Where was God? I dead-man floated in the deep end, staring
at the nowhere of the bottom, sterile blue. Why was the skin
on my mother’s fingers always scaly & breaking, as if with worry?
Worry rustled like a lake in the dark. Up the mountain silently

went Isaac behind his father. The stillness of spiders on my way
downstairs, like coiled springs, & how their webs startled when
they did. What thread between a spider & God & what was I
when I crushed one? Grass through sidewalk cracks. Through

Sinai in the back of a jeep, Sinai wide & sun-blasted. We stopped
where maybe Mt. Sinai’s bare spine rises to see what they say
is the burning bush, ancient bramble I barely remember. But an hour
away at Dahab: flaring oranges & neon blues, through windows

over our faces we could see soft white tinged yellow, wafer-thin
when they turned, wavering in the coral which still flourished then.