Poets on the Edge : An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry [1 ed.] 9780791477144, 9780791476857

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Poets on the Edge

An An Anthology Anthology of of CCoonntteemmppoorraarryy Selected Selectedand andtranslated translatedby by

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Aminadav AminadavDykman Dykman

Hebrew Po e t ry

POETS ON THE EDGE

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SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture Sarah Blacher Cohen, editor

POETS ON THE EDGE An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry

Selected and translated by Tsipi Keller Introduction by Aminadav Dykman

Cover image: Michael Sgan-Cohen (1944–1999), HAOR ROAH, acrylic on canvas, 40x40 cm. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany, by arrangement with The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Susan M. Petrie Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Poets on the edge : an anthology of contemporary Hebrew poetry / selected and edited by Tsipi Keller ; introduction by Aminadav Dykman. p. cm. — (SUNY series in modern Jewish literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7685-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7914-7686-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Israeli poetry—Translations into English. I. Keller, Tsipi. II. Dykman, Aminadav. PJ5059.E3P64 2009 892.4'1708—dc22 2008014208 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

PREFACE xvii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxi INTRODUCTION Aminadav Dykman xxiii YEHUDA AMICHAI (from Open Shut Open, 1998) I Was Not One of the Six Million. And What Is the Span of My Life? Open Shut Open 1 The Precision of Pain and the Blurring of Bliss A Touch of Yearning in Everything (third section) 4 My Parents’ Motel 5 The Jewish Time Bomb 7

T. CARMI (from Monologues and Other Poems, 1988; Truth & Consequence, 1993) And Until When? 9 If It So Pleases 10 Nightwatch 11 A Time for Everything 12 Monologue of the Deserted (II) 13 In Memory of Dan Pagis (1930–1986) 13 Monologue in the Twilight of His Life 16 Lonely Woman’s Monologue 17 Chess at the Seashore 18 An Explosion in Jerusalem 18 Mortification of the Soul 19 The Mouth 20 From the Diary of a Divorcé 21

DAN PAGIS (from Late Leisure, 1964; Transformation, 1970; Synonyms, 1982; Last Poems, 1987) Tempt the Devil 24 Ein Leben 25 Wall Calendar 25 The End of Winter 26 Memorial Night 27 *(First line: You arrive slightly late) 27 A Linguistic Problem 28 Diagnosis 28 Anecdote 29 Testimony 29 Browsing through the Album 30 Houses 31

NATAN ZACH (from Hard to Remember, 1984; Since I’m in the Neighborhood, 1996) A Belated Poem 32 To Rise from Ashes 33 Self-Portrait at Night 34 Meantime 35 As Agreed 36 Three Poems That Weren’t Written 36 Widow 38 Hayuta 39 Comrade Poet 40 A Small Error in the Machine 41 Goodbye Berlin 41 Confession: Gentle 42 And Then We Had 43

SHIN SHIFRA (from Woman’s Song, 1962; The Next Step, 1968; Poems 1973–1985 (1987); A Woman Who Practices How to Live, Poems 1986–1999 (2001) That Made Me Woman 45 The Spider of Sin 46 On Rain 46 Conceit 47

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Lie 47 Father 47 A Stranger 47 In This Split Second 48 Sabbath Prayer 48 Summer 49 This Evening 49 Ecclesiastes 50 Goat 50 Moonstruck 51 Dove 51 Vegetarian 52 Shame 53 A Woman Who Practices How to Live 53

ISRAEL HAR (from Edge of Darkness and Bread, 1994) Morning in a Foreign Place 56 Grave in the Sun 57 A Cradle Story 58 A Sour Pickle the Angel of Death 60 Dust Instead of Glory 61 Australian Story 63 Pauper’s Talk 63 And Tomorrow I Too to Die Like This 64

DAVID AVIDAN (from Something for Somebody—Selected Poems 1952–1964) The Stain Remained on the Wall 68 Housing 69 Incident 71 Interim Summation 72 Power of Attorney 73 Personal Problems 74 Dance Music 75 Will Power 76 Safe Distance 76 Last-Last 77 Experiments in Hysterics 77

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DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH (from Mother with Child, 1992) An Exceptional Autumn 79 An Attempt to Express an Opinion 80 On Life and on Death 81 Omens 82 The Cat 83 Ready Alert 83 Lying Upon the Water 84 But She Had a Son 85 Grand Days Have Gone By Her 86 A Mother Goes About 88 The Tale about the Arab Who Died in the Fire 88 Lullaby 89 Train of Thought 90 Rina Slavin 91 The Greenness of Leaves 93 A Private History 94 A Beetle’s Life 94

ASHER REICH (from Selected Poems, 1986; Works on Paper, 1988; Fictitious Facts, 1993; Winter Music, 1996) The History of My Heart 95 Fragments 96 New York: First Swim 97 New York: Second Swim 97 Requiem to a Dog in the Rain 98 Sights 99 Mud 99 Nights 100 Mornings 101 The Music of the Cosmos 103 A Recurring Memory 104 Fence 104 Photograph 105 A Different Sensation 105 Odors 106

HEDVA HARECHAVI (from I Only Want to Tell You, 1985) Tonight I Saw 108 When She Goes Out Alone 109

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Imagine, Carving the Sky 109 When the Music Subsided 111 Like Back Then When I Was Escorted 111 Like in the Passing Year 111 Like a Binging Preying Beast 112 A Very Cheerful Girl 113 Go, Go Wherever You Go, But Go 115 Already Night, Already Day 116 For Ruth 118 Here Everything 118

NURIT ZARHI (from The Fish, 1987; Village of Spirits, 1994; Hypnodrom Hotel, 1998) *(First line: For they are at the center of my life) 120 *(First line: The rain reveals the hidden names of leaves) 121 *(First line: Forgive my outburst, Sir) 122 Baby Blues 122 The Marked Ship 124 Convincing Herself She’s a Picture 125 Nights 126 Lightly 128 Stone 129

MEIR WIESELTIER (from Exit to the Sea, 1981; The Concise Sixties, 1984; Warehouse, 1995) A Naive Painting 130 To Be Continued 131 Condolences 132 A Moving Electric Message 132 Only in Hebrew 134 My Wisdom 134 Cheese 135 The Bible in Pictures II 136 Burning Holy Books 137 The 19th Century: Nohant, June ’76 138 The Lost Uncles 139 The Fowl of the Air 139 The Flower of Anarchy 140 Not a Poem 141

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A Childish Farewell Song to a Prime Minister 141 The Wheel of the Century 142

RUTH BLUMERT (from Exiles on a Strange Planet, 1991; Acquaintance from Another Age, 1996) Antiques 143 The Combination 144 In Time 144 Entropy 145 Chances 145 Breaks 146 The Departure from the Garden of Eden 146 Jerusalem, Bus #18, 1986 147 Waves of Love 149 Silent Film 150 Letter 150 Additional Dimensions 152 Metamorphosis 152 Morning 153 Lost in the Alleys of the Flat 153 *(First line: Most of the time I doze) 154

YONA WALLACH (from Appearance, 1985) All the Trees 156 House Said the House 157 Come to Me Like a Capitalist 158 Tuvia 159 Sleep with Me Like a Journalist 161 Come to Me Like a Jew 163 Let’s Make a Little Philosophy 164 All At Once Everything Seems Dear 164 Woman Becomes Tree 165 When You Come Lie with Me Come Like My Father 167

RAQUEL CHALFI (from Free Fall, 1979; Matter, 1990; Love of the Dragon, 1995) Travelling to Jerusalem on a Moon Night 169 Hair of Night 170

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The Water Queen of Jerusalem 171 Reckless Love 172 I Drew My End Near 173 Sitting in the Wall 174 Monologue of the Witch Impregnated by the Devil And the Whiteness Grew Stark 175 Elegy for a Friend Who Lost Her Mind 176 A Concealed Passenger 177 Blues in a Jar 177 German Boot 178

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MORDECHAI GELDMAN (from Eye, 1993; The Book of Asking, 1997) Friendly Dragon 185 Porno 2 187 Porno 3 188 The Hottentot Venus (Porno 7) 188 Holy Ground 190 Dolinger 191 Tonight I Yield 193 I Won’t Travel This Summer 193 Abused Neighbor 195 Yes 196 Why a Frog 196 Almost Flowers 197

RUTH RAMOT (from Slices of Heaven, 1994; Sealed Waves, 1998) Blue Prince 198 *(First line: I leave, taking with me) 199 They Assault Me the Flowers 199 *(First line: Quiet and an evening breeze) 200 In the Soft Curve 200 The Scent of Wind 201 Painting 201 *(First line: The moon doesn’t fit here) 202 Toward Evening 202 Hot in the Corner Café 203 Arithmetic 204 Time-Saturated 204 Love Song 205

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Room Number Forty 205 Nuns 206 *(First line: Yesterday, when I sat in the café) 207

