to pray if even they could, as they lack both voices and hearts, shuffle their bloated, crapulous ways into shul: Unaffiliated, jingjangling keys—there couldn’t be! that many doors…goyim nameless faceless nearly formless, quiet massing hulks emerged out of dim wet here to make a living that’s more a dying. It’s strange, no one understands: they’re here to help, not destroy. Be calm. One sweeps up; another sweeps the seats for articles and personal effects left behind, by night. Yet another stacks books on the almemar, shoves them, balled up crumpled wet, into pew pockets, lays them out on seats swept toward the rear, nosebleed territory from which the Shammes groans in with an enormous what hath God wrought iron key, looped on a rope around his waist, hanging low under his gut, swinging with his stride—which is as long and wide as the last night he’ll spend here, free, unconcerned.

Hours later when hours were still hours as restful and lit as all Sabbath’s day, not the binding celestials of numeral and ordinal, the narrow gauge of comet trains, stardeadline, failing, falling, the tickers of arrival and departure and arrival, diurnal again—the clock centerpieces upon our timetables that not only remind us when to partake but are, simultaneously, the only sustenance left—the Affiliated muster, assemble outside…soon, there’s a congregation beyond: nondenominational, because what does observance mean anyway, irreligious maybe even, or all of them heaped together, thrown atop the burning pile, who knows, with the languages who can tell? Their bloods are their tickets, purchased at a steep price or a long song much in advance. Presence by the pint. They lineup two-by-two, two of each kind, husband and wife. They’ve restedup, washedup, dressedup; they’ve reported for showers and were shorn. There’s last summer’s rose attar, perfume stagnant in air—or it’s smoke, strangely sweet…

Menschs bow down by the curb, bow at the knees and cast fingers, fish around in last regime’s grates and late afternoon’s puddles for anything that’s not yet blown away: loose pages, blots of blatt, daf stains, yellowed newspapers the print of which’s run off to tomorrow with yesterday’s wife, scraps of rag, parchment or is it just skin, God, it’s skin. As a handful of the oldest menschs bow, they fall, are then helped back to their feet by menschs only slightly younger, each of them by another younger by just a wink or a wrinkle, they’re righted, and so now they’re ten altogether, which makes us a minyan. Runoff is wrung out from these yarmulkes, mud knuckled away with spit. The menschs gather these scraps, spread them on glassy bald skulls with thumb’s knife, against the gusts at the doorway, as if they didn’t have these frags and parches, corking it All down, their heads would spill out to the sky. And its vault. Never forget the vault. Windily, they kiss at the jamb, which is marked. An Unaffiliated at the door hands out books, programs inside, both also pressed into yarmulkes.

Yellow over red to brown over black if I’m squinting it right, I don’t have my glasses on me just now, comes to west through the windows. Then, Let there be light, and there is light and if not good, then so-so—eh, though you might prefer feh. It’s not theirs, though: insight is forbidden to the assembled, at least here, and what they seek in their own homes, hosting ruin just past the horizon, and on their own time, which is almost up, is absolutely none of our business. Two lights becoming one becoming two: the Shammes has lit candles, flame, but the fire’s outside. The stainedglass remains dark. The floor’s a mess: remnants of flowing tracery, shards of leaded panes from the windows lancet and rose, long replaced or walled up due to heating costs; pews’ rubble heaped to the side, seating’s splinters, scrapped immature limbs—for use in stoking the furnace.

They’re still late—it’s a long walk and in these shoes…

Those who aren’t late yet they go some to the left some to the right and up the stairs, to the balcony there: the cheap seats, the women, forgive; some have forgotten though they’re forgiven, reminded again. Entering, the audience is shaking hands; they hug, kiss, and make inquiries with the hands they’re not shaking. Shoes echo off stone. Sweeping suits up in their hands, gathering skirts and slacks they sit, Phfoy. Elders should sit first, but the kinder these days threw respect to the dogs, a distant barking the night through. Cushions, where there are cushions, in the first few rows, wheeze out a measure of dust. Coughs and sneezes ensue, allergies. Some sit on benches, others on seats along the wall, at shtenders, a nod to the old traditionalists: a grip on the hat’s brim, a little bow, the upright stooping to become the fallen in greeting, left wordless while the dialect’s still being decided. Everyone’s pooped, the day’s pooped…I yi yi and all that kitsch, it once was. A few sit in pews, they appear ashamed, remote; there are foldingchairs way in the back. The room’s filling up; there aren’t enough seats, never are, no room, no space, no air: some stand rocking for warmth as if they’re their own mothers; others sit on headstones hauled desecrated from the cemetery beyond; there’re a few pieces of remaindered furniture outside, too, holy borax that’s rental on special, on remnants of sample carpeting they sit anywhere they can, on frayed cushions over loose currencies, sagging under weight, on a sofa with corneal slipcover making piecework flatulence when you go to give up your seat to someone with more hope, or is it less luck, I don’t know—to make way for others, people standing on people pouring in through the smashed in shattered out windows slicing their guts open on jagged edges of glass then falling their ways in, intestinal ladders and no, no angels registered, not tonight…though if not now, if you’re such a Hillel, then when—then never: widows and orphans emerging from drafts of pure nothingness and of the absence of pure nothingness, which is just the proof of pure nothingness, yadda; they lean against the walls, crouch in neighboring alleys—with the door left open a crack.

Womenfolk above, the menschs below—the women can’t complain: it’s all ritual, no one’s fault, merely a gesture to what, who remembers; the women disappearing behind the mechitza, then peeking out, disappearing again. Curtains, bodying presences—is that the one I’m in love with? her sister? maybe her mother?

