The last time I saw my brother, he’d been dead

eighteen months and came as a ghost in the passenger seat,

his arm hanging out the window and whistling

an old boot camp song. He said

we were born on the two ends of Tammuz

and that our mother, ever since Dachau, knew God

wanted us close. The road curved along the Hasbani River.

He turned his head toward the apple groves, let the wind breathe

on his beard as if it hadn’t been

washed and treated in Tahara. Cursed the plains,

their magnificent light in the Arabic he’d learned in a village

beyond the plateau. We stopped for gas

and he took off his shirt. Shrapnel gleamed like mussel shells

caught in the skin above his ribs. He said he’d travel again

underground, spend nights counting beetles

in trenches, that he’d tasted the blood of palm trees

in yellow dates on the other side of the drought.

Years ago, we saw a woman with wild hair

pull bits of gold from her mouth and cast them like the Mayans

cast them, into a sinkhole by the Dead Sea. Flies bustled

in and out of her dress. The desert hummed

underneath like an engine refusing to cool off.

When the late sun vanished into Hebron, she chanted something

in Russian, bent over to watch the last bit of gold

overcome by a womb of earth. The rim collapsed

under her weight and hours later they mined her:

dogmatic, unwilling to show herself

through the muck and salt. No one claimed her. A tourist,

my brother said, and he held me so I could stand

what the land, in its unquenchable thirst, had done.