AGI MISHOL (from Fax Pigeon, 1991; The Interior Plain, 1995; Look There, 1999; New and Collected Poems, 2003) So Overbearing Had Become 208 *(First line: I remember a short speech) 209 It Seems Miraculous to Her 210 Turning to Rest in Sappho’s Poems 210 Afternoon Nap 211 The Interior Plain 211 Revelation 212 Like a Bird Tagged 212 In Her Bed 212 The Sacred Cow of Hardship 213 The Irritating Manner in Which I Exist in Your Fancy From the Depth I Called Hey 214 When Soft Angel Plumage 215 Morning and She Pees 215 Estate 216 Woman with Pitchfork 217 Nocturnal I 218 Nocturnal II 220 Shaheeda 221

DAN ARMON (from Duration, 1986; Footprints, 1989) The Squash Watchman 223 The Apple the Cucumber and the Plum 224 Midas of Sugar 224 Stairwell 225 *(First line: In a temporary shelter 226 Play in the Kitchen 227 *(First line: In a gesture of argument) 228 Eight Short Ones 229 Baking 230 *(First line: In a dark backyard) 231 Fire 231 Candle 232

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214

*(First line: The wondrous wilting of a flower) 232 Song of the Valley 233 *(First line: We’ve stabilized the emotion) 234 Travel 234

YITZHAK LAOR (from Night in a Foreign Hotel, 1992; And Loveth Many Days, 1996) A Note 236 Silhouette 237 Sleeping in Another Place 237 Poetry 238 Gouging 239 Sweat 239 The Narrator’s Death 240

MAYA BEJERANO (from Selected Poems, 1972–1986; Voice, 1987; Beauty Is Rage, 2001) Poetry 244 Data Processing #10 245 Data Processing #12 246 Data Processing #14 247 Lust 248 Don’t Stop the Motion 249 Passion-Dress 249 The Hands of Autumn 250 A Galilean Landscape, Important to Note Pecan Leaves 252

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RONNY SOMECK (from Rice Paradise—Selected Poems 1976–1996) Dog After Dog 255 Greek Music 256 Solo 257 A Soldier in the Desert. A Romance in Photos 257 Johnny 258 From a Distance the Tombstones Look Like a Flock of Storks 258 Handcuffs. Street Poem 259 Poverty Line 260

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Jasmine. A Poem on Sandpaper 260 Autumn. A French Movie 261 Tear Comptroller Report 261 Thirty Seconds to Charge the Nipple 262 Tractors 262 Lions’ Milk 263 Poem to a Girl Already Born 263 In Answer to a Question: When Did Your Peace Begin? A Pound of Child 264 Blues on the Life That Was Almost Mine 264 Rice Paradise 265

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HAVA PINHAS-COHEN (from The Passage of the Doe, 1994; A River and Forgetfulness, 1998) Explicitly Named 267 On the Eve of the Holiday 268 Fear 269 Variable Texture 270 Boundaries 271 Time 271 Pietà 272 The Way to the River 273 A Hand Empty of Body 273

AMIR OR (from Face, 1991; Ransoming the Dead, 1994; Poem, 1996) A Pint of Beer 277 From the White Dictionary No Trail Markers 279 Synopsis 281 Immortal 282 Poem (six sections) 282

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TAMIR GREENBERG (from Self-Portrait with Quantum and a Dead Cat, 1993; The Thirsty Soul, 2002) Ode 290 Son 292 Dusk 294

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Elegy 294 My Grandma Rachel Age Fifteen Annabel Lee 301 Poetics 1 301 Poetics 2 302 Poetics 3 302 Journey 1 302 Journey 2 302

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SHARRON HASS (from The Mountain Mother Is Gone, 1997; The Stranger and the Everyday Woman, 2001) Our Life Is the Life of Beasts 304 To the Fox 305 The Stranger 306 The Great Illusion 309 The Flutist 309 I Stand in the Circle and Look Around Me 310 Afternoon Slumber 311 Smooth Boys 311 The Sun’s Mooring 312 The Girl Fumbles 313 Beyond the Forest 313

AFTERWORD The Poems of Irit Katzir 315 ABOUT THE AUTHORS 327 INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES 329

CON T EN T S

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PREFACE

Translation is the art of revelation. It makes the unknown known. The translator artist has the fever and craft to recognize, re-create, and reveal the work of the other artist. But even when famous at home, the work comes into an alien city as an orphan. —Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice by Willis Barnstone, Yale University Press, p. 265 (1993)

The gist of this anthology began twenty years ago while I was reading Dan Pagis’s poem “Ein Leben” in his posthumous collection Last Poems. As I read it again and again, I began to hear it in English and, like a somnambulist, reached for pen and paper. The poem “sang” to me in Hebrew and then resonated and “sang” to me in English, and, being a writer myself, I had to translate it. It seems a natural progression for a bilingual writer, living in the country of her adopted language, to look back to her country and language of origin and wish to create a bridge not only for herself but for the reading public in her new country. Translators often are poets and writers who, for the love of literature, are determined to bring over an “orphan” and set it in our midst, hoping we will appreciate its merit and make it welcome in its new home. Israel is small but not insular. Reading world literature translated into Hebrew is widespread, and many Israeli authors and readers, by necessity and/or by birth, are bilingual or trilingual. Literary events,

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both local and international, are part of the everyday discourse. Poems and short stories appear in the pages of the major dailies, as do translations of foreign works. It often seems that every other Israeli considers himself or herself a poet and/or a prophet. There is an intoxicating feeling of nervous creativity, a feeling I recall from the late 1960s and early 1970s when I sat in Kassit, a Tel Aviv café, surrounded by writers and poets—some of whom are included in this anthology—who drank, laughed, and argued late into the night. At the time, television sets were few and rare (even telephone lines were hard to get), and yet we felt connected to a larger world that was rapidly changing. We adopted jazz, pop music, and Sartre’s néant; the counterculture of the 1960s also had a great impact. At the same time, as the growing cities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa came into their own, so did the poets living in them. A new urban edginess, a sense of freedom, and a celebration of that freedom permeated their poems, not always understood or welcome in a country that until then embraced the ideals of the pioneer and of tilling the land. These new poets read their overseas contemporaries, such as Auden and Plath, Ginsberg and Lowell, to name a few. Like their fellow postmodernists, they discovered the night and recognized their urban surroundings and daily lives as subject matter. And, most important, they rejected the rigid verse forms and the stilted “poetic” language of their predecessors in favor of the evolving Hebrew they heard spoken on the street. A lot has been said about the sepulchral weight that Hebrew has had to carry, the weight of being (the holy language of the Bible), so holy in fact that to this day the strictest Hasids in Israel reserve Hebrew for prayer and the study of the Torah and use Yiddish in their daily and business lives. But a living, spoken language cannot be kept in a historical or religious museum, no matter how hard one might try “to stifle her unruly voice” (Pagis’s, “A Linguistic Problem” p. 28). Still, the Bible and the Talmud are taught in the schools in Israel, and so the Bible and the “mekorot” (sources) are an integral part of everyday life and speech. Shalom Aleichem’s Tevye—the dairyman who, like his neighbors in the shtetl, quotes and misquotes the Bible—would feel at home in present-day Israel. These references and allusions are commonly heard and used side by side with new slang

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words, with locutions and technical terms borrowed from English, and with curses and obscenities taken, most frequently, from Arabic and Russian; modern Hebrew, derived as it is from the Old Testament, is relatively impoverished in this respect, though developing. This fusion of high and low, of the colloquial and the archaic, makes for interesting and exuberant juxtapositions. Biblical allusions abound in the poems here, sometimes as straightforward quotes, often playfully and ironically; many of the notes I provide point these out when they are crucial to the poem. Most of the twenty-seven poets introduced here have never been published in this country before. The more I delved into their work, the stronger became my desire to bring before the American reader the range and variety of the poetic voices that have emerged during the last forty years or so. Religious or secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardic, immigrant or native-born, they all participate in, and explore, sometimes giddily, a new dynamic and excitement that reflect the freedom and ability to “speak entirely new phrases,” in the words of Agi Mishol (p. 217). What attracted me most was the directness and vigor of their speech. The poems are urgent, accomplished, and accessible, and I have tried to select those poets who best represent the variety and richness of contemporary Hebrew poetry. I want to thank Aminadav Dykman for his concise and illuminating Introduction, in which he provides the necessary historical foundation, masterfully interweaving the story of the birth of Israel with the story of its poetry, while demonstrating how Hebrew poetry evolved into what it is today. Finally, I had the privilege to work closely with the poets, except for those no longer living at the time of translation—Yona Wallach (1985) and Dan Pagis (1986). Over the intervening years, we lost T. Carmi (1994), David Avidan (1995),Yehuda Amichai (2000), and Dahlia Ravikovitch (2005). This anthology is dedicated to their memory. Tsipi Keller

P R EFACE

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Some of the poems previously have appeared in the following journals and anthologies: The New Republic; BOMB Magazine; Seneca Review; Partisan Review; The Kenyon Review; Prairie Schooner; The Asian Pacific American Journal; World Literature Today; Modern Hebrew Literature; ACM; Poetry International; MidAir Magazine; Visions International; The Cream City Review; The Jerusalem Review; Confrontation; Spoon River Review; Art Speak; The Quarterly Review of Literature; Modern Poetry in Translation; The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry; Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present; Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry by Israeli Women Writers; Circumference; Columbia; Connecticut Review; The Café Review; CipherJournal; Florida English; Guernica; Absinthe; InterPoezia; Zeek; Language for a New Century; Mad Hatters’ Review; American Poetry Review; Smartish Pace. Several poems also have appeared in the 1999 Mishkenot Sha’ananim International Poets’ Festival Anthology (Jerusalem). All rights for original works are held by each one of the poets or their representatives. Published by arrangement with The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. Special thanks go to the dedicated staff of the Institute. This project was made possible, in part, by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Agi Mishol’s poems “Revelation,” “Nocturnal I,” “Shaheeda,” from Look There (2006), reprinted in my translation with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota.

