Yom Kippur as Manifest in an Approaching Dorsal Fin by Adam Byrn Tritt Page B

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    When I was seven
    I went on a field trip
    Through the Jersey countryside
    To the clogged vessels of
    Dense New York streets,
    Sitting in the Yeshiva bus,
    Staring down
    At the faces in the unmoving cars
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    We slid, heated, halting,
    Metal to metal cells, fuming forward.
    Finally, stilled, we gratefully
    Disembarked, stood and walked along
    Delancey Street
    The lower east side
    Of Manhattan,
    With my school class,
    We visited a temple during minyan
    Sat separated
    Girls from boys
    On an austere balcony of
    Dark woods and dark ages
    Staring above the vaulted steps
    At the dais of black-coated men
    Listening to the song to their beloved
    Carried with the audible overtone of
    the holy
    And an undertone of confidence
    The song was surely heard.
    We were there for days or minutes
    And fidgeted, fussed, squirmed
    In the presence of the Universal King.
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    Passover and the Industrial Revolution
    After, released of our confinement
    Reconfined to sturdy lines to walk
    On to the great mystery of the
    Matzah factory.
    Past the pickle barrels
    On the sidewalks
    Where for ten cents
    We all got to dip our hands
    And pull a half-sour
    From the briny cask,
    Close by,
    And brick-built
    Red and high-windowed
    Was the matzah factory.
    We entered though the loading dock
    And never wondered if there was
    A door, an office, a warehouse but
    There were ovens
    Vast and hot.
    We stood on a balcony
    Over the open factory floor,
    Vats and vaults
    Mixers and all over the smell of flour.
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    Rolling from the vat,
    Poured onto a sheet, rolled into the
    ovens
    Pressed by combs
    For perforation
    For ease of use
    For profit
    For Horowitz-Margareten,
    Streits, Manischewitz
    The Matzah Monopoly
    For tables during Passover
    For people to gingerly, slowly shop for
    In Pathmark, Shop-Rite, Foodtown
    Kids in cart, mamma picking her box
    Of matzah, plums, salami
    And, if she was in a hurry
    It had nothing to do with
    Evacuation, or the Pharaoh
    Or Moses except that
    We’d read it in the Haggadah
    And break the matzah,
    Ask the questions, dip the
    Parsley, spread the horseradish
    And bite.
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    Passover and the Industrial Revolution
    The factory was hot with baking
    And we left, sweating, drenched
    Flour-powdered without and
    Within, samples of matzah,
    In a single-file exodus from the ovens.
    Which, every Passover
    I recreate in my kitchen.
    The bread of affliction
    Is my joy, my revolt,
    My exodus and cry unto the
    wilderness
    To my own kind—
    “Let my people go.”
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    The Harmony
    of Broken Glass
    A million years ago, I used to own a
    bookstore. The community had
    asked for it and even put up much
    of the money. In return, they’d receive a
    return on their investments when the store
    turned a profit and would have a local store
    that carried the things they wanted. All Lee
    and I did was to quit our jobs, invest our time
    and money, and pour our hearts and souls
    into it. They gave us a list of the sorts of things they wanted, we stocked them, and they
    pointed their browsers at Amazon to buy the
    books and drove to Wal-Mart to buy the can-
    dles and soon we were out of business and
    they could not quite figure out why.
    We were in Gainesville, Florida, at the end
    of Sixth Street, where it met 441 at an acute
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    angle just past the north side of town. Our
    building was an old gas station built in 1906.
    It had the original brick foundation holding
    up the original cedar beams holding up the
    original pine tongue and groove floors hold-
    ing up the original pine tongue and groove
    walls in which were held the original win-
    dows. Nearly one hundred years old the entire
    building was, and it creaked and groaned and
    loved every step made inside.
    The building had two main rooms. The
    front, the salesroom, was twenty by twenty
    and windows all around except for the front
    door on the south wall perpendicular to the
    street, and the door leading to the second
    room, right in the middle of the west