How can the room hold so many, their light—so fresh, so clean, such blushing about the face? Virginal, their apples intact, if desperately ripe. For the purposes of swallowing them the shul seems to expand, a snake’s mouth, releasing an inky venom decreeing the digestion of a millennium, slower. The Fire Marshal Who art in Heaven has bestowedeth upon them His blessings of numinous capacities and maximal occupancies, illimitably, which means nevermore up for renewal…a great oven, heating.

Authorities up on High have dictated All.

A group huddling past the river of three names and of no name, done feeding the waters, done watering them, and so just in time to make the first seating’s lights: they’re rushing in, they’re dripping, taking the steps down to humble, supplication doesn’t matter if meant as it’s imposed from above—this ducking through the portal so that their prayers might rise up from the depths; and, too, so that they don’t smack their heads that’s how low.

Psalm 130, if you know it. An arch.

They’re entering their Father’s House—but is their Father home? Anyone, anyone?

You were expecting what besides miserly decoration, impoverished, no humanity, just faceless lions and onewinged birds, frozen midroar and half tweeting. Above the ark, where the scrolls are kept, where no scrolls will be kept anymore—a tympanum, a woodwork canopy peeling paint and blue mold; deepplanted vaunt, hardened bounty amidst carved drapery, earthen vines strangling eternity, then above, only ribbing. Menschs on the lowest level, their wives and daughters higher, upon the balcony then on balconies decorated in rock flowers and jewels, who knows how many of them on up to the stone seat of the moon, as if one half of the Decalogue, the cleaved five commandments, and who can sneak a look? or else they’re kept to the side, or toward the rear, the women, nearest the western wall, the separating grillwork a veil of metal, an armor of plaits…the menschs keep turning, keep coming up with prayerless occasions to turn their eyes upward, behind. We’re inattentive, weekly; resentful, daily; at all times our souls unprepared—beginning there at the ceiling, its crown, an ornamental rib intended to forsake the vault of a cross. An extra, whether left from Creation or a predating build. An almemar parts the room, though later in the show the staging will remove itself to the eastern wall, the pulpit: another migration, yet another orientation, and so which way to face, though the movements are known, felt instinctually—are up and down and back and forth, in and out and this and that and what where, only now.

Everything known better days. The worn steps up to the proscenium’s ark, arching at the height of the street once again: their cups covered over in dissolute pillows, stuffed with who wants to think. Just inside the vestibule, a lavabo for the washing of hands before prayer’s suffered drought. Those without prayerbooks are to read the prayers that have been written on the walls in a hand unwashed. A hand impure, in that it’s withheld.

At that proscenium, arkways, the House Manager, resident schlockmeister extraordinaire, an obese mensch shvitzing nerves in this freeze, smokes a frond rolled in loose page, fitted into a holder hollowed out from his humerus; he taps ash to the floor, lines of ash indicating staging. All has been blocked since eternity. The pit’s just below; the baldspot on the Conductor’s head blinding the balcony: he’s bent over his score, baton in one nostril out the other, scribbling his cues in fanatical charcoal, circling rests and only the rests. Tacit. His tuxedo’s motheaten, his cummerbund an enormous expropriated armband. A clarinet running scales up from the chalumeau, embouchure cracked, his reed a sliver of skull; a fiddler, a tallskinny mensch to the clarinet’s shortfat, fiddling with the tuner on his tailpiece: if he’s sharp he’s sharp, if he’s flat he’s flat, it’s the thought that counts, condemns; an organist, pulling out all the stops, warming up the webbed pipes; the Copyist rushes in, vaults over the rail, trips over stands, slipslides in spitvalve discharge, hands out parts barely dry, just finished as all work—not just that of Creation but of copying, too—must be barred from the sunset: dusk’s red ink smeared, ink that actually ran out yesterday and is now only blood worried with spit; the Prompter wiping his forehead with the House Manager’s noserag, then numbering cue cards with a quill so sharp his cousin could perform morally impossible ocular surgery with it—a procedure ensuring prophetic hindsight, would help. The House Manager, lapels at his ears, flicking the switch to the Applause sign, ON and OFF then ON again, as onstage, the Emcee the rabbi pops Polyn’s P’s into the microphone smuggled in tonight only.

Testing…

Testing…

One—Two—Three…

Is this thing on?

…

Good evening, ladies & gentlemen…and feedback attends

Try the veal!

…

the fivethirty show’s exactly the same as the threethirty show—and thanks folks, I’ll be here all week…

Nu, that’s what he thinks.

As feedback echoes, feeds back on itself the sound cud, swells in the mouth to air raid proportions, but it’s maybe a drill, let’s hope, or a close relative screaming Name somewhere near—as the crowd alarmed, is made fidgety, restless…a buzz that is its own sting, inspiring of shock, the instinctive Amen that surprises: people whispering to each other, jawing that it’s finally, about time—unannounced, from the leftwing stageright, the cantor comes forward, arrayed in an illfitting white kittel.

Houselights of the world to dim, out; the candles guttering brighter.

They don’t know to sit or stand: there’s a great creaking, an opening of books, a mass cracking of covers, a slitting of page with the forefingernail, honey on the pagetips to encourage as the rabbi intones off the script, introduces himself, yet again; it’s a foreign language, yet another tongue’s trouble: it’s a responsorial without a response, or actually anything to respond to…how’s everybody doing tonight? we’d like to thank you all so much for coming.

Blessed Art.