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INTRODUCTION

What is so unique about Hebrew poetry? Why would a poetry reader be interested in a selection of Israeli poets? Partially, at least, such questions remain rhetorical: Israel has always elicited great curiosity and polarized emotions, and it is safe to assume that its poetry would as well. Poetry, W. H. Auden said, “makes nothing happen.” Perhaps. But poetry, whether engaged or not, best represents the culture out of which it has grown. In addition, Israeli poetry has its own unique characteristics, just as the culture of which it is part. Vladislav Khodasevich, a Russian poet of this century, who was especially liked by Nabokov, wrote a poem that opens: I am the beginning, I am the end: I’ve done so little! And still I’m a solid link: this blessing has been granted me. One extraordinary feature of Israeli poetry is the length of the chain in which a poet may feel as “a solid link.” In fact, it will not be erroneous to state that one line, contorted as it may be, connects every Hebrew poet to the poetry of the Bible. In other words, the poetry of which Israeli poetry is part is possibly more ancient than most poetic traditions of our time. Russian poetry, for instance, is, at the most, 350 years old, and if we explore its roots, back to the twelfth century’s The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, we would be at a moment when Hebrew poetry was already in the “middle age” of the golden era. When an Israeli poet such as Yehuda Amichai writes a poem to Yehuda Halevi (“The soft hair on his neck / the roots of his eyes. // His curling beard- / the progression of his dreams”), he writes about a poet from

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a golden era that was over before other golden eras emerged. When a poet such as Dan Pagis writes a poem about King Saul—Saul’s Last Prayer—(“God, as the herd in the meadow / I was strong among your stones / Enduring the burden of your thunder”), he writes in a tongue whose vocabulary, to a great extent, is still the vocabulary of the poem’s biblical hero. True, there is a great distance between biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew spoken today, but not as great as the distance separating Yves Bonnefoy from, say, Chrestien de Troyes. At the same time, contemporary Hebrew poetry, in many respects, is younger than other contemporary poetry, perhaps, in some measure, precisely because of its antiquity—for many generations, this poetry, just like the tongue in which it is written, languished in a sort of private purgatorio, not of death exactly, but not of a full life either, as it did not participate as an equal in European poetry where it lived. Many of the literary trends, such as classicism, symbolism, or modernism, entered Hebrew poetry late, and in strangely twisted ways. In the summer of 1910, in a small resort town near Odessa, Haim Nachman Bialik, the modern Jewish National Poet, wrote his famous confessional poem Facing the Bookcase: Do you still remember?—I have not forgotten— In an attic, in a deserted synagogue, I was the last of the last, On my lips an ancient prayer lingered and died. ----------------------------------I look, I see—and yet I do not recognize you, old books, From your letters clear eyes no longer Gaze into depths of the soul, The sad eyes of ancient elders [. . .] ----------------------------------Is it that my eyes grew dim, Or are you nothing but rot, eternally dead [. . .]

The speaker of this poem, like S.Y. Agnon’s protagonists, is split between his painful longing for the old, tradition-based Jewish world and between the new ways of the modern world. A few months earlier that year, Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti printed in Le Figaro

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the first Futurist manifesto: “1. We wish to praise the love of danger, the habit of energy and effrontery. 2. Recklessness, daring and revolt will be the components of our poetry [. . .]”. Modernism, in fact, did penetrate Hebrew poetry rather soon, about a decade later. But the juxtaposition of the texts just quoted helps, I think, to appreciate what enormous distances Hebrew poetry had to traverse in order to enter the twentieth century. Many aspects of the new history of Judaism and Israel, especially after the rise of Zionism, have often been described in military terms: the battle of languages (Hebrew and its rivals—the Hebrew of the Diaspora, Yiddish, German, and Russian); the conquest of the land (Palestine-Israel); the conquest of Hebrew labor; the conquest of the desert. To state that each poetry is engaged in a fight to formulate the language it needs will be a truism. But again, in Hebrew poetry, the battle, one might say, was heroic and on an exceptional scale. At the beginning of the last century, Hebrew poets still referred to their language with messianic aspirations, as to a living dead, and they often depicted it as the mourning daughter of Zion, using language reminiscent of The Book of Lamentations: Be consoled, thou holy Hebrew tongue, Your light shall shine still, your glory shall return, Let not all your lovers despair; The people of Israel, longing for you, Shall rise again, as a warrior in the field of battle, Once your poets will start singing [. . .] Surely the reader will have noticed the mode of distant hope that runs throughout this stanza. Looking back 100 or 150 years, an American reader sees poets such as Tennyson and Browning, Poe and Whitman, and she or he cannot quite imagine poets who did not have in their language a word for “orange” or “cricket,” poets who had to consult the Bible and the Talmud to decide what might be the equivalent for “insomnia.” The struggle to revive Hebrew, umbilically bound to the greater struggle to revive the Jewish nation in its home, triumphed against all odds. In 1928, when the battle over Hebrew still raged, poet David Shimoni depicted the reviving language, using the well-known metaphor of the phoenix:

IN T RODUCT ION

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Spread your wing, wonder-bird, Hebrew idiom! Shake your wings and fly! Fly to the end of earth, onto the depths of the ruined Diaspora, And where the wind had not yet uprooted the tents of Jacob, Awake the wondrous melody, the song of the everlasting gospel! The song of the everlasting gospel! For the ashes are not yet cold, And you will rise from your ashes, from the all-consuming fires [. . .] As late as the 1940s, this struggle had not been clearly decided, and a battle was yet to be waged for a live, spoken Hebrew. Most of the poets of that period—Avraham Shlonsky, Leah Goldberg, Natan Alterman—felt a strong kinship with Central Europe, and with Russia in particular. Their poetry, for the most part, was rhymed and metered, written in a Hebrew that resorted to a wide use of biblical vocabulary and diction. Consider, for instance, the following stanzas by Shlonsky: Halbishini, ima kshreh, ketonet pasim le-tif’eret ve-im shakhar hovilini eley amal. Otfah ‘artsi ‘or ka-talit, Batim nitsvu ka-totafot, vekhi-retsu ot tefillin golshim kevishim, salelu kappayim [. . .] Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colours, and at the dawn lead me to [my] toil. My land is wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl. The houses stand forth like frontlets; and the hand-paved roads stream down like phylactery straps. (Tr. T. Carmi)

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The imagery here is clearly modernistic, almost à la Chagall, but the wording is unmistakably biblical. The forms halbishini and hovilini, the secondary, rare form otfah, and the use of the perfect in the verb nitsvu (modern Israeli Hebrew would use the participle nitsavim) all clearly belong to biblical Hebrew. This linguistic usage was by no means limited to Shlonsky’s poetry. In fact, it was the poetic lingua franca of that age. Israeli linguist H. B. Rosen, who published a pioneering book in 1956, under the self-explanatory title Our Hebrew, dedicated several pages of his work to a meticulous analysis of one poem by a young poet of the time, written in this very idiom, with its strong affiliation to the language of the Scriptures. Rosen composed a short philological commentary, where he noted the poet’s use of several biblical and talmudic hapax legomena, and he concluded that he can gloss the poem but cannot understand it. Writing as a linguist, not as a literary scholar, Rosen stated that the poem, relying heavily on words that are so far removed from the everyday conventional language of the socium in which it was written, became incomprehensible, at least as far as the users of that conventional language (i.e., Israeli Hebrew) were concerned. What was felt by the linguist was felt even more acutely by the poets themselves. In the early 1950s, the young generation of poets in the new state—only a few years old—felt that the poetic diction developed by their predecessors no longer suited their experiences; their emotional and intellectual makeup was radically different. In 1951, Benjamin Harshav, who in time became a leading scholar of poetry, was one of the founders of Likrat (“Toward”), a group that included young poets who later became household names: Arieh Sivan, Natan Zach, Moshe Dor,Yehuda Amichai, and David Avidan. “Likrat,” Harshav wrote not too long ago, “shifted Hebrew verse overnight from the bathos and exuberant imagery of the Russian tradition to the irony and understatements of Anglo-Saxon modernist poetry. [. . .] Whereas the dominant Hebrew poets [. . .] were still steeped in the language of the Bible and even used biblical tenses, the poets of Likrat wrote their poetry as a matter of course in the spoken language of the new Israeli society, with its European syntactic system, and the basic three tenses: past, present, future, accommodating allusions to the Bible within the framework of the spoken discourse.”

