The Hebrew תֵבָה (tayva), normally translated as ark,
can mean container, box, and, also, word.
א.
When Noah was still
just a man, not yet sailor and savior,
God said,
“Make yourself a word,
for I have decided to silence
all flesh.”
Scraping muscle
from a hide, his wife
crouched nearby, listening.
Without argument or question, without a single
signal of warning to neighbors or friends,
her husband—that little wind-up toy, God’s docile
errand boy—complied. He built the word
to spec: big enough to hold
two of every creature,
but too small for her
mother, too small for her brother, no matter
how she begged.
ב.
From planks of gopher wood smeared with pitch,
Noah built the word and God shut them up
in it.
Water crushed down from the sky, fountained from the seas, dissolving
living dust and breath
to reefs of hushed mud.
And Noah:
a silent man in a wooden word drifting
the silenced world.
ג.
With an otter placid as a stole across his shoulders,
instead of talking,
he lived in his hands, picking
nits; troughing food and water, always more water; tending,
tending to every walking, creeping, winged thing, to all beings
but her—never lying beside her, never tasting
the taste of sleep, his tongue
withered to a husk.
The dark hold was mobbed with chitter, roar, and screech
without restraint, and from outside, the ceaseless babble
of wood and rain. She was drowning
in languages she couldn’t speak, and he never offered her
a word
of comfort.
ד.
When the rains finally ended, Noah bound a rope to the rafters.
Before the raven, before the doves, he lowered himself
from the word’s one window. A splash,
and he leashed the rope to his ankle; leaned
back and let his hands fall empty, let the flood
embrace him.
Grime sloughed from him into the waves
until the only animal he smelled
was himself. Noah
bobbed there, a beaming buoy,
tethered to the word
in which the future
floated, where his wife, unseen—the new Eve, humanity’s
unnamed mother—looked out from the window and watched
as he gave himself to the killing waters;
looked past him, trying not to think
of the death and rot that brothed him.
ה.
Is a man good,
she wondered,
who can construct a word
large enough
for only a chosen few?
ו.
And now, regardless of any covenant
that once rainbowed the sky, before the world
is again silenced—the water and weather
already rising—
what noun collective, what peaceful fleet
lashed by syntax and spring lines
into a sentence of survival,
what new words
can we build
to save us
all?