A buzz at its height, as if a hive dangled down from the roof of the night: people whispering, shouting, screaming final warnings, advice; addresses overseas to be memorized, 36,000 12-Millionth Street, Apartment 3B and ring twice; times and dates…the corner of Broadway & Innocence, 1952, 6 pm; lashon hara…it seems here, the pages are different: some have books with oddnumbered pages, others just even; some of the books only have numbers: digits—and dashes; other books have photographs in them, are only photos, images black & white, and uncaptioned, or the pages, whatever they have or say or show, don’t correspond to whatever it is the rabbi or is he the cantor, the chazzan, I forget, he does, too, announces twotongued, in every translation known to this side of the ocean: page 296, two-nine-six, page number twohundred-and-ninetysix, in the white book, you can do your own conversion for the blue.

Old menschs up front flip through their books, shaking heads, muttering Substance at all the blank pages: what should be, what should’ve been, they fill it in with the lip’s drip, the tongue’s ink. Nearest the ark, the oldest menschs standing and swaying throughout as if letters themselves, though letters still in flux, still being developed, not yet bound to fixed form. O the aleph reach, the bet bend, the gimel footforward, as if symbols with bad joints, with stiff cuffs, one leg shorter than fractured heels down below; while up top, roofing: their necks twisted to cripple, though as beautiful then still ruled permissible, kosher. Their books held out as if their own ornaments, as if crowns, tags, and kotz, they’re just black covers, no pages at all. And as for how they’re pronounced, they’re stilted, not inept but unpracticed, hinged klutzy with rust, as if requiring miracle oil, rededication to the task of innermost knowledge…as if asking themselves, who knows their own name? how to say the self ’s secret, pronounceable only if known? Argumentative, they give way to grumbling, learned grumbling, studiously insistent nodding as if their very own lettered bodies in their movements and shapes would, too, give movement and shape to their sounds: arms flowing out into fingery vowels. In the back, where voices still carry, kinder play in the aisles, odd games of lots; the sacred idiot drools into the mouth of the drunk.

Late, they arrive, finally do us the honor of showing up, about time. Survivors, us all—you’re cordially invited to join together with the congregation in this staring at them down the aisle a murmur, through the mess of mismatched to their seats. Reserved. They arrive, can you blame them, as if they didn’t show up the show wouldn’t have started without them; we wait, as they fill in the last remaining seats, except one. Reserved still. One seat’s always left empty, always reserved, still remains: the empty seat and door open a draft are not quite contingencies, but gestures.

And so we might wait for an apology, but who’s listening, no one: everyone catching up, breath, asking after, brides, cousins, do you know whatever happened to her; ordnance outside, or is it just in my head; explosions, shaking the shul deeper into its foundations: every house is built upon its own grave, as if a pit for a brother, at home in a hole pitched seven years’ deep: at least it’s the earth, and as such, livable, knowable—as who can sleep in the sky, who can lie down in the air and be comfortable there? The clarinetist bends a note, and Heaven bends, brass, night’s rainbow of one widened band: darkness, the void, O the Covenant Who forgot.

Air’s typhus, from the Hellenist typhos, an impure word we’ve been infected with, fatal: meaning smoky, a blemishing haze. All around, puddles of lands-men wait to take their place, their places, ours, as brainfog, impenetrable cloud whose controlling deities are also charged with scalping and illegal recording. The first one inside and the last one inside sit next to each other, atop one another, share between them a book, but there aren’t enough books, never are. Ben Someone or Other’s summoned up to the almemar, the bima an island at middle he bridges across on the backs of his fathers; he throws up his tallis, is hugged, kissed, returned, hugged, kissed, then seated again, bound to his chair with tefillin. Outside faces press up against glass, crucified by the mullions, they’re stretched across shards, eventually shattering, each other, themselves; window glass that’s been silvered over, why not, the better to straighten yourself for what’s to come—and so, mirrors in which the waiting arrange hairs, under collars tuck ties, breathe against the panes to know they’re alive.

A sphere makes its way around a sphere, is made.

There’ll be no east one of these tomorrows, there’ll be no rising—an unleavened morning for the wrong New Year.

And the assembled, settle.

Night. Of what colors were left, half were bleached into the moon and stars, deloused into white, an assimilation to air, high and rare above smoke; the other half, though…the afternoon’s sky: only a sleeve salvaged of a coat of many colors come bleeding through the wash outside; hues ripped from rays of the sun, snapped harpstrings the strands of a rainbow—forgotten. Now dark, which nights everything passing through it, none left untainted: a black beyond black, benighting, not so much the color of death as already an aftermath, a survival, what survives dream; black, the last color: the hair of sleeping girls, sent away to work off their breasts and hips, indentured abroad only to exhaust their own fate; the effects of an infinite yellowing: passport pictures curling at corners from fires never extinguished, Never Forget!—a night of the ninth plague, not yet; a night like whole hunks of blackbread in the mouth, soon…a night by the night: its blackness bound by stars without number and nameless, a wall then the river around it of their drained radiations: greater dawn’s strain to make it through its own pricks and dings that, in truth, are the stars, dimmed.