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One of the famous milestones in this process of change and “liberation” was Natan Zach’s direct mutiny against Alterman and Shlonsky, a mutiny that openly challenged the poetics of the dominant poets of the time. In a book of collected essays, Time and Rhythm in Bergson and Modern Poetry (1966), Zach criticized the “stagy diction” of Shlonsky and Alterman and compared them to the mannerists of the seventeenth century. He demonstrated how empty, in his view, was the metric monotone of Shlonsky, and he stated that Alterman’s poetry, “the greatest charmer of them all,” was “better suited to the small stage rather than serious poetry.” In one chapter in his book, Zach called attention to a poet close to his heart, David Fogel, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s and had a strong affinity for German expressionism. Even a casual glance at some of the poems by Zach, Amichai, or Avidan should suffice to convince the reader that these poets indeed forged a new poetic idiom, expressed in a language totally different from that of their predecessors. Above all, this idiom involved a complete, conscious rejection of the highest register of the Hebrew lexicon. Words that occupied a central position in the poetic vocabulary of the preceding generation were now excluded or marginalized. Yehudah Amichai, to quote but a representative example, made a clear statement to that effect in one of his earlier poems: “I, using but a small portion / of the words in the dictionary.” In other cases, this “higher register” was used by the poets of the new generation as a point of departure toward something quite different, usually closer to irony and understatement. As in all similar cases, the move away from a lofty style entailed radical changes in the status of tropes. These were now used in a very different manner, almost diametrically opposed to the practice of the “older” poets. In a nutshell, one might say that the poets of the new wave elaborated the various techniques of hushing one’s voice, of bringing it as close as possible to the vernacular; hyperbole gave way to irony. For Hebrew poetry, the conquest of place was just as important as the conquest of language. For many generations, Jews experienced the mystic connection to their lost land—which became a spiritual land—through an imagined geography. This imagined geography was the driving force of the famous Ode to Zion by Yehuda Halevi from which one never tires to quote: I would pass into thy forest and thy fruitful field, and stand Within thy Gilead, and wonder at thy mount beyond—

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Mount Abarim, and Mount Hot, where are the twain Great lights—thy Luminaries, thy Teachers. ---------------------------------------------Sweet would it be unto my soul to walk naked and barefoot Upon the desolate ruins where thy holiest dwellings were; In the place of thine Ark where it is hidden, and in the place Of thy cherubim which abode in thine innermost recesses [. . .] (Tr. Nina Salman) It would be only natural to assume that once Jews returned to the physical domain of Palestine, the imaginary and the physical entities would fuse harmoniously, but in reality this harmony took quite a long time to achieve and had to be fought for as well. In 1903, Abraham-Moses Luntz, a pioneer of Hebrew publishing in Jerusalem, printed a small anthology of poems, which later became very popular: “Zion’s Zither: Fifty Popular and National Poems Sung Nowadays in the Cities and Colonies of the Holy Land.” On page 39 of this booklet, Lunz printed a naive poem by one Y. Davidovich, under the title “A Wreath of Flowers”: I will set foot to the South, to the Land of Wonders, And come to the awesome, beautiful Lebanon— A few mighty cedars still stand there, I will pluck some of their leaves for you, I will stride down to Bethlehem, to its fields— A boy still sings there his wondrous songs, David the shepherd, leading his father’s herd— There I shall gather for you a bouquet of mandrakes. I will then come to the gardens of the Mount of Olives— Fresh leaves of the olive tree I shall take for you; I will come to the fair Sharon Valley, There, my pretty one, lilies shall I gather for you [. . .] It is easy to see that, almost 1,000 years later, the very same imagined geography that moved Yehudah Halevi was still very much active: on

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the slopes of the Lebanon Mountains and in the Sharon Valley, the poet expects to find the traditional biblical flora, and in the plains of Bethlehem his inner ear still hears the song of King David; from there he ventures to bring to his girl mandrakes, a plant nobody could identify with any certainty in the real Palestine of 1903. Indeed, the encounter with the real land of Israel resulted, for most poets, in a shock. Celebrated Israeli critic Dan Miron pointed out that a shock of this kind must have shattered the great Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky (1875–1943); after settling in Palestine, in 1931, the poet experienced a deep “writer’s block,” broken by a single poem, “In an Hour of Gloom,” where he wrote: “Here you are, Zion, with your ruined sanctuaries, / With the proud grandeur of your desolation! / Where are you, my enchanting, glorious dream? / Dream of my dreams, where are you?” It took Tchernichowsky almost two full years to produce his first poem about Palestine’s real panorama; the imagined geography lingered for a surprisingly long time. In an overall view, this poetic traditional geography yielded some kind of a double (if not triple) vision, which combined a real, immediate view of the panorama with a visionary, transhistoric view, sometimes blended with historio-sophic-spiritual vision. The result, in all cases, was a persistent inability to see the real surroundings of the land of Israel. It is easy to demonstrate this with almost any “place poem” written in Palestine up to the middle of the 1940s. One example follows by Shmuel Bass, a poet who belonged to the generation known as “the second aliyyah”: Gush Halav At moonlight I ascended to the mountains of Gush Halav, To look for the ancient mystery, frozen in the slopes. Mount Atsmon in the Galilee is wrapped in fog, The miracle of Johanan’s bravery shines there no more. No more there the tumult of the horses of ancient hosts, Night has unsheathed here the sword of silence. Oh, Lord! A great shadow passed before me, Leading an army of fleeing fluttering shadows!

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Johanan! Johanan! I heard your voice From the silence of rocks—burned hearts— Tell me, wasn’t it you, who passed here? In the light of your dew-like footsteps, Mysterious dreams of old are kindled here, And your laughter dissolves: You’re too late . . . Too late . . . It is quite obvious that the author does not, or is not willing to, see the actual place at his feet. From the top of Mount Atsmon, one could see, in a clear night, the majestic view of the Valley of Beit Netofa. But the poet sees nothing of that view; instead, the eyes of his spirit see a historical vision of the battle between the legions of Vespasian and the tragically heroic men of John of Giscala (Gush Halav), in the year 67 AD. Similar poems were written on virtually every site in Israel. This is not to say that there were no poems in which the real view of the land of Israel did emerge. But even those poems were, in general, laden with a cumbersome ideological burden. It is safe to state that as the spoken Hebrew of the living street entered Hebrew poetry, so did the street itself. It seems that Hebrew poetry had to wait for a generation for whom looking at a place, in the here and now, would be part of its poetics. For Israeli author Dan Tsalka, writing about Amichai’s poetry in 1962, it was immediately apparent that “the landscape Amichai usually writes about is a new one, unknown in our lyric poetry [. . .] In Amichai’s poems, jets crowd the skies, cars caress the roads, tanks travel [. . .].” This opening toward a real place, an actual landscape, grew and widened, making room for strong, physical poems by the new generation of poets discussed here. Had this development not taken place, one could hardly imagine how a poem such as Meir Wieseltier’s A Naive Painting (p. 130) could have been written: A world is created in the shape of a backyard in the South of Tel Aviv.1 A tired eucalyptus represents the third day, a hungry cat, the fifth. 1. A mostly impoverished area in Tel Aviv.

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The Almighty on the right in the image of an old Bucharan man in clean underwear, addressing the virgin Daughter of Israel, a Yemenite girl of fifteen with a tape-cassette on the terrace across the street. He says: Won’t you turn off the music on the day the Temple was destroyed? The Ninth of Av is a mourning day for the Jews since time immemorial. And what does Yemima say? She doesn’t say. She turns up the volume. As this poem clearly shows, the possibility of looking straight into an actual courtyard, in a physical city, did not mean that the turn away from the historical past resulted in a one-dimensional, myopic poetic vision. Not at all. But here, too, Hebrew poetry had to negotiate a long path before it reached that which seems quite natural to an English-speaking reader. The last conquest that has to be discussed here (and perhaps I should have reversed the order) is the conquest of the self. Of the twenty-seven poets presented here, almost half are women, and the fact that there are many Israeli women poets writing today is irrefutable. Again, in order to appreciate the full meaning of this literary fact, one might cast one’s eye back in time. At a time when English poetry had such poets as Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Emily Dickinson, themselves late heiresses of a long tradition, Hebrew poetry had but a single woman poet, Rechel Morpurgo, of Trieste, whose very existence struck the Hebrew men of letters of her generation (mid-nineteenth century) as something short of a miracle. She herself was well aware of her “transgression” in aspiring to write poetry: “I look to the North, South, East and West: / Women are fickle-minded, that’s why they’re vain. / A few years past, why should any city / Be remembered more than a dead dog? / Wanderer and city-man alike declare: / The distaff is the only art fit for a woman.” It was only with the new wind brought by the Zionist endeavor that women took their place in Hebrew poetry. In the words of Yael

