Before a storm, the sky is the same gray
density of old pages pressed together,
moldering in their closeness.
I keep looking for strays on my walks.
Somewhere: a dog in the gutter, limp
as a wet notebook, a cat trapped
in the metal points of a fence. Before a storm,
the sky is a long chamber that holds
an infinite number of texts,
scraps that carry the name of God.
I’ve been reading about storage rooms
where the people who came before me left
anything sacred, nothing to be destroyed.
The body too is a room with words
heaped to the ceiling, books piled up
the way some distant people
used to stack the dead in layers.
Once on a walk I met a tiny black cat
lying deep in the grass, her eyes
like cut rounds of sea glass set
in the lawn’s green enamel. I knelt.
She rubbed against my fingers,
white hairs like slivers of metal glinting
in her fur. Sometimes on my walks
I pass the house with the four corgis,
their ears stiff as a row of pickets.
I near the bridge where I watched
a coyote cross one early morning,
its shadow like a sentence stretching out.
These days, I don’t know why
each walk contains such symbols
to be parsed by a careful reader.
All I know is the sharp quill poking
my shoulder blade and the pain
of my wrist from too much typing.
Genizah means to hide or put away.
My ancestors believed a buried text
would bring the rain, letters, I suppose,
draining into soil to feed the growing things.
Every seven years they emptied the room
of words. Today on my walk
the black cat scratched me at the site
where thumb and finger meet.
I can’t discern what this means,
her conversion from purring to slice,
the sudden white cliffs of her teeth.
There is a genizah inside me. I store
these scraps from my walks
and don’t know how to throw them out.
Everything takes on the luster
of a red oak after rain, that brief darkening
before the heat bleaches ink from the leaves,
leaves them dry as ancient paper.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of nonfiction, including Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (New Mexico). Her work has appeared in New England Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.
Photo by Taylor Flowe on Unsplash
