Gezundheit

Leaving home is the sneeze that jolts me
out of the predictable. God Bless You,
people say as I walk out, cast into the world
by my abrupt thrust. October.

The cottonwoods caw, yellow, yellow, with a beauty
so severe it’s almost obscene, the S & M of passing
or transience. I move to the north, walk through
people I’ve met before and strangers. Hello

Hello. My daughter’s teacher calls me
Corina’s mother, doesn’t know my name.
A women missing most of her teeth is stitching
yucca onto canvas. All of this is the God

Bless you of breathing out. At home,
The inhalation. I come and go, arrive,
depart. Inhabit my body like a house,
my bed like a shroud, practice small goodbye.

The extroverted moments of sun, the introverted
motion of eyes over pages. I drive in and out
a thousand places of eyes. A million mistakes.
But this week in the vast outer I found the hidden,

the Hebrew song that moved my cells into beautiful
regalia of DNA, aligned my spine, certified
my charkas, made me Jew for that day, scented
me holy. I stood. I sat. I touched the Torah

with a prayer shawl I had sewn by my own hand
a dozen years before. I felt remembered as I let
my mother and my father come to me in their new
forms. Dead. Alive. It’s the coming and going.

Introvert. Extrovert, which breath is your mother?
Where is your father’s mouth, his celestial neckties?
The Days of Awe spread out on the table
as a calendar of ten blessings. How did I forget my name?

What date did God miss? How many right hands make war?
How much peace is possible, even here, even now?
Even over there in the mangers of war?