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Feldman, a scholar of feminist Hebrew literature, “[At] the turn of the last century [. . .] Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, the propagator of spoken Hebrew, invited women to revive this ‘old, forgotten, hard and dry language’ with their ‘emotion and tenderness, suppleness and subtlety.’ [. . .] One hundred years later, Hebrew is in no need of special care, and women poets infuse it with a range of emotions and reflections [. . .] as befitting any creative endeavor in any language by any gender.” Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the conquest of the self in Hebrew poetry meant only that it was “liberated” so as to allow women’s poetry, or homoerotic poems. The tone givers in Hebrew poetry of previous generations adopted the self of prophet-poet, the self of a titanic, public persona, an Atlas-like figure, bearing an enormous weight of national responsibility. A juxtaposition of poems might help demonstrate the dimensions of this titanic poetic persona. When HaimNachman Bialik, the National Poet, passed away in 1934, there gushed a flood of commemorative poetry. In these poems the dead bard often was hailed as a prophet, or as “the Tree of the World,” whose roots nurtured the entire nation and its literature. The poet Ezra Zussman wrote a poem titled “The Poet’s Lecture”: He came, as if returning from an expedition To the North Pole: wintry and panting, In a heavy coat, a scarf around his neck— Crossing the stage as a light-footed youth. And he walked to and fro on the stage (Many feared lest he return no more)— Spitting words like metal splinters, His hands full of enchantment. And he was greater than any dispute Over theatre or plays that night, When spirit and matter together Staged the greatest play of them all [. . .] Readers familiar with twentieth-century Russian poetry may remember the following passage from Boris Pasternak’s poem “A Sublime Malady”:

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How should I finish this fragment? I remember his turn of phrase That struck me with a white flame Like a whiplash of lighting bolts. The audience rose and with squinting eyes, Scanned the far table When he grew unto the platform, Grew before he reached the stage. ----------------------------------------He was—like the thrust of a rapier. Chasing the stream of his talk He thumbed his vest, planted his heel. And hammered his point home. (Tr. Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk) Bearing in mind that Pasternak’s lines relate a recollection of his presence at one of the public appearances of V. I. Lenin, the reader can imagine the scope of the poetic persona in Hebrew poetry of that time. Grosso modo, this was the scale: a poet-Isaiah, a poet-Lenin. Two generations later, the poets of the so-called “Palmach-generation”2 still made use of a very similar public poetic persona (characteristically in the early poetry of Haim Gouri). The emergence of the poets of the new generation changed all that in a most radical fashion. To be sure, several of the poets of that generation, and of the generations that followed, still displayed various titanic selves, but of a very different sort. Risking a certain platitude, I would say that this new poetic self, grand as it might be, no longer bore the responsibilities of the nation. In this context, it is enough to mention the fact that the title of the second collection of poems of David Avidan—a central figure for the “new generation”—was “Personal Problems” (emphasis added). Naturally, this “narrowing down” of the poetic self harmonized well with the move toward a less grandiose and lofty poetic vernacular, and with the desire to feel less burdened by history and more at home in one’s habitat. In an anthology whose title includes the word “contemporary,” it is fitting, I think, not only to investigate the past and the roots 2. So named after the paramilitary organization to which many of the poets belonged during the Independence War of 1948.

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of the contemporary object presented here but also to reflect for a moment on its possible future. No doubt, most of the poets selected here will take part in the future of Hebrew poetry, and one can only hope that, thanks to this anthology, American readers will become acquainted with a poetry that will enrich them and encourage them to continue to follow it. To conclude, let me quote in full Dan Pagis’s poem “A Linguistic Problem” (p. 28): The maiden we call Hebrew is the youngest born in a very good family. Her problem, though: she messes around. Every day it’s another story. You can’t rely on her, her word carries no weight. She’s not even pretty: she’s got acne, large feet, is loud and stubborn as a mule. And what’s worse: she won’t give in to those who want to stifle her unruly voice and bury her, respectfully, in the ancestral tomb. Aminadav Dykman (Essay translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller)

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YEHUDA AMICHAI

(1924–2000)

Yehuda Amichai was born into an orthodox family in Wurzburg, Germany, and arrived in Israel in 1936. He studied at Hebrew University and later taught at various schools and colleges, including the Greenberg Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and New York University. He published fifteen volumes of poetry, two novels, short stories and plays, and his work has been translated into thirty-three languages. His many awards include the Shlonsky Award, the Brenner Award, the Bialik Award, the Würzburg’s Award for Culture, the Israel Award, the Agnon Award, the French Malraux Award, the Literary Lion Award, Macedonia’s Golden Wreath Award, the Norwegian Bjornson Poetry Award, and an Honor Citation from Assiut University, Egypt. The poems appearing here are from his 1998 collection Open Shut Open.

I Was Not One of the Six Million. And What Is the Span of My Life? Open Shut Open 1. I was not one of the six million who died in the Holocaust, not even one of those who survived, and I was not one of the six hundred thousand who came out of Egypt, I, for one, reached the Promised Land from the sea.

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I was not among all those others but the smoke and fire did linger in me, and columns of fire and columns of smoke1 still show me the way night and day, and the frantic search for emergency exits and soft spots still lingers as well. After the stripped earth, to flee into weakness and into hope, and there lingered in me the lust to search for spring water, to speak softly to the rock and to smite it.2 Later a silence of no questions, no answers. Like millstones Jewish history and world history grind me between them, at times down to dust, and a solar year and a lunar year precede one another or follow one another and leap and provide constant motion to my life and I at times fall in the gap between them to hide in or to sink. 2. I was not in the places where I was not and will not be. I have no part in the infinite of light years and dark years but the darkness is mine and the light is mine and my time is mine. The sand on the shore, the infinite grains, is the sand upon which I loved in Achziv and in Caesarea. The years of my life I broke down into hours and the hours into minutes and into seconds and milliseconds. They are the stars above that cannot be numbered. 3. And what is the span of my life. I am like one who has come out of Egypt and the Red Sea parted and I walked on dry land, on my left and on my right two walls of water, behind me Pharaoh and his army and horsemen, 1. Alludes to Exodus 13, verse 21. The biblical Hebrew “amud” is traditionally translated as “pillar,” but here, in the context of the Holocaust, I chose “column,” alluding to the columns of human beings, reduced to numbers, and who were the fodder of the smoke and fire. 2. Alludes to Moses striking the rock for water (Ex. 17, 6).

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before me the desert, perhaps the Promised Land. This is the span of my life. 4. Open shut open. Before a man is born all in the universe is open without him. While he lives, all is shut within him. And when he dies, all is open again. Open shut open. This is what man is. 5. And what is the span of my life, as in a self-portrait, I set the camera at a distance on solid ground (the only solid place on earth), decide on a spot where to stand, near a tree, and run back to the camera and press the button and run back to my place near the tree, listen to the ticking of time, its hum like a distant prayer, and the popping sound, like an execution. This is the span of my life. God develops the picture in His great darkroom. Here’s the picture: white hair on my head, the eyes heavy and weary, and the brows above my eyes black, like sooty window-frames of a burned-down house. The years of my life have passed. 6. My life is the gardener of my body. The brain a well-secured hothouse, replete with flowers and strange exotic plants of great sensitivity and extinction fears. The face a French garden laid out in exact planes with marble-tiled squares and statues and places to rest, and places to touch and sniff and gaze, to get lost in a green maze and paths, not to trample, not to pluck. The torso above the navel an English park displaying freedom with no angles, no tiles, a facsimile of nature and man, in our image,3 our likeness, 3. Alludes to “Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness” (Gen. 1, 26).

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its arms joining the great night all around. And my lower body below the navel at times a feral, striking, wondrous nature preserve, preserved and not preserved, at times a compact Japanese garden, mapped out in advance. The genitals honed and smooth stones with dark tufts between them and distinct lanes full of meaning and calm contemplation. And my father’s precepts and my mother’s commandments are the chirp and song of birds. And the woman I love is the seasons and the weathers and the children playing are my children. And the life is my life. 7. I wholly believe that right at this moment millions of people are standing at crossroads, at street corners, in deserts and jungles, and direct one another as to where to turn, and which is the road, the path, and explain again where to turn, which way, and how to get there taking the fastest route, and where to stop and ask someone else. There, there. No, at the second corner, then make a left, or a right, near the white house, at the oak tree, and they elaborate, with excited voices, waving their hands, shaking their heads, there, there, no, not this there, that there, as if taking part in a primal ritual. This, too, is a new religion. I wholly believe that right at this moment.

The Precision of Pain and the Blurring of Bliss A Touch of Yearning in Everything4 In my garden I saw jasmine blossoms swept in an autumnal wind and clinging to a bougainvillea bush. Oh, what a blunder, what a waste, what a senseless loss. 4. This is one section (third) of a twenty-one-section poem.

