where the cracks run

This we do not talk about—on the third

Day of the third week that summer

In the yellow sands of the Jordan valley,

I rose to myself before the sun, in violet night slipped on

another man’s clothes that had been another man’s

before him, walked down the hill

past sleeping goats to shul to quietly

hold my insides calm and take stock of what kept me

keeping me alive, and then I climbed onto the tractor’s

side and rumbled with it up the hill in silence

as fire lit the field and my friend and I looked on

and shared something though we shared no language,

except the few words of our forefathers our fathers had taught us.

We stepped off and into the shed to pick our tools—white gloves with a few holes but good grey grips and a pair of single handed shears. Eli found us in the shadows, took us to the rotting choupa with grapes budding at its crown in the sunrise.

5/10 and 240 lbs of sun raw flesh, eli read passages to us

every morning, gutteral Hebrew beginning to lilt as he was overcome

by joy at the torah. That day he told us of the day leiah died, body blown across the sand by an exploding bus. A man from Jordan did it he told us.

And he told us of the morning when he gathered the other men in the dawn,

Before the sun rose, faces set like granite stones in the desert, how their tractors

And trucks started like the keening of the women by the water and then locked into step with the anger of a generation. They drove across the valley in a long line,

Past the other socialist kibbutzim where man made rivers trickled by the many tents. They drove a long time and the sun rose and they entered Jordan.

I imagine they each sang lo yisa goy to himself in his little vehicle,

And they shall be turned into plow shares.

And they drove onto the farm on the other side, in Jordan,

Where I am sure a man and his wife were just beginning to get to work,

Rising and dusting their knees and clearing their throats from prayer.

And they tore the land to shreds. They destroyed the crops.

They ripped up the roots and spat the living back onto the earth

In a heap of meaninglessness. And they whooped and shouted and menaced

The family, small children looking up from between their father’s legs

At the machines spraying blood into the sun.

And then they drove back, 

and worked, and prayed, and ate lunch 

in the chadar ochel and danced on the Sabbath,

And had a ceremonial burial for leiah and sat in her house

For 7 days. And later, when they drank the wine they made that season,

I think they tasted everything, though they could not say what.
they had lost the language for it.