As our rabbi, a firstborn though he doesn’t like to brag much, beadles the floorboards by the pulpit—the tenth plague readies, is kept readied in the wings: the ninth plague sets the stage for the tenth, the arch for its entrance; though the ninth plague’s also the tenth plague’s commandment, then the eleventh’s, the twelfth; how the ninth plague is, ultimately, no plague in itself but rather the condition of all plague: its blackness appropriate, the colluding, concealing dark without morning to bear witness, clear air. And, as this is the very beginning of this last night to plague and be plagued without end, this, too, is the beginning of the very last Sabbath of all time, if not just of their lives; tell me, though, how those aren’t the same, two-of-a-kind? A Shabbos eternal we’re welcoming eternally—as any sun that should ever set again would only ensure a day of rest whose holiness must blush in comparison with the sacrifice of this one, of ours, and so desecrating in retrospect, a defilement made all the graver thanks to its very posthumity. And so, a time for rest now, this day of rest now, such rationed rest that’ll last as long as light will be remembered. An idle worship, given to graven imaginings. Because, with regard to that memory, there’s not much of it left—but still, there’s hope…to be hoped for.

Above the sill of the world, a pair of diamonds suspended. The moon and its stars, and the diamonds, too, are the impurities in the night, of the night, impurifying as those diamonds they’re only poetry, art; casements flecked with white paint, rubbled with plaster chips, remains of parget…these lights—no candles or candlesticks, which have been sacrificed to the rubble, melted down with their wicks wicked away, wisped into smoke with the upward ambition of flame—hover; what’s left is only their purpose: a question…does the light float in darkness? or the darkness around light?

No weather and the roof is maybe, hymn, missing, skullcaps blow off, blown around; there’s no refuge. Whether the roof was bombed through or, perhaps, has been landed on one too many times by messenger storks resting on which season’s way out…or, in another interpretation: there is, indeed, a roof, and from there’s where it’s raining, then snow.

Skypages blow from books that have pages, loose pages blown, wet paper mushed, pulped, wildly flung about and grasped at, stolen and promise to tell no one, they’re killed for; rain to snow, clumps of snow as if stillborn moons, this sleet and hail, this fiery hail, retributive fallings, a weather testamentary, Creation first testing its power: what can my sky do? is what God should be asking…though ignoring that voice, they jump out of their own voices and stoop to grab at skin now, piecing through the pages, this vellum taken in vain, binding themselves back together without a sense for order, with spit dripped from the seams of a beast remade, with weather into the shape of a cloud dispelled: to stoop and shirk from any mumble, that would avail a response to the mumbling of the rabbi who’d begun his own not in prayer but dismay—at their willingness to follow fate, but not his called command. From what illiterate womb is such disorder born? This reading of prayers they’ve read or should’ve read or had read to them lifetimes before, and yet prayers they’ve never, not even once, understood; the ignorance of a tongue redeemed…as they’ve never listened, heard, attended with still and silence. If reading for us is only memory—daily repetition as a guide to the pilpul perplexing, undertaken with any acronym’s help, enlisting all manner of mnemonic wonder and signs—then the following mysticism might preempt, be permitted: In the beginning was the Word, that word was all words, the book, any book, in which each letter falling into the arms of its mother is in itself the word whole—the Shibboleth, the Passwoyd, the Name of God, no one knows. The recitation of a spare set of teeth. While praying, no one knows what they’re saying not because no one knows the language of prayer, but because no one knows themselves, and so they pray: they dress themselves and shave and stoop and bow only in order to hope anew—only to ask for a tomorrow for which they might be dressed, be shorn, stooped and bowed, in which to pray again.

For an end to all this, to all time.

Tonight, though, they’ll be gone, with only their refuse, their lost and never to be found again articles to acknowledge existence, forgetting’s relics already enshrined, cataloged as just so much charity within a book glassed on display, not for use (a ledger, the list)—only to be replaced next week, same moon’s time, by a new shipment, a congregation bound in a box. The shul’s an enormous phylactery; the shul’s swollen like a stomach full and starved. No oneg shall follow, no Kiddush luncheon will save with its sponsor.

Slowly, with the pressures of privation, the weather, they remember, a response or else the responded to, same difference, especially if delivered in the hooked nosespeak of their father’s father’s father; respecting the variations, there are so many on so few—how many letters can an alphabet finally hold before it becomes a language unto itself, and so mysticism, tamei is the code, which is forbidden as bilbul, nonsense not proscribed but worthless, a waste save in how it preserves the minds and lives of those whom we’d otherwise lose to a God Who can be imaged as us—amid the shadow, embarrassment, failure; such intimacies, become parables and are foreseen to have become parables; everything’s known in advance, subsequently incorporated into the liturgy, written into the script in a fire that then destroys the script, ashes to ashes, prophecy received by the dead. All of this happened, and only then was cued—in this house, under the sky, this outstretched armband arching our world, as if a banner shaming the scroll unrolled in representation of the afterlife we’d once been promised, or so we claim in our beseeching of the only power who might grant us such succor: our kinder, who by now have all emigrated, or burnt. At the almemar, the gabbai oldtimers, the altes, the priests and the pillars, they’re still fingering what, cantillation, their arms flapping in approval disapproval all the same this way then that, the dim forms of the nusach for morning—then the roll sign, hands tumbling down a hill; business ensues; many blessings!

As the show ends, the service is what they say now, Ma’ariv it’s usually transliterated as, the rabbi exits stageright, the cantor the chazzan stageleft, Amen, they return along with the entire supporting cast to receive flowers under the proscenium arch, holding aside the petals and those of the ark’s curtain and gushing red, davening still duchening even and everything intensely meant and from the waist and kissing air then waving; the velveteen falls and rises, another round of applause, the velveteen falling, then rising again, a third and final round its applause scattered, Diasporated how they’re just standing around now they’re waving goodbye, then the velveteen falling again this time the last, the house lights go up for a finale as exit music swells from their mouths, zmirot: the players exit stage everywhere, wash, dress, and shave to shuckle through the stagedoor to the street, its grabbing hordes and their faithful hounds…down Prinz, sit.

