Collective Nouns
Jessica Jacobs · Ecotone · 2021
Collective Nouns Jessica Jacobs (bio) The Hebrew (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 singlesignal of warning to neighbors or friends,her husband—that little wind-up toy, God's docileerrand boy—complied. He built the wordto spec: big enough to holdtwo 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 upin it. Water crushed down from the sky, fountained from the seas, dissolvingliving dust and breath to reefs of hushed mud. [End Page 36] 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 beingsbut her—never lying beside her, never tastingthe taste of sleep, his tonguewithered to a husk. The dark hold was mobbed with chitter, roar, and screech without restraint, and from outside, the ceaseless babbleof wood and rain. She was drowningin languages she couldn't speak, and he never offered hera word of comfort. ד.When the rains finally ended, Noah bound a rope to the rafters.Before the raven, before the doves, he lowered himselffrom the word's one window. A splash,and he leashed the rope to his ankle; leanedback and let his hands fall empty, let the flood embrace him. Grime sloughed from him into the wavesuntil the only animal he smelled was himself. Noah bobbed there, a beaming buoy, tethered to the word in which the futurefloated, where his wife, unseen—the new Eve, humanity'sunnamed 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. [End Page 37] 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 covenantthat once rainbowed the sky, before the worldis again silenced—the water and weather already rising— what noun collective, what peaceful fleetlashed by syntax and spring linesinto a sentence of survival, what new words can we build to save us all? [End Page 38] Jessica Jacobs jessica jacobs is the author of the books Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going; Pelvis with Distance; and Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, coauthored with her wife Nickole Brown. Jessica is the chapbook editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. Four Way Books will publish her collection in conversation with the Book of Genesis in 2024.* Copyright © 2021 University of North Carolina Wilmington