A Heaven of Others

Beit

I am of rabbis

a scholar to Torah and other

words, noted in my day

(which was long ago now)

and still in this day

by some who pray at

my grave because they

can’t pray to me as I

am dead in this heaven where,

when soon after my

death a student of mine my

greatest student died and visited

me, found me on a beach-

chair on an approximation of the

beach with its ocean (Netanya)

alongside a film star or starlet I

never know which her name is, was Elizabeth

Taylor and though

she’s dead to look at she looks pretty

good in a light whitish thong and blindingly

bleached sunglasses as my student,

my greatest student he approached, sat

down on a just-then-materializing beach-

chair and said:

Rav, Rabbi, it’s so good to meet you again and

here, but I don’t understand he said

throwing his tricolor beard and their chins in

the cardinal direction of Miss Taylor, Elizabeth

emerging from the wavelets, foam on her nipples

and

all soaked to the bush but I don’t understand he

said, how heaven could be like…this,

how this could be…heaven,

and so I said as I would always say as I stood

up in the shul in Witz but here I was at the

beach (Netanya) I said his name was Nathan,

Natan I said you must trust, but also think because it

might not be my heaven, I threw off my black

unshrouding the bronze of my chest,

it’s her hell