Shalom is the name that follows next, meaning Hello, and Goodbye — and so going both everywhere and nowhere at once, but in Peace. B’s ship, He’ll think of it as His ship until another makes topside, floats Shalom in the middle of the peacefully immovable and middleless water, moving at middle: Hello and Goodbye, they’re mingling, the waters wetting each other as if always made undivided, never been sundered, never foundered between those above and those below upon God’s second day. A flow of stasis, under the bandage of the newly calm cloudless sky. It’s here He loses the winds of the world we call New, trading in those for a species of wind that doesn’t blow or push as much as it pulls, tugs Him toward, the meridian east: the brightkindling bow of the ship set amid the middle of the water without middle, it now parts each sucking, hollowfaced gust — pierces; to where the globe turns its cheek, to the face of its father the sun, is then struck with a kiss, lightsmote to blush itself humbled, a sunrise, as you’re flung down to the other edge of the round, where the flatness begins, the vale of the lessdimensioned, divested of west, the endless dark world we call Old. At the landed crown of the rounding before it’s rubbled away to flat, a last standing shadow, lengthening with the thrift of the day; it’s a female form, if not emblematically feminine. A ship’s figurehead stranded, could be, straining from her perch at beached prow. A maydel not too young anymore, she’s Eli the doctor’s daughter appeared sullen at the pointing, way out on the accusative tip of Manhattan having followed Him, if tentatively or shy: she hadn’t been sure, has to make her lastlit goodbye, maybe even she thought to convince Him, to remain and be hers, impossible, perhaps, this she knows, too late; she’s waving a headkerchief she’s abstractly embroidered as if with the fingers helpmating of widows and kinder unborn: with its wave not exactly bidding Him anything besides her heartache, commending it unto Him if that’s the mood she merits, as if — aval aval, it’s not a headkerchief, it’s a cover for challah, a coverlet for the swaddling of the two tabled loaves from last night, she’d baked; waving, more like she’s shaking out the crumbs her father and mother’ve left her, miserly few and what there are, greasy: she follows the lone ship, her cloth a sail forsaken by wind, sagging Him far, then gone. Out of her life, this gust: a sigh older than God. Had a few prospects over last Shabbos, again: nothing she’s interested in, no one redeeming, forget it, it’s worthless. With Him, He was different. Same old. How her father had said he’d die the night he’d marry her off. Finally. That or retire, or both. And in front of company, too, two corporate attorneys who’d also been patients, calling on her one with a new duster for a present, the other without flowers either. Dad had been calling the both of them Son. One touched feet with a wooden paw of a leg of the table under which the other’d held the hand of her mother. She was going to spit the cream in their coffee, but her mouth was too kind and the maincourse was meat. The last vision this puffy, darkeyed Eli has of His departure, it’s a reflection — the last to be imaged upon the waters of her face with its fallen nose, and those warm, rounded lips — it isn’t the ship, but a huge solitary head rising from the east, as if His return, but lifeless: the new Shabbos’ sun, sliced from the neck of horizon.
In the eye of the Shalom, in the very mouth of peace, B stands still through the storming, the weather unnamed and unnamable, having held fast to the wheel with one hand, with the other at the ribbing of His stomach, the ropes of flesh taut with hurt that wrest Him in, still sickened. To survive, and to rejoice in your own survival: to open your mouth to the last lingering patter, to open your eyes once shore’s distanced behind you, to catch dew upon your lashes, manna’s fallen balm. And then into the slowed heart of this quiescence, this lulling, ship’s loll, to be hit with one last and ferociously whiplashing force of night’s wind, a remnant, a reminder of the darkness left behind and yet in front of you, too — and, flying across that sky a fish lands on the deck, at the forecastle, the fallen castle, amidships, who knows, not me, I don’t care. Which fish don’t ask me either, whether kosher or not, only that it flips, gives a flop, a silver sliv of ichthys out of water off land, over and into a ship that goes forward while on a ship there’s nowhere to go, that’s what I’ve got — it goes onto the planks of the deck netted in kelp to hide its nakedness from the blush of the clouds.
