91¿ì²¥

Not Knowing What to Say When Yom Kippur Ends

Carlie Hoffman, A Director of the 91¿ì²¥ MFA in Creative Writing

When the day ends and the September sun goes red, paused
between the trees like you and I, stopped
in the middle of a conversation—two birds, one yellow, the other
the color of a peach, perch on an upper branch
of a blue spruce. Impossible, no doubt, it must be the glare
from a streetlight waking, delight teasing the eye. When we
eventually pick up speed under the Chagall-blue sky, the story arrives
like a respite, like birds returning:
Once there was an ordinary person searching in the Book of God
for some word like a sword to slay us. Day after day he fed his horse.
Women carried bowls of olives as they passed. A boy played
melancholic music on his harmonica. Rain came, washing
the evening’s blue skin. When words rose like blisters to the tip
of his tongue, they burned there until he blurted out:
I once saw a frozen waterfall. Frozen solid. In midflow.
When Yom Kippur ends, we are paused in the middle of a difficult sentence,
and the birds reveal the story along the branches—
once there was a tyrant searching in the Book of God for words
to serve him like a sword to slay us, but instead he came upon
a frozen waterfall. A thing of beauty—he wanted to say—how the sight of it
made his heart expand with grief, how it was like seeing
something no living person was meant to see.