Blue Sperm Whale

His patient brings in a dream, to infiltrate his own: I'm about five, I'm on a windy beach dragging at the sand with my hands, when suddenly, I bring into view the rubbery brow of some long-submerged ocean beast. My fingernails keep clawing, clawing aching from the pressure, till after what feels like hours I unearth its entire body: A blue sperm whale. Is it alive?

Cautiously, he interprets her painful struggle to expose yet somehow contain an old Oedipal menace. Now, after five years on his taut leather couch, on a morning in late April, she sits up and confesses, I love you.

Other images she shared speed through his mind: her mother's horrified scream when she walked in on them and her father urgently covered his naked wife, vague memories of the thrashing that followed, her back and neck lashed with the pain of barbed ocean waves and a terrible excitement. Now, crowning up through the sand shamelessly naked and blue, this spent beast from the sea and more, I love you.

He recalls that her dreams are often mined with fish-hooks. Here too, Each time I try to free their grips they snare and bite at my fingers. Mentors from his training circle like pilot fish, offering a school of evasive replies from a feeble "I too have feelings for you," to a simple, suspect "Thank you," as if he were gaining, no, maintaining an upper hand, as in the lament: The patient has a vantage point, the therapist an advantage point.

I love you too, trips off his lips because of the truth, because the risk of losing his license seems banal against her gallery of ocean images. And though he knows she has been raped and repeatedly mistreated, this therapist (The Rapist, she nicknamed a doctor from her past), he rises from his chair as she rises from his couch for a long silent hug.

Later he tells a frowning colleague who specializes in physician abuse, "Hugging a female patient is never sexual for me; it only happens from the waist up."

But even as he defends his stance he senses the stirring head of a blue sperm whale desperate to free itself from the sand. A nearby buoy shines bright as a cenotaph. Stretched across the excavated pit where once a whale tried to surface, he grieves what little remains, lines of tiny barbs glistening, twitching in the ocean breeze, painted with freshly drawn blood.

Elephant Street

for those who chart the red shift of galaxies

When Israel went forth from Egypt, Armand and I wound our way through another spring. The Jordan turned back a rush of hot-dog smells, a pollen of street dust and car-stereos blasting through open windows. The mountains skipped like rams past panhandlers and boutiques, and Armand grinned down at me like a carnivorous fish. "Judaism is an aesthetic choice," he said. "The sea saw it and fled." An expanding universe is speeding up. My step slows. I had shaken my head: "How can anyone be an atheist?" "But you're an atheist," he thunders over the busy intersection. "There are hundreds of Gods you don't believe in —the elephant-headed Ganesh—and only one in which you do." We're in for a lovers' quarrel. I scoured the universe with questions, scrubbing until it was nearly clean, but by the Gates of Prayer we stopped again to dodge the cars. Half-heartedly, I switched back to science, the "eternal molecules" argument, which he side-swiped. "If a car were to hit you between here and Spadina Avenue, would your family be consoled to know your molecules were still here? You wouldn't be forgotten, but you'd be gone." The heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth is given to mortals: That made me look around and count the number of streets on which a Jew could walk. A universe was speeding up when it should slow down. We parted the seas, as usual, on good terms. The rock of his heart by then must have been turning to water; we are just flints from which sparks are struck. It is not the dead who praise the Lord, it is not those who go down to silence. It's like that, talking about God over lunch-hour as the seasons change on the unforgiving concrete. "To Fate," Armand calls back a final time, raising an imaginary wine glass as he steps into traffic, "no matter how we render it."

* italicized lines in "Elephant Street" are quoted with permission from Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayer Book, by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.