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I saw a sun dip in the sea, I saw God. What blunder, what hope! I saw two birds trapped in the domed terminal in the airport, flying desperately above the commotion below. Oh, what a blunder, what a flight, what desperate love, what an out without an out, what a vision of hallowed wings! A plane circled above it all, calling: I’m trying, I’m trying again. Try, they tell him from the control tower. Try again, try again.

My Parents’ Motel 1. I went past the cemetery where my parents are buried. In his poem Ibn Ezra called it: My Parents’ Motel. I didn’t go in, I just went down the road outside the wall. I wave to them as I pass, my soul made into a hand, my soul changing forms, sometimes as my hair in the wind, sometimes as my aching feet while they walk or happily hop, and sometimes as my eyes, sometimes as my lids, and sometimes even my lashes are my soul. Greetings to my parents, greetings to their dust, greetings to their motel in Jerusalem! 2. With much love my parents spared me aches disappointments and sorrows. Now all of these are deposited in me as in any savings account to which is added the pain I wish to spare my children. What a great savings account collects in me. Even they always said to me: “I’ll show you yet,” at times in a threatening voice, at times in a voice of sweet love. I’ll show you yet. Wait, I’ll show you. “You’ll see,” in anger, “You’ll see,”

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in a soothing, promising voice. “Do whatever you like,” shouting, and “Do whatever you like, you’re a free person,” as in a chant of benevolent angels. You yourself don’t know what you want, you yourself don’t know what you want. 3. My mother was a prophet and didn’t know it. Not like Miriam the Prophetess who danced with drums and chimes, not like Deborah who sat under a palm tree and judged the people, not like Hulda the Prophetess who told the future, but my own private prophet, quiet and stubborn, and I must do as she commanded and the time of my life is passing. My mother was a prophet when she told me the everyday things, verses for one-time use: You’ll be sorry; It will make you tired; It will make you feel good; You’ll feel like new; You’ll like it; You won’t be able to; You won’t like it; You can’t close it; I knew you wouldn’t remember; Don’t forget; Give; Take; Rest; You can, you cannot.5 When my mother died all the little prophecies combined into a great one to last till the end of days. 4. My father was God and didn’t know it. He gave me the Ten Commandments not in thunder and rage, not in fire or cloud, but with softness and love. And he added gestures and good words, added, Please and Welcome and intoned Remember and Keep in one incantation, and pleaded and wept between one commandment and the next. 5. In the original manuscript pages Amichai had given me, before the book appeared in Hebrew, the line read, “You can, you cannot.” In the book, the line reads, “You can, you can.” It is possible that Amichai revised the line; it also is possible that it is a misprint, and the same for the stanza break after this line: in the ms. pages, there is a stanza break; in the final book, there is no stanza break.

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Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, Thou shalt not take, in vain, please, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. And he held me tight and whispered in my ear, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill. And he placed his open palms on my head in the Yom Kippur benediction, Honor,6 love, so that thy days may be long upon the land. And my father’s voice is as white as his hair. Then he turned his face to me for the last time as he did on the day he died in my arms and said: I want to add two to the Ten Commandments: The eleventh commandment, “You will not change” and the twelfth commandment, “Change, you will change.” So said my father and turned from me and went and vanished into his mysterious distances.

The Jewish Time Bomb On my desk stands a stone the word amen engraved in it, one fragment, a survivor of thousands of fragments of broken tombstones in Jewish cemeteries. And I know that all these fragments now cram the great Jewish time bomb, together with other fragments and shards, fragments of the Covenant Tablets, fragments of altars and crosses, rusty crucifixion nails with household fragments and holy fragments and bone fragments, and shoes and glasses and artificial limbs and false teeth and empty tin cans of Exterminator poison. All of these charge the Jewish time bomb until the end of days, and even though I’m aware of this and of the end of days this stone on my desk calms me, a stone of truth that no one would want, a stone wiser than a philosopher’s stone, a stone of a broken tombstone, 6. In full, “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land” (Exodus 20, 26).

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more whole than any perfection, a testimonial stone of all that ever was, of all that ever will be, a stone of amen and love. Amen, amen, and may it be Thy will.

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T. CARMI

(1925–1994)

T. Carmi was born in New York City to a Hebrew-speaking family, and his first Hebrew poems were published while he still lived in the United States. He studied at Yeshiva and Columbia universities, and in 1946 he worked with Jewish war orphans in France, before settling in Israel in 1947. He taught at Brandeis, Oxford, and Stanford and was poet-in-residence at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He published fifteen volumes of poetry as well as plays he translated into Hebrew, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, and Hamlet. His awards include the Shlonsky Award, the Brenner Award, the Bialik Award, and the Prime Minister Award, as well as the 1982 Irving and Bertha Neuman Literary Award, and the 1982 Kenneth B. Smilen Present Tense Literary Award for the Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, which he edited and translated. His poems were translated into twenty languages, and collections of his work were published in the United States and in Europe. Since 1978 until his death, Carmi had been visiting professor at the Jerusalem Hebrew Union College. The poems appearing here are from his collections Monologues and Other Poems (1988) and Truth & Consequence (1993), and these translations were dedicated by the poet to his son Michael.

And Until When? Words of darkness, hot as wax. I swear on my life, yours,

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on my head, yours, on this hand, and under my thigh. Words of darkness. A scorching tear from your eyes burns on my forehead like a third eye. We’ve drawn a covenant, hot as wax. Until the moon is no more? Until dawn? Until the warmth of the groin fades? Words of darkness, hot as wax. The glow of one flesh, a memorial candle to the memory of a flaming breath.

If It So Pleases The greater the bond—the greater the distance. Mouth to whispering mouth, eye to eye. And all at once—no eyes, only void, only sealed lips, a deaf asp; and from where the courage to see again, to recall the melting sweat, the welding dawn; the strength to clearly say: Forgive me, I don’t understand what stung from out of my eye, which is your eye. I don’t understand what fouled the breath of my mouth, which is your breath;

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and how the two who were one, man in woman, woman in man, now face each other, faceless— a hard, blazing malevolence? And what happens to memory—obliterated? Does it dissolve, like dew, in the heat? Does it pretend to be dead like a naked vine in December? Above me, a sliver of moon: after-death or news of a return? I don’t know. If it so pleases, perhaps the greater the distance—the greater the bond.

Nightwatch Even in sleep, you fill the rooms. The Persian rug, twisted, serpentine, knows you’re sleeping in the next room, in your white gown, the sleep of the just. Your head on my shoulder tells me I’m free to think whatever I wish, and my wish, thanks to you, is good. I’ll sit here by your bed, not sleeping, not dozing (like the hum of the refrigerator) and shoo away mosquitoes. The big stinger shoos away the small ones. Your blood is on my head.

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A Time for Everything 1. Solomon’s Egyptian7 inflamed his head with sorcery, spreading over his bed a canopy of stars and planets. The wisest of all men. Turned his days into nights. 2. When the sun rose my sorceress drew the curtains. And I, naturally, saw stars. The room blazed and she switched on the fan. The wisest of all men never heard such an ocean! 3. Time stood in the doorway, biding, his satchel overflowing with court notices, eviction and oblivion. But their rustle, like light foam, blended in the roar of the ocean. 4. He was not upset. He knew it was only a matter of time. Sooner or later, a faint hand will emerge from the waves of darkness— the fan will be silenced and we will be parched. 7. The poem alludes to the midrashic legend that Solomon’s wife, Pharaoh’s daughter, “spread above his bed a tapestry cover studded with diamonds and pearls which gleamed and glittered like constellations in the sky. Whenever Solomon wanted to rise, he saw these stars, and thinking it was night still, he slept on” (L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. IV, pp. 128–29).

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5. On the shelf, at the head of the bed, side by side, our wrist watches are tense like crabs on the beach.

Monologue of the Deserted (II) When the day comes, father of my child, I won’t be able to sit Shiva for you. (Once, when I sat on you, you were in seventh heaven.) I won’t be able to shed a tear over your letters. (The source has long dried up both in the eye above and the eye below.) I won’t be able to lie prostrate on the heaps of photographs, carry you in my lap like a nursling, diaper your memory, pick up the toys it tosses to the floor. You’ve torn your life from my hands and also your death. I once desired your life, now (vainly) your death.

In Memory of Dan Pagis (1930–1986) 1. “The future,” Dan said on the telephone, about two weeks after surgery, about a month before he died, “doesn’t look rosy.”

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And I thought: Only Dan could have placed these words on his palette, mixed them cautiously and, with quick strokes, touching-not-touching, brought to light the red and the white hidden in the pink, the aborted future, and the past turning over before his eyes. 2. Could have. Could have. Could have. He could have written. Could have said. Could have remained silent. Not to stray from the truth (he couldn’t have) I must reiterate: His person, now—third person pronoun, his time—past continuous. 3. When the chill pierced his knees in the heat of summer he covered them with a blanket like a stowaway in a dim compartment. Even his great lucidity failed to disconnect the chilling sparks that flashed from knee to knee— emergency transmissions between underground cells. He had locked up the code in his bent body. For twenty years he forgot, forgot, forgot. And what he could not, pierced under the blanket. His high forehead took no notice

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of what happened at his feet. His blue eyes did not betray the cold throbbing in his kneecaps. Did a fire come out from hashmal 8 and consume his smile? 4. He almost always hedged his words: Perhaps . . . as well . . . although . . . yet . . . Yet his perhaps was certainty— the distance of a pilot who knows that he handles supersonic instruments; that precisely in such altitudes, where he circles alone, it is important to observe ground rules. 5. In normal times, I would show him these lines, and he would go over them with a slow finger, like a mine detector, halting at a dangerous passage, suggesting an alternate path and leading, circuitously, onto the right lane. 6. Quick as a dragonfly, clear as the reflection of water, radiant as a child’s smile, wary as an exacting scientist implanting new hearts in our ailing words.

