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  • Home
  • New Poems, Stories, Songs
  • New Translations
  • Poetry
    • Youth Poems
    • Two Poems about Brooklyn
    • Tefillin
    • Little Psalms
    • The Absence of Stone
    • Some Other Poems
    • Some Other, Other Poems
  • Music
  • Rav Kook
  • Jewish, Spiritual & Beautiful
  • About Myself
  • Contact
  • What Does "Dot-Letter-Word" Mean?
  • Sefirot Sample
  DOT... LETTER... WORD...

There Is No Way

8/30/2017

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​There is no way into
The universe of knowing,
Of ethics, whose belt
Is tight, of bon moting.

When the heart is giddy, when
A noble love sluices your torso,
Within you is light,
Skimming over the Torah, more so,

Every Divine name. You are on
Every hill, plateau, city
Where the air is rarefied,
To the horizon, from the gritty

To a river that doesn’t stop,
That feeds the green-choked 
Forest, the straining vines,
The tangled grass soaked,

The mountain cat spore,
The usurped nest, and you
Are free, filled with sound,
Servant to the true

And infinite, a cluster
Of honor is on your head,
Are you a slave or liberated,
The poppies streak the meadow red.
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A Small Point

8/27/2017

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​A small point (at the top of the hill,
As though in brief rehearsal,
And spilling dimensions down,
A drumbeat quaquaversal),

A fine line (a universe
Whose love and tunes are avid,
A star, a nebula,a galaxy,
A planet, bursting, gravid),

There is the will of the eagle,
There is the will of the snake,
(The dragon, the unicorn,
The serpent in the lake),

A worm slithers from the earth,
It is invested with mind,
With rightness and might,
And grows white and kind,

Or the stork descends and drags
Its claws in the mud,
The heavens braid, the desert
Creatures flee the flash flood,

The fennet fox, the kangaroo rat,
You can hear them scrape,
The sage and scarlet bugler
Drape across the landscape.
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Stream

8/27/2017

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A stream flows, rapids,
White water, braided,
Whose muscular waters
Are alive, palisaded,

Glinting torrent,
Rising surge, bearing
On its back rafts, skiffs,
Carrying those who seem past caring,

At the source of the river,
The waterfall tumbles,
It is a flood, a roar,
Its thunder voice rumbles..
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To Return to the Law

8/25/2017

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​To return to the law
With all of its practical
Consequences, loving
Its details, the bountiful

Slew of its intricate
Doodles, together with
A culture that rises 
Past woods, creeks and myth,

When the songbird sings
And the streams fork
And spirit, van Gosh
And lofty word, the stork

Circle and nest on the
Dry land, ruled and
Scored, so that song spreads
And ideas on the lines of the hand,

A vision, a dream, a
Fantasy, on the other
Hand, the image of a western
Hand that meets its eastern brother.
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When We Remember God

8/22/2017

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​When we remember God, we
Grow thirsty, thirsty for
Everything that is right and good,
And ideal justice comes ashore,

In your limbs its wellsprings roar,
And pours along the streets, they
Are gilded. We come home, we
Return to the letter A,

And we yearn for what is right,
Our hair is burning, the air
Is radiant. Only God’s light
Glances through the earthenwear,

Gives beauty to the canopy,
Gives life to the tapir,
To the blue morpho butterfly,
In the green atmosphere,

Life that is just, life
That is kind. Proclaim
That He is great, past
Boundaries Your name.
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Supercooled Helium Can Flow

8/20/2017

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​(Supercooled helium can flow
In two streams, each passing through
The other. How different they are
Than one, but not yet two.)

Imprisoned, in a vise,
And your spirit wants unfettered
Sky. It wants to drink,
The light, lettered or unlettered,

No barrier across the road
On Mt. Amana, no tree,
No weather report, no time
Of night, claims of moral necessity,

But joy. Everything behind a railing
Is a mushroom beneath the dripping
Leaves, I want the leaves, the rain,
I want the climb on the slipping

Shale… how difficult these squiggles,
These ants, beneath the pathless paths,
“Uncover my eyes so that I may see”
The crystal chambers past maths. 
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Sometimes, Words of Prayer Glow

8/17/2017

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​Sometimes, words of prayer glow
They are molten gold, they warm
The soul, we feel their source,
A vast vortex where lives form,

And these words flow, they
Fill the cracks in the world,
We see the bead of every word
Knurled with meaning, how life has swirled

Throughout the vacuums and the
Traceries of space, we see
The vastness of the treasury
Of spirit, the leonine solemnity,

The vale of their fecundity,
And the fear of God fills
The atmosphere, the bird,
The branch, the stream and the deer.
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In You I See a Field

8/16/2017

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​In you I see a field
Of crackling lightning
Flames flare and gush
The ears of the world are ringing,

You are the river dinur
We are waking, we are shaken,
And you streak, you draw the dawn,
And al the seats in Zion have been taken,

And people flow from the
Andaman Islands, from Kalimantan,
From the Chilean shores,
Truth on the lip of each woman and man
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There Are Two Types of Trails

8/14/2017

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​There are two types of trails,
The trails to harvest the olive trees
In Rhodes, or meditating on
The hills in the antipodes.

If your soul is air or fire
It is hard to make prints
On the soil. Find your
Balance where the sun glints

On the feldspar. Don’t envy
The apples, green or gold,
Owned by the farmer living
On the soil. His freehold,

Even if he is a king of 
Sorts, wise and righteous as
The sun, his bounty, his
Crown, platinum, topaz,

Are lackluster. Don’t be
Afraid. You will not go
Hungry. You will be paid
For your voice, your duodecimo.

And when you shine, you
Sprinkle rose water, you
Shine upon a single soul,
It shivers the whole world through.
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How Difficult to Decide

8/13/2017

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​How difficult to decide,
To choose the powers of my soul,
The fuse, the mountain,
The sky, the water bowl,

The images that straddle
The cape of heaven, that
Glide above the highest bird,
A wheeling, weightless, black cravat

Beyond my limited desires,
Fireflies on the dusky lawn,
Or the will to set the record
Straight, to greet the fawn

At break of day, to 
Hear the wind, to see the sky,
To read the bark, to hold the scheme,
The starry texts that signify,

To heal the cicatrix, the scar
Of a sidewalk of another land,
To check the ladings of the boats
And watch them glisten on the sand

To weigh the cargo, sofas,
Cars, a brace of grouse, a violin,
To check the teeth, to examine the sails,
The noble and the genuine.
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