Now that death creeps all around
and the pecans are bursting their shells,
I hide within Hebrew.
Nothing will befall me in innocent writing.
Nothing will befall me
if I am absorbed into the letters,
if I don’t go outside the line—
shrunk to a small dot
stuffed inside an O
or into the belly of a C,
a semicolon dripping tears
like a captive.
Beloved holy tongue,
now that everything is in its own time
and everything now is horror,
when the orchard stretches out
and the earth is plowed,
I do only what Rilke says:
let beauty and terror happen to me
without thinking
that this is my end.
