Tzohar—Some say this was a window; others say it was a precious stone that gave off light.
— Rashi, 11th century commentator
Annie Wood, don’t box me in, 2023 (Artist Website)
Paper, acyrlic paint, and glue
Thirty-seven & the pain
gets worse each month. That burn
in the womb where the baby
isn’t. Body’s tantrum loud
with lack. Doubled
over by it.
In autumn, I am doubled
over by pinpricks scarlet-bright, maple
rubies held against winter’s mouthy white,
red moths in cluster-flames. Blue tooth
of frost. The season’s last
hurrah.
The poet
Alicia Jo Rabins says tzohar
is synonym for the precious gem
that glowed in Noah’s arky heart:
press a button & God’s voice
will radio transmit.
The Baal Shem Tov
says tzohar is a window of words cut
from the dark walls of a darkening
world, teva: a holy boat
of language.
A boat of language
carries me to my chevruta, the only
Conservative Movement female rabbi
in the city. Her office has
no windows.
We run our hands
over columns of text we’ve tasked
ourselves to decipher. Outside somewhere,
a gnawing red against a graying sky.
Inside me, sheath of maple making
regular descent.
What did Naamah think
when her husband Noah consulted
the gemstone cased in the walls
of the wooden life raft, squinting
for light, narrowing his eyes
for next direction?
Did anything gestate
within her, floating along
at the end of the
world?
I’m awake
at 4am, swathed in night so dark
its darkness glows, my bare feet padding
through the house. I drop red anchor
into the cupped palm of toilet, tripled
over, muffled groan.
Heaven thumbs
my hair, stuck in night-sweat
to my neck, which isn’t old
and isn’t young.
How many animals
were pregnant in Noah’s boat, how many horns
of cartilage assembling inside the mother
antelopes, hooked claws like commas cradled
by the sloths who nested in the rafters
of that great drifting, creaking,
dumpster?
The ark itself was mother
to a world, an incubator lined inside with grass
& must, & with that tzohar glimmering
untranslated.
Make each word a vessel
that can float, the Baal Shem teaches, and in it
gather olamot: worlds and souls and angels.
Crack a window with the word, he says,
through which you’ll watch the world
as it transforms.
A twine of language
from Poland’s 18th century, to Noah’s
gnarly vessel, to 2023 in Philadelphia
where a woman still can’t get a window.
There is no measure for the pleasure of what
language can yield.
When I leave her office, walk sore
legs down brumal streets, my cramping gut pumps
blood into my booted feet. Everywhere fall
whispering goodbye: last yellow ginkgo, last pink
simper of the rosebush.
I stop beside it,
reach out my hand to cradle a petal
between my fingers. The world bloods forth
its final burst of beauty. Instead, a thorn
sickles me, then red.