Gilad Jaffe

MICHELANGELO’S MOSES

Take an invisible thing & build a house around it:
Cut a window in the wall & call it a door:
My house is a decayed house: & the Jew squats
on the windowsill: Merging with the weather:
Not even he can capture: Wind in material:
As words cannot come to us from dead languages:
Given there is no such thing as dead language:
& the wind is born into material already:
At the base of the mountain: Your eyes become toys
for other eyes: Gathered on the lonely piazza:
Delivered into our head: The distorted gift of horns:
But even more resonant: He has hidden our ears

GILAD JAFFE has poems in Conjunctions, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives and teaches in Iowa City.