Negative Theology

God tells a story, but not the story

I am listening to. Finger pointing

at the moon and I can’t see the moon. But tell that

to God. Some say he’s playing

           hide and seek, and that he’s hiding.

I can go on this way, in my Jewishness,

from parable to parable,

but the whale isn’t a metaphor

when Jonah is in it. If I run screaming

down the street, people think not that I am

afraid, but that I am crazy. I am

afraid of understanding why God

is telling a story into the wind, as if

           I am as far from the wind as Jonah

                                                                      in the whale in the sea in the story.

There is nothing I can do—I have a contract

with the wind that wants to know

what I breathe in the belly of the whale

I am not inside. The wind doesn’t care

if I can hear my own breath, which is

the wind, but is really the past.