8. The modern Hebrew word for electricity. It first appears in the chariot vision in Ezekiel, chapter 1, where it apparently refers to a supernatural glow. Hashmal was one of the major subjects of early Hebrew mysticism.

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7. The words I haven’t told him when he was alive. The truth be told, I said very little. (He, too, held back the words.) I knew he knows his way among the stanzas, that he infers the yes from the no, sees the silence between the voices, the rhyme inscribed in invisible ink; I knew he remembers the meaning of forgetting, extends a helping hand to the stumbling pun, willing to pretend the mask is the face. 8. When a good friend dies you lose something from your own reflection. From now on you’ll always be wanting. New York, 1986

Monologue in the Twilight of His Life Without my noticing the time has come. I live my life in thirds: one third at the gravesites of friends, one third among the living (in some measure or other), one third at the plot that eagerly awaits me. Without my noticing the time has come. I lie to the dawn,

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to my son, sleeping open-mouthed, to her, half of my body, who crosses the night. I am all lies, lies, dripping memories, smiles. Without my noticing the time has come, following me, like a phantom. We are two who are one. I deceive everyone: I speak in the singular, purchase one ticket on the bus.

Lonely Woman’s Monologue The light above my door proclaims: Open. I’m home. Waiting. The bulb is exposed— a faint pulse in the waves of night, emergency flashes of intensive care. The bougainvillea vines interweave with the pine, sprinkle crimson spots on sealed acorns. Now all sway in the wind: the lamp, the night, the pine needles that seek my veins. The extinguished light above my door proclaims: I’m done waiting. I’ve come to the end.

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Chess at the Seashore A calm sea. The end of September. Two old men play chess at the seashore. Like a hampered kite one hand hovers above the board. The pervading aroma of barbecue; grilled meats on the shore. A mechanical pigeon, white as the man’s bristles, lands, exhausted, on the warm sand. The next move: rewind the spring, fly the pigeon before it gets dark; take the Queen with a drooping hand. Dusk on the shore. It is hard to tell white from black. Whose turn is it? It is hard to master the rules of the game.

An Explosion in Jerusalem In the Garden of Independence pigeons take to the air; a hasty flight to antenna tops. Their hearing is sharper.

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Only after the flutter has stopped and the sky has cleared I hear a distant explosion. The cashier at the café is already waiting: a practiced hand, a worn smile, she hands me telephone tokens. My wife is already waiting. Her hearing is sharper. All is well on our side: she is home, he is home; who is home? Who isn’t home? A strange garden, a garden without wings, but the patrons on the terrace are not puzzled. Through the glass I glimpse dancing fingertips, a hovering mouth, quivering laughter. I return to my seat. And now, a first pigeon in the garden. 1985

Mortification of the Soul Yom Kippur on the Sabbath: instead of shofar blows,

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a gray tomcat shoves his horn into a black tabby; her complaint goes up to heaven— the tremulous wails of chastised infants; his teeth fasten until she bleeds, the army of his sperm roars in her womb. And the parched neighbor who no longer remembers when old age overtook her stands in the window, shrieking: Enough! Enough! Enough! Ein Hod, 1990

The Mouth The mouth that enthralled is the mouth that appalls. The mouth that lulled to sleep is the mouth that awakens, saying: Enough. Your dream, like cobwebs, sticks to my hands. The mouth that sucked the breath of your sleep like a rescued man on the beach, clenches like a fist. The mouth that aroused is the mouth that numbs, saying: With your permission, these tears tenderize your flesh, to set the table for the feast of the dead.

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The mouth that bound is the mouth that releases,9 saying: From now on you’re permitted to one and all.

From the Diary of a Divorcé 1. Dream My desk kept shrinking until the tiles underneath were exposed. My dog kept spinning until it shed its fur. When a tongue of crimson was all that remained, I begged for mercy and wakefulness. In the morning, I kissed my son’s forehead, stroked my wife’s hair. I went from room to room, nodding brightly at the carpets, the window bars, the shelves, the cracks in the ceiling. At last I entered my study. The desk is made of oak. It knows that dreams speak falsehoods. I lean my weight upon it and write our story. At my side is the dog, prick-eared, but—and this is unusual—I can’t see its eyes. 2. We Were Not Worthy “When husband and wife are worthy, Shekinah abides them; when they are not worthy, fire consumes them.”10 We were not worthy. A fire consumes us. The birds deserted the roof, fleeing the smoke. The lizards ran for their lives. 9. A variant on the Talmudic ruling in financial matters: “The mouth that forbade is the mouth that permitted” (Ketuboth, II,2). 10. The quote is from the Talmud (Sotah, 7a). It is based on the following wordplay: if the middle letter of the three-letter word for “man” and the last letter of the threeletter word for “woman” are omitted, then the remaining two letters yield the word “fire.” If the two letters that were omitted are joined together, then they form the Divine Name (i.e., “Shekinah abides them”).

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In the closet—a rending. The sleeve mourns the hand, the collar laments the neck, the hat weeps: My head. Fire. Perpetual fire. 3. The Last Day On the day before my divorce, I went over to the house (my house). I went past my neighbors, turned my key in the lock I had installed only a few months before, and entered my home. I thought I might light the paraffin stove, as I do every winter. The stove is old, rusting. The rings, warped in the heat of passing years, disintegrate. The oil duct is blocked. Only I knew exactly where the rags are, the kerosene, how to coax the switch of the thermostat. But another had already lit the stove before I arrived. A tall, yellow flame gargled in the tattered tank. Too bad. I wanted so much to leave behind a neat, warm house, purring like a pampered cat. 4. Before Leaving Before leaving my house (for the last time before my divorce), I took with me a pomelo and an apple. I put them in a brown plastic bag (the bags are stored in a net, to the right of the fridge) and left. Coming down the stairs, I recalled how my son, before leaving for school, would return and grab something to eat, especially on days he expected a quiz. I turned back and took a banana as well. 5. Another Dream I went past her as if she were a guard at the entrance of a museum. I dragged my feet in the dim light from exhibit to exhibit gazing from afar, wondering up close.

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Coming out, I didn’t look at her back. Museum guards do not have a back, nor a face. 6. For the Time Being For the time being our slate is clean. You did not follow me in the desert. Another did, and now her share is a stretch of unsown land. For the time being I do not begrudge you. But my happiness is a moon that consumes itself and its inhabitants.

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DAN PAGIS

(1930–1986)

Dan Pagis was born in Bukovina, a German-speaking province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the war, in 1946, he arrived in Israel, having spent three years in a concentration camp. Pagis was professor of medieval Hebrew literature at Hebrew University until his death. He published six volumes of poetry, a children’s book, and studies on the aesthetics of medieval poetry. A posthumous collection, Last Poems, was published in 1987, as well as a Collected Poems in 1991. His work was translated into Afrikaans, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, SerboCroatian, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Yiddish, and collections of his poems were published in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Spain. The poems appearing here are from his collections Late Leisure (1964), Transformation (1970), Synonyms (1982), and Last Poems (1987).

Tempt the Devil When he faced the guillotine Danton said: “The verb to guillotine (this new verb) is limited in its tense and pronoun conjugations, for I will not have had the chance to use the past tense and say: ‘I was guillotined.’ ” A sharp and cutting sentence, but naive. 24

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Take me (and really, I’m nothing special). I was beheaded I was hanged I was burnt I was shot I was butchered. I was forgotten. (I shouldn’t tempt the devil; he may yet recollect that morally speaking, at least, I’m still ahead.)

Ein Leben In the month of her death she stands at the window, a young woman, her hair done in a permanent, elegant wave. In the brown photograph she is pensive, looking out. From the outside an afternoon cloud of the year ’34 looks at her, blurred, out of focus, but always loyal. From the inside I look at her, a four-year old, or thereabout. I seize my ball, slowly exit the picture and grow old, grow old, cautiously, quietly, so as not to startle her.

Wall Calendar December. An arctic wind, new and bitter. Angels and polar bears DA N PAGIS

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sink into their winter slumber. Just then, above, in the folds of soft snow, the traps of spring get set. June. In a military ceremony filled with sunshine, the man is buried at noon. Just then, it is midnight in the woman’s belly. The fetus reports for duty: he recognizes the code. December. Suddenly the boat turns over, I drown in a squalid sea, and watch, as expected, just then, all my stolen years drift by like sweet water.