The Rosenkrantzes and the Singer family rise and Misses Rosenkrantz searches around her seat if she’s dropped or left anything behind, and she hasn’t so she waddles out the row to the aisle to meet her husband who’s halfway already to the arch shining exit, quickly, her fat wobbles; as she reaches Rosenkrantz, there’s lightning, thunder, the house lights go out. A son, the ben Anybody to be made barmitzvah tomorrow if only, he emerges holding a long, thick, threewicked taper, thricebraided then those braids braided, its unified flame illuminating a knot that can only be undone through its melting; wax dribbles, scorches the hand. All stumble toward the arch out, step on each other, essentially trample one another, but politely, exceedingly viciously kind—a friendship’s tumult, unreal, as if faked; how the shul’s shrunk, it’s behind them now, and now the arch seems further, seems larger—as the shul backdrop’s withdrawn into the greater wings; an earthen set, perhaps, or a stage deserted, without fictive ornament or division, barren as if brokendown for the kindling—the deepest pit to be found through a hidden trapdoor…and the group, they find themselves in a field, empty—a nowhere. A sudden abandonment, but with the arch still ahead, and them standing facing.

A lone arch, standing free, with nothing on either side or above them; an arch, which enters and exits onto nothing, Niemandsland never fulfilled. Though it only appears to them far and large, huge from here, it’s a low arch, its opening’s small: to enter, they’ll have to suck and stoop, must become humbled, be made modest again; they usher themselves still in seating order, roughly, elbowing, pushing, it’s madness, keep forward. It’s suddenly hot (it’d been winter): hell if they believe in it should be this hot, that’s how, though they don’t believe, they’re living it here and now, shanking, shouldering, angrily pleasant—and not hot exactly but fevered, a delirium through which they’re wandering, exhausted, heads shvitzing, and pits…sucking under their tongues: a bottle’s cloth teat; a railway ticket used once but unpunched; an edge of ex libris marked with a temperature number.

An arch, pushed up, it stands atop a mound, a hill, a high mountain—the pressure of the arch, the pull and push the very source of its support, and how a force is pulling and pushing them, too: Singer struggling up against his attacking heart, what’s called a preexisting condition; the Feigenbaums, the Rosenkrantzs, Singers, and Tannenbaums, stepping intrados to extrados and all that pagan parsing, the watchwords of idols: the archivolt with its inscription we’re too distant from, too far to read, the soffit, it’s unreadable, also…the vaulted above with its ogive, as sharp as a knife, murderous, then toward the middle of the arch, the hole, the drop, machicolation’s the term, from where the oil or boilingwater would be poured upon any enemy advancing, invading; progress in its deathmarch, slowed as their feet are made shoes themselves through procedures of callus, brass tacks, and metal—and how that wound opens: widens to the dip of the moon that’s only the sweep of a spotlight’s escape, and everything wanders: they grovel before the steps that lead toward it, up, the winding aisles and pillowed stones; stepping high over these hazards, as some are path slates, while others are as snares and barbs, bombs and mines, and how you never know which unless you step, or until. Know this, though: that upon passage through the arch, there’s no mezuzah to forget without kiss—if ever we arrive, and with our mouths survived.

An arch: stones go up then stones go down. Without mortar, it’s pressure alone that holds this thing up.

Once upon a morning, someone would’ve pulled up the sun: an old hand long unionized amid the rigging and tugging, would’ve risen it to shine through the arch with a frayed pole that’d serve as a rope—the sun to be framed in the arch, its face revealed, appearing as if only to receive the glory of the horizon’s siegheiling; then, risen under its own momentum and higher, up to the middle of the sky without middle, millions if not more of an archaic measurement above—it’d fix, be held, sun of Joshua, without shadow, day waiting…

An arch, skysized, though they still must stoop to pass through, to pass over unto—an arch, the entrance to and exit from, with nothingness on either side…

And then, that same Someone would’ve pulled the sun down, lowered it toward the horizon just opposite; hauling in all the properties for dimwatted storage. Even the sun falls, and in now’s inner light, the dinnerguests—because they are dinnerguests, and late, hungry, starving—throw shadows, as they gather themselves toward the set; they approach from the east, advancing, invading, a swarm, freshly showered locusts, shorn with their wives…hauling what they’re hauling you’d be slow, too, but they’re trying.

As they were late for the show, and as the show ended late, now they’re late for their dinner, expected: with a candle still burning held by a boy not so young anymore, melted old in his lasting, then a couple even with flowers, which have been snipped from the wilts of the wayside—essentially stolen, then wrapped up in skin, which is theirs though it be borrowed or bargained or dripping, and wine, which is red, dribbling behind them suspiciously thin; emptyhanded’s no way to arrive, no way to treat a host treating you. As they gather over the land, last explosions are heard, creationary clumps not a warning—smoke to the east they’re fleeing, if east: suns other and younger. They’re fired toward the arch, is the feeling: it’s oy the heat, which is worse though also welcomed as it means they still feel, then the smell, too, the burning, the singe of the sauce: baked chicken, and is that soup cooling on the stovetop above—tell me, I’m that lucky?

