What we know for sure, what we can feel in our bones, is that it all took place in the desert, and the coastal plain and hill country. 

In the Jezreel Valley and Jericho and Jerusalem.

Among the tribes of the Canaanites.

When a god was carried from the south, from the wilderness.  A god of war and rain.

The shepherds brought their first lambs to be sacrificed on his altar. The farmers brought their first grain in early summer, their first fruits in fall.

The men were circumcised. 

Back before Ashkenazi and Ukraine, and pale skin and glasses.  Back before rabbis and bibles, before even the First Temple!

I was a Canaanite.  But not eating certain things.   

And you, who I sit with at brunch:  you were on line with me at our hilltop altar.  You lugged sacks of plums and lemons; I brought dates and persimmon, scraped from the rocky ground.

The blood of my lamb oozed onto the still wet blood of yours.

Who was our God?  Was he the god, even then, of love thy neighbor?  Of pay your farmhands?

There is no image of him up here.  Our minds work in the empty space.  Beyond the altar, the valley stretches out… 

Please bring rain so we can stay here.  Be with us, give us the advantage, as we fight for this valley.

With empty grain sacks, washing our hands, we stop for a moment to catch up, to kibbitz.  We share a local slang—the first Hebrew.

All the different subcultures and opinions made a crude body politic. The parts did not quite reject each other; the livid stitches had healed over into just skin.  We could lurch around, drink water from the stream, appreciate the flowers, grunting and cooing at them.

We had lactating breasts for the growing population, and the genitals of both sexes; we used birth control and we didn’t.

And we watched the news.

Then one night a man appeared at my bedside in the dark.  Restrained me in iron cuffs.  And for hours, he ran his fingers over me, searching out the lines between parties, between races.

I had always been indecisive, of course, but I could function.  I heard voices, but they were whispers; the overriding voice was me.  And I could control my limbs, my movements, with decent precision, passing laws meant to help.

But his fingers—it was uncanny the way he knew where to press.  As if I had scurvy, my old scars reddened, opened… 

The cognitive dissonance I’d always lived with began to shriek.  Two voices shrieking incessantly, clawing at each other.  Right there on the bed, I started to hemorrhage.  And separate.  There is my hand, bleeding from the wrist into the blanket.  To move it now would take telekinesis.

I can’t unite the voices anymore.  The man is kneeling at my bed again, his fingertips searching.  Mercifully I’m going away.  I hate him, my enemy, my destroyer.  With my last bit of consciousness, last bit of will, I vote for him.

The mystery of the living room window, the membrane.

The clouds right now are the Pillars of Creation.

Above a shaggy horizon of tropical trees–shapes of hydrogen from deep space!

Heat beyond our conception, surrounded by absolute zero…

*

Miami, in a heat wave.  There’s no going out in the day.  Sun-blasted streets.  Ocean hotter than blood.  Fish dying.

We’re lucky to live in a bubble–with AC, supplies, work.

A biosphere.  In the big window, masses of trees.  Continued in here by plants.  By you, moving from room to room.

The sun and trees, with their roots in still-wet earth, interact.  You breathe, speak, laugh…

The window somehow keeps out the heat, lets in the light.  Keeps out, I think, the silence of the melting tar.

We’ve evolved to handle the chilled air on our bare skin. 

Delicate creatures, comfortable only at 76 *F.  Moaning otherwise.  Feeling infinite gradations within that one degree.

Music plays in the dome.

News of the world.  War, hate.  Families grieving.  I have a membrane to let in a taste of this, screen out the rest.  You, less so, are crying.

The rooms are harmonious.  But the candles scare me, the naked flames.  The knives scare me, the naked blades.

In room 3, you’re working.

Looking up from my work, I’ve been tracking the sun’s progress.  It’s now quite low.

A green parrot lands on the palm in the window.  Flies off into heat waves, like Noah’s dove; does not return…

The sun is now pink!  A perfect disc, etched, with no glare. 

You come with me to the window; holding hands we watch it touch the trees, sink into their green jelly.

It’s time to go out, in the so-called cool of the evening.  Into air like overheated fur.  The beast has found water, and shade. Shivers with pleasure, which we feel as breeze.

Other domers, in doorways, test the air.  Creep outside.  Across the street, surrounded by industrial fans, people are gathering for a drink.  Chilled wine, frosted beer mugs.  We join them.