Negative Theology
God tells a story, but not the story
I am listening to. Finger pointing
at the moon and I can’t see the moon. But tell that
to God. Some say he’s playing
hide and seek, and that he’s hiding.
I can go on this way, in my Jewishness,
from parable to parable,
but the whale isn’t a metaphor
when Jonah is in it. If I run screaming
down the street, people think not that I am
afraid, but that I am crazy. I am
afraid of understanding why God
is telling a story into the wind, as if
I am as far from the wind as Jonah
in the whale in the sea in the story.
There is nothing I can do—I have a contract
with the wind that wants to know
what I breathe in the belly of the whale
I am not inside. The wind doesn’t care
if I can hear my own breath, which is
the wind, but is really the past. 