nes gadol

haven’t been home since

I heard—coasted along

Glistening streets from the airport to downightown,

Industrial grey forest enclosing a polluted river

Which as we approached we listened for harder and

Harder until we were on the single lane

Bridge, at the bottom of two hills

And we turned the lights down and then

The car off and we tried to listen hard then,

The moment hanging off the edge

By so much weight on the past and future ends of us.

It is hard dating an organizer, but something else

Dating KB. I played games with her

Family, lit and doused the depressed brother, held

The father a respectful fist away, and of course

Flirted with sue. It was almost enough—

He is up there in the stars in a plane he barely knows

How to fly, or out there in brookline

Sleeping fitfully in his chair as the news

Cycle changes. He is reading yehuda amichai

In his later years and so am I, 500 miles away

Drunk and sleep deprived in a man’s house he

Does not know, but would like. We are both

Feeling sore and leaning back trying to piece out where

We are open, where we have closed,

And what has been opened once again.

I am thinking of the gains he made for our family,

The house by the ocean that sings

softly in the nighttime to the birds,

And of how he was never drunk

in any of his stories—no matter

How debaucherous.

It is the first night of hannukah,

And the Aryan psychiatrist and Mexican

Union organizer don't seem to have a candle in the house—I am drawn back to the ransacked temple, heaving in pain, invaded and

Changed forever, the priests and peasants

Searching through it like a ct scan. I’m sure there

Are things they hoped never to find,

But did. But hope too. Borrowed time.

I am thinking of him and three months and

A great miracle happened there

But I cant hope that

Maybe in another version of the story

The oil really only did last for one

Night but it burnt with the light of a star,

So bright, blasting the ruins of the temple

And for a brief time turning everything there beautiful

And stark, highlighting what it was and what it did and all the ways that hands ands time had changed it. Showing the past overlaid on the present

Like an xray. And maybe like that

I think a great miracle is happening in the condo by coolige corner

Where my grandather sleeps

And my grandmother wakes periodically and looks over with a determined look.

Maybe that brightness and that miracle

Have been happening for a long time.