For Yehuda Amichai:
letter to a man whose home is rain

and whose language is the shiver of reeds.
You said of a certain shore
that even God stopped there
without coming any closer to truth.
But it wasn’t that wind-eaten beach
or your city of second-hand Jews
(“slightly damaged, bargain priced”)
that you really meant:
that shore is the world, Yehuda,
which you loved anyway,
rubbing its darkness like kindling
between two callused palms
until the flame of a new poem was born.

I love that you were once so jealous
of your ex-lover’s lover
you ordered a dog to bite off his penis
(in a poem, that is).
I love that lies were honey to you,
and the purity of anything a myth:
despair can comfort,
and hope rip apart our days.
What’s a taped-up and pasted-together
product of the Diaspora to do? Shake a fist
at the Messiah you know isn’t coming?
Or open your palm to catch some rain?
(It’s your only home.)

Poet, you know the answer.
Your whole life, on the same
wine-stained page,
you did both.