They smell; their nostrils open into their faces, eating up their heads into just more empty space to furnish then water with feed; there’s a distant door, opening…gusts: the smells of cedar and pine, lemonlime, which could as much be from the wood polish as the outdoors, from the forest as dark as it’s deep that’ll hide like a mouth as well as it swallows, keeps down; the smells, too, of fat, onion, paprika; they’re desperate for a snort, a schmeck to renew. Their mouths plump; saliva drips from the lip still ahead, trails from them for others to follow: a wandering path of goldening noodles, the more boiled the less hard the less straight and as yellow as yolks, with maybe a little cinnamon dusting, or sugar, that imitation cherry topping, too, not too much to ask; with each false wishniak sac soft in the redness of the #40 dye, how you bite into one and it just seeps into your tongue, you know, as your tongue itself and the pareve of it all’s as a sin: these noodles rise toward them, to greet, as if to wave, curl into their nostrils, then as if the shed skin of serpents, harden again, fossilize fixed, pulling them in, further and near and held tightly. Fumigations, as of the Temple days, but they’re themselves the sacrifices, and yet still how this offering’s intended for them, which means martyrdom. Such expectation, this sense without taste: wafting through their hooks caked in the mucuses of over six million infections; they inhale deeply, a reflex once guilty: enhancing the medicinal effect, as intended: them coming back to life, now that they’ve been called to account…deep in the diaphragm, a lineup at gut, as if reporting; they sneeze themselves into coughs, their lungs milk out a yellow, a responsive pure gold; their forms are wracked, they’re sent into involuntary fits, seizures, or it’s only now that they’re rushing, scrambling, no time to waste.

It’s not only the allergies or infections, though; it’s the promise of food more than the food itself, then the drink, the zissen l’chaim, the mashke, the schnapps, not even that—it’s the old appetite for the as-yet-unfulfilled. Their handkerchiefs, in their pockets, have been in their respective families for who knows how many generations ever since Adam first dressed Eve only in order that she should have a pocket for that apple of hers and so keeping her hands free for tree’s cleaning, the cooking of Eden: napkins stolen from the tables of every diningroom ever liquidated to stain more than could be sopped with a badge or by a country absorbed, clumped into tight balls, into furrowed globes, wadded with snot and liquids in a respiratory ersatz of rainbows. Approaching the summit, this Sinai’s high arch—they clear their throats, an invocation of phlegm, only in order to greet, to meet, say Shalom; only in order to tell their future generations of Adams and Eves about their own passage here—how they came to be at this dinner, how they came to sit and be served only after their crawl through the desert like snakes…the wasteland infertile no good racked an ocean away for the torture, the work details, the lineups, the musters, the no food or drink hunger and thirst, O the ovens!

Everything slows, when, to the kinder, the daughters Israelien all twelve of them Rubina through Batya, their guests, The guests as ours, are even only a few, fifteen minutes late, it’s forever. Rubbed wasted time, what to do. Sing a song, say a story. Tell me about your day, I’ll care as long as they’re coming. Upstairs. Our late wander on on intentions, always, please, and so it’s enough that they want to keep no one waiting, should be. Have patience, and enough with that shuffling. I’ll be up to tuck you in in an hour at 360º. Though this sound can’t be exorcised in that way, as it’s made in no image, has no source in the body that might seek to cool down or drown it: that of blood flowing’s too soft, a heartbeat too familiar, perhaps, makes you think of death’s love and not life, as it’s mechanically measured, pursed out by a Schedule, the pinch of a hand; it’s the tick, the timer’s tock, each tooth as its ancestor was, at the discretion of eternity, to the second, the minute; the sound, it comes from the oven, the oven at the end of the arch, the arch into the oven, then out the other side.

Here is their passing, from the world of the father to that of the mother, her power, again a reparenting: the menschs reduced, exampled less in their shrinking, their squeeze, while the womenfolk only gain, increase, go from strength to strength and further—over the ocean, perhaps the flow, the wetness, made it maternal. Over there, it’d been the Father, the overbearing idol, the loved one hated who’d reigned upon his high clerkdom chair, invested deeply in his dark office raiment, his threepiece, worsted wool suits, tie and hat, his habits of chess, coffee, tobacco, his ledgers kept in scrupulous scripture: sons mulling idle thoughts of patricide, while daughters were ignored, then the mother, too, she was kept marginal if not flipped past forgotten. Here and now, though, it’s the Mother, chesty in her coming, asserted—demonstratively disapproving, her questions as to how late they are proceeding without an apology, in mounting degrees of scrutiny with each tongued flick of the timer, which is the soul of her face tipped with the wag of a finger, accusative, the settling of blame on all but herself—and as for the father, he’s fallen, demoted, let go as the weaker, submissive, stripped bare of his birthright, mortified as made mortal; less meat and more soup: watery broth with its lentils cut up so that Aba won’t gag, it’s too sad. Admit how it’s sexualized, psychology, that science we’ve made to explain our suffering as an internal affair, if only to forgive those truly responsible and so, we hope, to avoid future wrath; the redoubled vengeance of those who do us the one, true, and inexplicable harm, as if nothing’s more natural save how well they keep themselves free from guilt…as if the sons surviving, they’ve agreed to dispense with the middle, the mediating paternal—and to head instead straight for the issue; to dive down headfirst, back into the black from whence they’d issued in warnings better kept private for centuries, generations of gross sublimation, denial: the Mother, the womb…them going into the oven, then out the other side—as another, reborn: not matricide, but an erotic fight—against death.

Her, she’s the head of the household now, around here wears the skirts.

