And its beasts.
There was a husband in the distance, too, years ahead, decades and menses — in his hands, he appeared to hold loaves.
This tree is our house — it’s more hers.
Of the tree grown down from within her with her on top of the tree grown down and then out of her up.
One morning, she began her descent: plucking the stem from her navel, from the highest of her tree’s branches the umbilicus bud, the soft, downy, prettypink petiole blooming in white, pricked and ripped — then slinking her shimmying way, down past boughs wet with her, in a pomaceous tumble soon splitting her legs and, trunkhugging, the tightening hug of such thighs…until she touched ground, a firm footing, arrived. An apple as if a breast of hers or another belly went loose with the rock and the shake — gravity fell is how, and the fruit hit her on the head, then hit the ground and rolled over the horizon, the sun. She gave a yell, he heard her yell, then turned his head to her and realized by this risen sun how late in the distance he was — that he had to arrive, must…he’ll be late soon enough.
Her tree grew down ever further, then, how it drunk down even lower to stay: it branched into the earth, roots to vein the beneath, seeking a wet other than hers, its very source that had seeded — down into the sidewalks, the breakyourback cracks, down into the asphalt, the now landscaped lawn of the garden.
Knots widened into plates, boughs wound into bowls.
Kinder, which were leaves fallen in the wind of her yell, ribbed in fall — they went out to retrieve them, the many plates and the bowls, and then to forage for more, with always an appetite climbed up, clambered down, scavenged their meat placesettings from the northernmost face, dairy scarfed from the south of her round.
As it’s been said, her tree was their house, and still is: this room here the lowest stump of the trunk, the diningroom, the room in which we all dine…it’d been hollowed out by the kinder, woodstuff taken to dust fluffed their pillows, which’re buds never to bloom, for night’s sleep within their rooms ringed of grain.
And from all that, from the root, the first and the strongest, the taproot it’s called — only this table remains.
The rest having been sided in plastic, roofed in who knows menschmade or synthetic what else.
A table of room hollowed out from around the table of root, that’s how it happened — we’re told.
But, the question the scholia still ask, a table tabling what — what comes cosmologically next, the penultimate celestial course piled on?
What’s to be served on the table — what savory dish, what sweet sacerdotal…what are we having, what’re we having, what’re we having, Hanna?
Ima, all your kinder want to know. Tonight.
It’s been handeddown, then tossed around hotly, thrown in rage — that the rock of the Dome of the Rock, which is the domain of the Akeidah, the altar of the sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac, and, too, if heretically, the purported site of the ascension of the false prophet Mohammed, due to an unfortunate leak in the minaret’s tip, a smallest sliver in the gild that let in the morning manna, was gradually eroded away, down to a grain of sand that, upon one morning’s dawn, went and drifted away on a westerly wind: and so what’s left, arching high above Jerusalem, is merely a dome, gilding nothing, stillborn, an idol kept from spilling itself to the street by only a wall thick with moss and graffiti, its cracks crammed with prayers suspected to be the only things still holding all up: the Temple’s precurrent platform, that dome atop, and the heavens themselves. Heaven. And it’s now and now only that reconstruction begins, with scaffolding and spackling, insulation and sheet — a different concern of conversion; according to our sages, they’re still talking, taking proposals, accepting suggestions, contract bids, a little help here, any ideas. We’re open, I’m saying.
Welcome to Palestein, the Resort State — a paradisiacal refuge once forsaken for exile, the diaspora’s good life.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the second assistant frozen foods buyer at the best, most centrally located supermarket in Greater Tel Aviv and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the second assistant frozen foods buyer at the best, most centrally located supermarket in Greater Tel Aviv verily said—
Nope.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the weekday resident pro at the Par-Shah Private Country Club and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the weekday resident pro at the Par-Shah Private Country Club verily said—
Sorry.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the head dayshift usher at the Mullah Moolah Multiplex and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the head dayshift usher at the Mullah Moolah Multiplex verily said—
Don’t think so.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the thirdline buffet chef trainee at Tumbler’s in Jericho and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the thirdline buffet chef trainee at Tumbler’s in Jericho verily said—
Wish I could help.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to a roulette pitboss at the Vault in Hebron and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the roulette pitboss at the Vault in Hebron asked for an afternoon to review the surveillance tapes and talk to the host, I’ll get back to you then verily said—
No, but if we do, I promise—
you’ll be the second to know.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to Him in the form of a bird I think a dove it was with the wings of a fighterjet and with the beak of an unmarried, unmarriagable virgin, and verily said—
Have you seen Him?
And He, verily — what could He say?
I heard nothing.
Not since has there arisen a prophet like Him, and never again…or, at the very least, not for a good long while — which is time enough to forget. Strangely or not so much, meaning expected, the holy and holying methods are proving inefficient, ineffective, too, until His God, and maybe, heretically, made in the Image of most of the other parties formerly interested, previously in pursuit, not a few of them no longer powerful, since ingathered into purgatorial failure — He just gives up, like He tried…abandoning the search just as B, Himself, once was abandoned, left limited in credit and options, unbasketed along the banks of the frozen Atlantic — not so much no longer believed in, but more to no longer believe in Oneself.
Walled in, and yet of the wall, too, towering majestically above the valley known as Hell…O the dwellingplace of Moloch, as has been most famously, as it has been most loudly, lamented by the prophet Jeremiah: this sepulcher doming the Cœnaculum within, alongside the tomb of King David, the Psalmist of Zion. Here let us sing of three rooms, communicating stonily mute, rendered dark by the cloying cloud of the drapes. A moon prior to B’s passage, twelve of them notables all take their seats around a table in this hall made of the rooms of the ultimate dindin, the Last Supper it’s known as, served upon the Seder of the first night of Passover as has been chronicled, too, in books finally forbidden, that and the site of the Holy Spirit’s visitation to the disciples seven weeks after, the day of their old Pentecost, unmarked, burnt from the calendar, its ashes forgotten. Apostles of a sort, He’s surely not among them, not gracing. Not fit to sit at table, to knock around ideas on last knees with the likes of His once could’ve been but now never future father-inlaw, Shade, no longer president of his nation, presently termed for the life of him the president of its Sanhedrin, with Congress converted. A Schade, though in losing his title he’s only gained power. What’s in a name: the new businesscards, for one, they’ll be back from the printers tomorrow.