Illustrious Ancestors

The Rav

of Northern White Russia declined,

in his youth, to learn the

language of birds, because

the extraneous did not interest him; nevertheless

when he grew old it was found

he understood them anyway, having

listened well, and as it is said, 'prayed

          with the bench and the floor.' He used

what was at hand—as did

Angel Jones of Mold, whose meditations

were sewn into coats and britches.

          Well, I would like to make,

thinking some line still taut between me and them,

poems direct as what the birds said,

hard as a floor, sound as a bench,

mysterious as the silence when the tailor

would pause with his needle in the air.