And her tick, it sets even the kinder salivating—Josephine’s hiding under the covers, suckling knees that’re maybe her own. Her mother, our hostess, her timer’s swept through its circle, has timed the rich round of her face in a licking of crumbs from her chins…and yet still—despite the overwhelmingly regular, even attractive, features, the sweet eyes and mouth and the long lashes and small ears behind which the short hair hides as if it fears her, too, her snap judgments, her nosy impatience—and yet still, despite everything made in the mirror, it’s a roundness lamentably random, without relative order, not as much a mistake that can be rectified as it is an object that must be reckoned with in its every imperfection, you have my apologies: her moles and wrinkles, the marks of such an expressioned though meaningless spanse…her flesh morning moisturized and madeup in a false cycle imposed on the raw, is what rankles, puts off, the excess blotchy and loose without cream—ding, ding, Ding. And into all this, with its own history, its own pledges and perils if lesser than any they’d left then no less dire within their own context: counters, a dishwasher, a sink like a pit without bottom, its wastes drained entire counties away—into this, our guests emerge: they come through the arch, the homehearth, the stove he says oven she says and how she’s always right, it’s her kitchen—they enter it, into a world tiled and stainless an ocean away, across, on the wind, on the smoke; with the round white detector making a noise, frightening, an alarm misinterpreted and so, for a moment, until a window’s opened to air, everyone’s frozen, stilled with a bad heart ticked between times…this process not so much a transubstantiation as a forgetting; an experience maybe better controlled with medication, prescription: two pills—one for the heart and one for the head—and they’re Out, then In again…in this kitchen, where their hostess has been cooking away since forever: rushing to the sidedoor in heels matching her mitts, to wave their smoke out into night.

Tonight’s guests, they’ve endured the oppression of that most cultivated, civilizing of structures: an arch, which humbles, makes modest, weathering the threat of its stones to fall, the rocktumbled warning, the tomb’s guard, the sepulcher’s sentry, that that’s served from night immemorial as a gateway through the electrified fence to their keeping, ensuring a bow through the barbs, giving mouth to the fire that would destroy their design even as it feeds its own flames—O the deepthroated, humiliate way, this passage of exile that’s wordless yet punctuated with stark vowels of grief: the songlessness of the conquered, stooped under the arching shade of the willows by the banks of the Babylon rivers; the Roman shuffle as shy as a caretaker, pressed through the cracks between the stones of the Temple, to be remade into either oil or Europe: how they’ve survived if with head hung the terror underlying the form—the arch’s essential destruction, debasement: in its greatest manifestations forcing submission, almost negating of presence; in its least variations standing so tiny and tight that the quills along with the parchment are flayed from any soul processed through—how through this, again, they’ve survived, and miraculously with their appetite still intact…only to emerge from an oven, across the ocean and its lip they’re stepping high and slowly as if poultry themselves, so as not to break or catch anything over the door, opened for their hostess to check on the baking, theirs or that of a surrogate sacrifice—the chicken they’re coming out like, about to be served; still, singeing what hair they have left, snagging their limp, raggedy dresses, worn and torn skirts, their loose, thousandmark suits on wire racks whose grilling appears to mark stripes across their ripped uniforms, too, shreds them into ties, strips into bands to bind tight their hats in their hands. Their glasses go fogged, and so they remove them; they’re all wearing glasses: one schmuck in a pincenez, regular specs the rest; remove them by their bridges, by their noses, their ears, then go groping for the hems of their garments, to wipe. Upon emergence, their stars lose their luster and fall from their breasts, cool to the ground as if cookies or cakes of six pointed flavors, which are as treats for the kinder: holdovers, of sorts, to tide them for bed if they’re asleep come the dawn of dessert. Singer helps his wife out; the Rosenkrantzs, even the wife of them winnowed to bones by now and so dry they’re not even fit for the pot that clouds up above, its soup stirred around with a pinch too much pity—both try to cram through at the same time, but orderly, in step, holding hands. They’ve been conditioned so thoroughly by now, trained, made to follow orders as if a recipe for themselves: a perfect selfpoison, its only and secret ingredient, fear (they all bow their heads save the last of them, Feigenbaum, who hits his); some of them young, some old, some healthy, some sick, some, relatively—they might be related. As a homemaker, a homemacher, as her husband would kid, who she prides herself on knowing her way around every substitute, how to deal with each lack of ingredient, keeps herself knifesharp, spoon-willing, tines tastes herself to ensure: makes piles, takes lists, sneaks groupings and tests; and with no attempt to make separate, between who’s been expected, already counted into the sum of the chairs, assigned placesetting and portion, and who’s been lucky enough to have managed her charity with a spontaneous tip, or on an invitation palmed off secondhand—there won’t be a problem, I’m sure…as she comes back from her guard at the door, how she’s cold to the nose as she greets them whether by name or with respect for their ruses: some meriting hugs with the mittens all thumbs, and with kisses for others, one cheek each or one for each cheek, it depends.

They the arrived late ask altogether, Are we early? or only one or two of them do, of the women, that is, and how it just sounds that they speak for their husbands, as well—and foreheads are slapped…even that of the moon, a gestural smack at the glass, into night. When we don’t know what to do or say or even if, we ask, instead—if you’re uncomfortable in that, why don’t you take it off, change the subject—after the opinion of weather: It was warm today, unseasonally, but we’re in for a coldspell, I’m told…as some assemble as if into fronts themselves around the islands of kitchen, the counterings, a mass of grays and black, already arguing and with lightnings of vein in the eyes that say not that they’re angry, just tired; others begin noshing on what food’s left out, sip water cupped directly from the tap; as some remain in the kitchen and offer to help prepare if just to get away from their husbands, their wives; as others go to hang their Homburgs or their husbands’ in the hall where is the rack: mine’s the third from the left, don’t get any ideas; there are those who take their seats already in the diningroom, which is presumptuous enough though it’s not like they’d sit well with denial: seating themselves down in order of increasing age and infirmity, that would make sense, though not in terms of the actual arrangement of chairs to the right and left of their host at the head, but merely in relation to who’s able to sit first as none of them are much help to those for whom it’s a challenge: their napkins already tucked into their collars loose of a button, or up if weakly atop their irritable laps; their knives and forks held erect, at the ready.

