Sibling Beit Midrash 
Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him. —Genesis 42:8 

Cave crickets pulse the walls of the shed while mice
scurry the baseboards and there, beside slumped
bags of potting soil … there in attics
whose rafters are woven with webs, whose boards
sag with boxes long forgotten and bins
hauled down for some annual reason … there
in basements dank with the slow seep
of groundwater … there in the dusty closets
of memory are the sacred scrolls
of our childhood. Released from their grotty arks,

we unroll them across a kitchen table. My sisters and I
lean close, coffee and crumbs anointing the pages,
pointing and laughing and reading aloud, and—as we
are also both siblings and Jews—arguing.
Who wrote this?! one says. That’s not how it was!
There’s so much left out, another complains.

So go the days of Sibling Beit Midrash.

Despite the singular lives we’ve built
with other people, in other places, to each other
we’re always the younger model
we were by circumstance and birth,
before our self-made upgrades.

Yet just as when looking in a mirror, you notice
not the glass and its cut but the momentary “you”
it reflects, when revisiting the shared scrolls
of our past, our readings reveal more
about the teller than the text—a text that reads us
as we read it.

Only from the new lines on my sisters’ faces
do I know I’m aging. Only each other can we call
to grouse about how, even now, in need of our help,
our parents persist in being themselves.

Siblings are archives of our earliest incarnations.
How we mirror, hold, and mold each other as we go.

Jacob’s Gift

Mid-step, no warning, a healthy person’s spirit
would flee their nostrils with a sneeze—
the Talmud says such sudden deaths
were once the only deaths.

…………………..So it wouldn’t have been uncommon
………………………………………………………..how my grandmother
…………………..found him: her husband
………………………..slumped at the breakfast table,
…………………………….face resting on his crossed arms
…………………..like a student asleep in a library carrel.

Yet when an aging Jacob reached for life’s next rung
and found only air, he prayed for more time.
So God created illness.
……..So Jacob lay in what he thought was his deathbed
……..and summoned his sons. He promised
revelations, and naming
was its own kind of prophecy. For Jacob
called each man as he was
and as his tribe would be:

Reuben was unstable water; Simeon and Levi,
lawless weapons, and on down the line—
a lion’s whelp, ships’ haven,
strong-boned ass, viper by the path, raider
of raiders, fat loaf of bread, hind let loose,
wild colts on a hillside, ravenous wolf.

…………………..Twenty years now
…………………..without him and my grandfather’s voice
…………………..is still the one I’d like most to hear; his,
…………………..the counsel I’ve most needed.

…………………..Before his final breakfast,
…………………..he’d walked three miles, lifted weights.
……………………………I’m sorry, grandpa, but what would I give
……………………………to have given you Jacob’s gift,
……………………………to have watched you weaken
…………………………………….as I sat by your bed,
…………………………………….your hand gone
……………………………frail in mine. To have had you call me
……………………………by my right names:

rain-leavened lake, kitchen mandolin, lawyers’
snakelet, students’ refuge, cussheaded mule,
poison ivy on the path, striver of strivers,
gluten-free toast, curator of commas, association
maker—or insufficient namer, bereft as I am
of all death took when it took you too quickly.