to my elbow on the armrest and fall asleep.

and slaps Friedman’s page
and jolts me awake and I reread—

in Jacob’s life in the story
of his wrestling with God.

and he has felt his own ways returned to him
and he is no longer such a man of action,
becoming more passive like his father Isaac—
passive to the world—wrestling with God.

to the heartfelt pouring of my soul
into my many duties in congregational service
overreaching my skinny self, and into marriage
attempted from a skill set meager, academic,
and obsequious, leading to my very own turning points
within the heaviness of my soul, slow to understand,
of the covenant with death made by my first wife
followed by deletion of service as I mishandle engagement
to my second wife, whom the demons snatch away from me,
followed by my assignment in my ‘roomy place,’ Rehovot,
as Isaac named the uncontested well, shared with others:
I see myself as magister of a single room with Wallace Stevens,
befallen of another loneliness with Dickinson,
bearing the eternal quietude with Keats,
preferring solitude over trade with Nietzsche,
still and contemplative with Shakespeare’s buffoons,
wrapped in the muffling silence of Suess’s spider,
yet humbled with Whitman to fearing I can barely write.

and carried—his grandfather’s seed to bless
all nations and all families of the earth—
knowing I am not of his seed
but testing an opinion as to who
are of his seed.

and then continue and ponder
how occasioning childbirth was difficult
for wives of patriarchs—and liberators?

who gestated a child for nine months,
but who said, what of us poets
who have gestated a book
for nine years?