Theirs has been an aliyah, though of a weaker species, a pilgrimage if oppositely directioned: in a distancing turned around at a deadend, before becoming stuck in a loop—a strangers’ sojourn, made to a strange kitchen in a strange house set amid a Development that has been designed so that nothing within it seems strange, which intention feels as if inspired by the divine chance of convenient location, amid a township that—if estranging to many too confused with the materiality of this world that confines them in its tile and grout to ever live freely themselves—was created complete with an excellent school system, too; how we live for our kinder: with its property values nothing to fault save the taxes, how ten cents of every dollar’s been allocated to educating our youngest in the various historical manners by which guests like ours have arrived here alive, if burnt badly; an emergence accounted for, approved, and even financed by the reparate banks of rivers never forgotten through even the unquenchable fire.

Theirs is a life remade, as if a recipe critically revised, secondchances for the not yet overseasoned; a spoil saved what with the mold scraped off with the challahknife of the woman at whose pleasure they’re hosted, these survivors, surviving—only at the indulgence of her slaving, that is, though she’s not letting on how exhausted, especially this week, despite the fact that with that kind of kvetch you run the risk and in slippers of misunderstanding, they all do, and even she herself every once in a while: she’s happy to oblige, though, that she doesn’t have to tell them about slavery.

And so the smile, all pep and pantry rearrangement, it says: we’re so pleased you’re alive, it’s a miracle you finally made it!

Call me Hanna, she asks when Feigenbaum calls her Misses Israelien to ask her whether it’s fine with her for him to sit where he’s already sitting and that without demonstrating any real intention to get up and move, and how she asks it of him sweetly…Hanna’s enough; not like she’d just been made to feel old, even worse: one of them. No problem, please—just stay where you are.

And then how Feigenbaum says, I had a grandmother named Hanna, I think—I think I remember.

I don’t know, it’s my head. You have any aspirin?

O, the queen of this kitchen, the bride who’s married this house into home, the Development’s mother, matriarch of Joysey just an hour’s commute from New York—she’s flushed, hot; worry about yourself, though, it’s only this, which she’s used to by now as if the condition’s become a daughter itself: a moon always full whose light’s to be doted upon, cradled as if a basket she’s hoping to lose to a distant river that runs dark and thick monthly…

Feigenbaum asks, Since it’s bad luck to ask, sometime when we’re not expecting it can you just say him or her so we’ll know. I hope I live long enough to meet, which is it again…I forget.

Nu, grant thee according to thine own heart, if you’re familiar, and, nu, she is and she’s isn’t: familiar because she’s pregnant again, swollen and snippy and thinning of hair, though her other daughters had never overstayed and by so much their welcome, what’s it a week well past due, any night now into day how she’ll spring open a door, the smoke that attends though it’s the doctor who’ll be wearing the mitts…high on the hospital wall, the deliveryroom as if a vacation house that’s how much time she’s spent there, she remembers: her as round as its clock and as pale, that and upon its thirteenth cycle its last how she’s slowing, how quickly she’s stilling, the tick of a timer winding down not just on a tray or dish warming but on the mechanism itself, the entire body she came with, the oven of her womb without warranty as installed too near the soul and too private—and then, at the same time, as she finds herself answering Feigenbaum’s psalm with her silence (behold, she recalls: she that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep), not so much familiar…which sensation she feels moved to explain is almost pregnant itself, as if by itself, selfgenerating in how it’s constantly, circumlunarly estranging me from myself, I’m so lost, but she doesn’t; in the end, timelessly unfamiliar, because—and this she withholds by fingering a knob, a drawer’s navel—not only is it a boy, Mazel Tov, but why does it feel like He’s early?

Their table, like the sun, almost set. In the kitchen, the shades are down anyway. Four are the legs of their table, a table with three legs is suspect, two are impure, and a table with one leg is an abomination in the eyes of God, which are infinite and are less eyes than they are legs upon which we might flee from the gaze of His judgment come the close of the Sabbath, our day of rest. The table sits on its legs, its legs sit on the floor. All is grouted—stayed, put—not moving, nothing rushing anywhere is what, just now no; all is grounded. Upon the ground, we know what is expected of us, and what to expect of others—to grovel for air. Tile tiles—molding molds—laminate void—formica without form—linoleum turf parquet that’s wood real wood, carpet carpets wall to wall to wall to sky; rugged, shagged, we’re just floored. Breathe easy, brotherfriend. We’re here to stay again. House to heavens stilled. Beyond, who knows. And who wants to. Cloud. All’s darkening, slowly—a scurry. Tonight is a night for stray dogs. As the dark is immovable, its shadows may roam as they please. It hurries into their yard up from the sidewalks. Without traffic, however, there can be no streets, there can only be sidewalks, and so every way of the earth is made safe. Finally, we are home. Weather’s wet, dripping ugly, though it hasn’t yet begun raining, or snow. The waters below and the waters above have not yet become separate. We will tell each a lie about the other and they will come to hate one another and they will never come together again except in a storm. That lie will be the oceans are more beautiful than the sky and the sky is more beautiful than the oceans, and though both are lies they are equally true. From a cloud, the threat of clouds. Collarless, tiny. Nameless and without sound. It paws the stoop, then raises its head. Mensch speaks. Woman