Stepping through the Gate
Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah. And this world
is lousy with them. More than we can count
on our dogwalk alone: chainlink and iron and white
wooden pickets. Fences to keep people’s bad barking dogs
in, to keep our bad barking dog out. His nostrils flare
wide as a twirled skirt as he reads the tales of past passersby
on fences that mark what is another’s burden, another’s
privilege to tend, and what is open to the traffic of strangers.
Called up to the Torah, a reader tracks the cramped letters
with a yad, a metal pointer topped by a tiny pointing hand.
If it feels colder than the air, it’s because silver steals
your body’s heat, this tool to keep your place, to keep you
in your place, to keep you from marring even a single sacred letter.
But sometimes barriers grow so large it’s hard to see
what they’re protecting. And here is the fig tree yearning
past its yard, reaching toward the walk with its fat-fingered leaves.
Here, the arbor propping branches hunched as the shoulders
of a weary giant—yet under its slump, an exuberance
of mulberries. There, the yellow house whose bramble is more
than worth its thorns: like drops of ink dripping from the branches,
the blackberries call us to make a quill of our tongues.
Let every fence in our minds have a gate.
With an easy latch and well-oiled hinges. The neighbors
urge us to indulge—There’s more than we can possibly eat—
so, here, love, is fruit with the sun still inside it. Let me
thumb the juice from your chin. Let us honor what we love
by taking it in.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), and Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), co-authored with her wife Nickole Brown. Read more.
“Stepping Through the Gate” was first published in Southern Cultures.