O the Kinneret, which is the lake to be found under the Sea of Galilee…the Mediterranean Nile, the Mississippian Jordan, the Sambatyon, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea of Reeds — there is no greater justification of the Fall than our naming of water. All our rivers, streams, lakes, and even the seven oceans, too, are but a oneness of an ocean and God. There is no better evidence of our corruption than our calling of water by name, no better argument for the sundering of the covenant, the flooding of creation again. And then there’s the weather, the question of what to call that, also, of how to give name to a flux, not to instability but to its opposite, stability, the greatest — which is a station founded upon motion, fundament on wandering, on being everywhere at once and so nowhere, forever. How to call a cloud, a nesting of cloud, clouds, a sky, a giant rumbling then a flash bound as one. Though we have the name Storm, we are still destroyed, foundered upon the world we call rock. No invocation will save us. A sky, get inside; stay there and stay honest. Rage all you want with wind, with light and with wetness, there’s no saint to invoke, there’ll be no salvation. We call it a crow’s nest, though it’s crowless; that bird is off mating with the doves in a land not so cursed. Its perch eclipses the moon — and the world finally, opens. An immense downpour at middlenight, suffusions of lightning like daylight, and the ships shakes, rocks, is thunderously rolled to a sink, hits near a glacier then gets turned around, hits another then is turned round again, swirled as if at bottom’s a drain or a flush — prodded then whirled in a hurling, thrown up then dashed back down to the white of an ever new wave, again. A Shabbos midnight of rainsnow, of snowhail, howling around the hull’s nidified mute…and then settling with it — gradually locking the ship, stilling it in ice made. Immovable. Through the night as the temperature drops, even into the next day — to be captive to the calling above, its lash at the foremast, its whip to the mizzen. Then, toward evening of the end of Shabbos, which reigns upon sea as it reigns upon land, which reigns in the air, too, and then everywhere else there be God, there’s a last bolt of lightning: it pierces the sky, strikes down to smash the ice up ahead, splits the ocean entire…sundering the horizons one darker, one lighter, while the middle melts away into grays — into soon, a steady, steadying pure, the moving water moving, again. And one tribe, and only one tribe, may pass.
Shalom is the name that follows next, meaning Hello, and Goodbye — and so going both everywhere and nowhere at once, but in Peace. B’s ship, He’ll think of it as His ship until another makes topside, floats Shalom in the middle of the peacefully immovable and middleless water, moving at middle: Hello and Goodbye, they’re mingling, the waters wetting each other as if always made undivided, never been sundered, never foundered between those above and those below upon God’s second day. A flow of stasis, under the bandage of the newly calm cloudless sky. It’s here He loses the winds of the world we call New, trading in those for a species of wind that doesn’t blow or push as much as it pulls, tugs Him toward, the meridian east: the brightkindling bow of the ship set amid the middle of the water without middle, it now parts each sucking, hollowfaced gust — pierces; to where the globe turns its cheek, to the face of its father the sun, is then struck with a kiss, lightsmote to blush itself humbled, a sunrise, as you’re flung down to the other edge of the round, where the flatness begins, the vale of the lessdimensioned, divested of west, the endless dark world we call Old. At the landed crown of the rounding before it’s rubbled away to flat, a last standing shadow, lengthening with the thrift of the day; it’s a female form, if not emblematically feminine. A ship’s figurehead stranded, could be, straining from her perch at beached prow. A maydel not too young anymore, she’s Eli the doctor’s daughter appeared sullen at the pointing, way out on the accusative tip of Manhattan having followed Him, if tentatively or shy: she hadn’t been sure, has to make her lastlit goodbye, maybe even she thought to convince Him, to remain and be hers, impossible, perhaps, this she knows, too late; she’s waving a headkerchief she’s abstractly embroidered as if with the fingers helpmating of widows and kinder unborn: with its wave not exactly bidding Him anything besides her heartache, commending it unto Him if that’s the mood she merits, as if — aval aval, it’s not a headkerchief, it’s a cover for challah, a coverlet for the swaddling of the two tabled loaves from last night, she’d baked; waving, more like she’s shaking out the crumbs her father and mother’ve left her, miserly few and what there are, greasy: she follows the lone ship, her cloth a sail forsaken by wind, sagging Him far, then gone. Out of her life, this gust: a sigh older than God. Had a few prospects over last Shabbos, again: nothing she’s interested in, no one redeeming, forget it, it’s worthless. With Him, He was different. Same old. How her father had said he’d die the night he’d marry her off. Finally. That or retire, or both. And in front of company, too, two corporate attorneys who’d also been patients, calling on her one with a new duster for a present, the other without flowers either. Dad had been calling the both of them Son. One touched feet with a wooden paw of a leg of the table under which the other’d held the hand of her mother. She was going to spit the cream in their coffee, but her mouth was too kind and the maincourse was meat. The last vision this puffy, darkeyed Eli has of His departure, it’s a reflection — the last to be imaged upon the waters of her face with its fallen nose, and those warm, rounded lips — it isn’t the ship, but a huge solitary head rising from the east, as if His return, but lifeless: the new Shabbos’ sun, sliced from the neck of horizon.
In the eye of the Shalom, in the very mouth of peace, B stands still through the storming, the weather unnamed and unnamable, having held fast to the wheel with one hand, with the other at the ribbing of His stomach, the ropes of flesh taut with hurt that wrest Him in, still sickened. To survive, and to rejoice in your own survivaclass="underline" to open your mouth to the last lingering patter, to open your eyes once shore’s distanced behind you, to catch dew upon your lashes, manna’s fallen balm. And then into the slowed heart of this quiescence, this lulling, ship’s loll, to be hit with one last and ferociously whiplashing force of night’s wind, a remnant, a reminder of the darkness left behind and yet in front of you, too — and, flying across that sky a fish lands on the deck, at the forecastle, the fallen castle, amidships, who knows, not me, I don’t care. Which fish don’t ask me either, whether kosher or not, only that it flips, gives a flop, a silver sliv of ichthys out of water off land, over and into a ship that goes forward while on a ship there’s nowhere to go, that’s what I’ve got — it goes onto the planks of the deck netted in kelp to hide its nakedness from the blush of the clouds.