The baton is in the other hand. The child has already giggled and been let go. This page is the errand after the refusal. The picture is blacked out.
No image. The frame stays dark on purpose. Isaiah already had a night vision, and it was not a lens: the multitude that fights Ariel shall be as a dream of a night vision (Isaiah 29:7). A hungry man eats in his sleep and wakes empty (Isaiah 29:8). Goggles would be a later glass, a green eye, NVG, worn so a soldier can see what the dark withholds. This leaf will not put them on. Blacked out is the refusal. Goo. Goo. A small mouth finding the dark, not a search set on the child. The infant is not the query. The night vision in the verse empties the siege. It does not light a target. What the eye would have been shown is withheld. The chariot can still be written. It does not have to be seen.
The last leaf would not read the sky. This one will not read a barrel as a verse. Hand off. The school of fish lifted the baskets and said the fire was not invented here. Take the stick. Do not spend the small throat to make the stick holy.
Nail him, as the chapter nails him The assassin ate bread and then used the sword. Ishmael son of Nethaniah, royal seed, ten men, Mizpah, the seventh month (Jeremiah 41:1–3). Weeping was the lure. Wheat and barley bought ten lives (Jeremiah 41:8). Johanan went out to fight him and took the captives back. Ishmael escaped to the Ammonites with eight men (Jeremiah 41:11–15). The page can want him nailed. The chapter does not give the nail. He slips. The plea in the field is what held. A play that finishes him cleaner than Jeremiah has left the leaf. Name him. Do not hire a sharper ending.
Fix the bayonet Fix it. The old command. Not a dagger, double-sided, a cut that can be drawn together. The bayonet on this leaf is three-sided, a spike, the wound unable to be sewn. That is the soldier’s fact, and it is not a verse. Triangulation is the other three. A place fixed from three points, so the hand knows where it stands. The spike has three faces. The fixing has three sights.
It is also not the peg. Jael took a tent peg and a hammer and drove it through Sisera’s temple into the ground while he slept (Judges 4:21). Deborah sang it: she put her hand to the nail (Judges 5:26). That nail is a woman’s, in a tent, and the chapter already finished it. Do not lay the bayonet over the peg, or the peg over the bayonet. One is a spike that will not be sewn. One is a nail the song already struck. Neither one is the three that finds a place.
The ear still hears bay-net: a net in the bay, the other boat, the pull on the cords till the fish tear the mesh (Luke 5:6–7). Pull up the other. One net is not the catch. The bayonet is the soldier’s word. The bay-net is the fisherman’s. Both are a fixing. Neither is a prophecy about a coast. The sheet in the narthex is still not the foe.
Do not give up the fire stick. It is a bat with wings, a small body in the dark, not a toy and not a verse. It stays in the wind. The wind at the cave splits mountains, and the L-rd is not in it (1 Kings 19:11). A report filed in the shape of that stick can ride that wind. It cannot become the voice that comes after. The peg stays in the tent. The bat stays in the wind. Neither one is the thin silence. The stitch is the page’s, not the wound’s. Three sides will not be drawn together. The sentence can.
Agent Mushkabah, as ordered Say it once so the play cannot pretend. Mushkabah is the agent’s name only in this leaf, a report filed in the shape of a fire stick, ordered toward a prophet who never carried one. The report does not put a whiffle-ball bat in his hand. A toy with holes is not the errand, and not a verse. It brings the noise to the cave and lets the cave answer.
He had already run. Jezebel’s sentence was in his ear. He went a day’s journey into the wilderness, sat under a broom tree, and asked to die. I am not better than my fathers (1 Kings 19:3–4). Afraid, then done. The text does not say depressed. It says he requested that his life be taken, and then he slept. An angel touched him twice. Cake. Water. A journey of forty days to Horeb, the mount of G-d (1 Kings 19:5–8). Condition: emptied, fed, still going. Not a diagnosis. A man under a tree who wanted the errand over.
The cave, and the refrain He came to the cave and lodged there. The word came. What are you doing here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:9). He answered with the altar, the killed prophets, and I, even I only, am left. Then the wind, great, splitting mountains, and the L-rd was not in the wind. After the wind an earthquake, and the L-rd was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire, and the L-rd was not in the fire. After the fire a still small voice, a thin silence (1 Kings 19:11–12). He wrapped his face in his mantle and stood at the entrance. The question came again. What are you doing here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:13).
Refrain. The same words. Not a new commission dressed as weather. A man asked twice, in the quiet after the noise, what his standing there was for. Go like the wind: he had gone like the wind once already, the hand of the L-rd on him, running before Ahab to Jezreel (1 Kings 18:46). At the cave the wind is the thing the L-rd is not in. A thousand yards is a soldier’s measure, not a verse. The distance in the book is forty days, and then the width of a mantle over a face. Bring him home means bring him to the question, not to a range.
What are you doing here. What are you doing here.
He is sent back. Anoint Hazael. Anoint Jehu. Anoint Elisha. Seven thousand who have not bowed (1 Kings 19:15–18). The cave is not the end of him. Home is later, and the L-rd is in it.
They went on, and behold a chariot of fire and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven (2 Kings 2:11). Elisha cried, my father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof (2 Kings 2:12). The wind at the cave was the wind the L-rd was not in. This wind takes him. Pull back on the reins. The horses are fire. The hand that checks them is not a soldier’s report. Bring Elijah home. Not to the range. Not to the tree where he asked to die. Home, on this page, is the L-rd in the chariot, the thin silence behind him, the question already asked twice, and the whirlwind that does not leave him under the broom tree. The child is here. Not in the whirlwind. Not the fare. A small throat at the edge of the fire, unspent, he, he, and already gone. The cry my father is the son’s. The other sound is not a sign.
The line goes out to the cave, and the wind is not the L-rd, and the question stands, and the mantle covers the face. The mantle falls to the other man, and the reins come back, and the chariot is fire, and the L-rd is where the line comes home. The child is still here. The fire does not get the hand.