The End of Winter With your charcoal eyes, good snowman, you saw black, only black. So much courage in your eyes: not even a stir! And in the middle the nose still protrudes, the pessimistic carrot. Be well, fellow, and happy in your aging. It is true that you and I, at the end of winter, are a trifle smaller, weaker, but you and I know: pretty were our days of winter and so will be our summer. Why wait for it in the backyard? Let’s sneak away from here right now, before the muds of spring

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flow gaily and rapidly down the street and further out to the open sea, if indeed it exists. Tomorrow the radio will announce that no trace of us will ever be found.

Memorial Night On that memorial night for what’s-his-name, that veteran poet, I am in the audience in the Community Hall. Facing me, the committee members are already seated on stage. A long narrow table severs them in the middle; six lost faces on top, twelve lost shoes below. The opener opens and says: “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening, thank you for coming. Please!” Six porters come up on stage, turn over the table and carefully pack in the committee members, each member on his chair: a communal coffin. The audience is already up on its feet, pushing and shoving toward the exit, toward their coffins waiting outside. I, too, with my elbows and fists, push my way out so as not to miss my turn.

* You arrive slightly late—a green felt hat, an elegant jacket—high spirited, almost sprightly, and ask: “So, shall we go? Do you know the story about coming and going?” I turn white, I’m so embarrassed, and you, noticing, hasten to end. You’ve succumbed. In no time you have wound yourself with white straps and are already laid out, like a large caterpillar, not yet a butterfly, on the filthy stretcher of the Burial Society. And you state, indeed with some hesitancy: “All right, let’s go.” A slovenly man approaches me and asks: “You’re the son? Good. That’s the father? Good.” He covers you, and six men carry you away. I plod in their footsteps on the dirt road—your footsteps are already up in the air. Suddenly the stretcher tilts over, and you oscillate between them, impatient perhaps, or just clowning around. I reach with my hand to help, to

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halt, but they all shout in unison: “No, no,” and then politely explain: “You are the son, you are forbidden to touch.”

A Linguistic Problem The maiden we call Hebrew is the youngest born in a very good family. Her problem, though: she messes around. Every day it’s another story. You can’t rely on her, her word carries no weight. She’s not even pretty: she’s got acne, large feet, is loud and stubborn as a mule. And what’s worse: she won’t give in to those who want to stifle her unruly voice and bury her, respectfully, in the ancestral tomb.

Diagnosis Day and night this shrieking in the ears, a whistle in the radio between two rival stations, an endless trilling. Maybe you’ve heard about this terrible punishment, the flea in Titus’s nose. But I am just a puny villain, so why the noise? Sir, it’s very interesting, but with you it is a simple case of tinnitus, in Hebrew: Tintun. A defect in the acoustic nerve. Your nerve11 is flawed, Sir. 11. In the Hebrew, nerve has the same derivation as sorrow, sadness.

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You press it, and your hearing becomes acute. Dogs can hear a high frequency, superhuman, and you, what you hear, it comes from you, it’s inside you, no other chirp here.

Anecdote In an incidental train, at night, at Long-Island Intersection, suddenly he sits opposite me, the witty poet who died years ago on a different continent. Disguised as a passenger, hidden under the rim of his hat, he nods his head as if agreeing with the journey’s destination. I glance at him, yet my gaze is trapped in the holes of his eyes. I say his name, but his name strikes against the bar of his teeth, and reverts back to mine. And already the car stops, he rises, pushes to the doorway, disappears. And so, even the great swordsman of speech ends up with a mutter of, “Pardon, Sir,” in a narrow dim doorway bearing the inscription: “Stop! Have you forgotten something?”

Testimony No, no, they were definitely human: uniforms, boots,

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how to say it. They were made in the image. I was a shadow. I had a different maker. And He in His grace hasn’t left in me anything that could perish. And I ran to Him, I ascended, light, bluish, reconciled, I’d say, apologetic: smoke to almighty smoke of no face or figure.

Browsing through the Album Destined for greatness, he’s sprawled on his belly, sucks onward confidently. The expanse of the floor awaits him: it is all a target, he cannot miss. And already he is big, photographed on his feet, and forgets all that he will not learn. Briefly, he enters the class picture, smiles up there, next to the teachers. In the meantime, with a woman or two on the beach, passing footprints in the sand. And so he rests, grown and yellowing in a pensive photo, a hand on his forehead; twilight. Before he solves it, he proceeds, like a thief, cautious in a dim hallway, and finds, at the end, himself waiting in the mirror: a light, too bright, of the instant flash captures his image, darkens the glass lenses of his eyes.

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Houses At the edge of the paper the pen quivers, a seismograph, and tries to draw in thin lines and sharp angles the quake of the floor. The quaking intensifies, the angles turn sharper. But this instrument is old, it doesn’t draw even the tip of the truth, that the table is smashed to smithereens, the house has collapsed, the earth has opened underneath. In the stillness that ensues, among the ruins, the pen is absolved of all its duties. It scribbles on the page as it pleases, joins all the threads in the center, a master plan for a spider’s den.

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NATAN ZACH

(b. 1930)

Natan Zach was born in Berlin and arrived in Haifa as a child. From 1968 to 1979 he lived in England and wrote his PhD dissertation at the University of Essex. After returning to Israel, he lectured at Tel Aviv University and was appointed professor at Haifa University. He headed the group of poets who began publishing their work after the establishment of the state in 1948 and revolutionized Hebrew poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. An editor, critic, translator, and poet, Zach has published ten books of poetry, a book of short stories, two collections of essays, a memoir, and four children’s books. His work has been translated into twenty languages, and collections of his poems have been published in the United States, Europe, and China. He has received the Bialik Award, the Israel Award, the Feronia Award (Italy), and the ACUM Award. In 2004, the University of Geneva awarded him an Honorary Doctorate for his “contribution to the renewal of [Hebrew] poetry in the second half of the 20th century.” Most recently, Zach received the honorary title of Cavaliere from the Italian government (2007). Zach divides his time between Haifa and Tel Aviv. The poems appearing here are from his collections Hard to Remember (1984) and Since I’m in the Neighborhood (1996).

A Belated Poem It was far, as usual, a few drops that night still stood in the window, when you said, when I said, and we were near agreement, if very distant, 32

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in all else. A man won’t discuss it, a man won’t tell. Three times winter wintered, there were hints: whatever I hold in my hand drops and breaks. Is it the spirit, is it the body, suddenly gripped by a spasm, letting go? A man won’t discuss it, a man won’t tell. Her hair was dark auburn, the color has since faded. There remained a certain tenderness, a small area of tenderness, or maybe not tenderness. It’s hard to be precise in such matters. It’s hard to explain why, it is hard to be precise. A man won’t discuss it, a man won’t tell. I said tenderness and I could have said more, after the fact one can always say more. One bulb of the two in the room has burnt out. One is not enough to read but enough to weep. Shall I weep on the terrace, in the chair, in my bed? A man won’t discuss it, a man won’t tell.

To Rise from Ashes is a complicated matter. Only one bird can do it and no one has ever seen it. The pre-requisites, of course, are ashes: a spark, or cinders, cigarette ashes, almost anything. In the absence of ashes, shards will do, crumbling plaster, a general collapse, ruins. Anything that’s anti-biological, anti-ecological. Another condition is the ability to rise and stand again on your feet after the fall as in the boxing ring: the points are against you, your chances to win are slim, even your fans have abandoned you, already thinking of home and a late supper. In my youth I met a man who rose from ashes N ATA N Z ACH

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(Yes, he did!) Every Sunday (from the ashes of the Sabbath) and every Friday—from the ashes of weekdays. Such as he there are but a few: a sort of a master at rising, like Kafka’s fasting artist. But for every man who rose I knew quite a few who didn’t. Some burned in a small, quotidian flame, like a kerosene lamp or burner, others in a sudden blaze, like a bonfire or brushfire with blaring sirens and ambulances. And in this there’s no difference between men and women the male chauvinist pig flares up just like the best of females, the weaker sex. And there’s no age distinction. Some burn young, others in advanced age. There’s no man whose time won’t come. And there’s no career distinction: blue-collar erupt too! Just like clerks and males of the liberal professions. Despite the rumor that they’re more fire-proof. Only few will ever rise to life or on their feet. However, this is no reason for despair. On the contrary, any bird-watcher will confirm: the phoenix is not a mythological creature. It is here with us. But extremely rare.

Self-Portrait at Night The skull is reflected in the window pane, incorporeal, bespectacled, bearded, sternly scrutinizing me—I’m not all that gray yet. Behind it, lights, and the blackness of the sea: it has always been like this and will always be: light is always dubious, never

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enough. And tonight, not hot, not cold, a tepid12 night, and the look in the glass that became a looking-glass, no compromise there: opaque translucency. Is this the only surviving gospel, and the horn now heard from the port is the reminder? And if so, what else am I yet again asked to remember? A night full of images, omens, likenesses. Speak to me clear and essential things, otherwise—better keep still.

Meantime Meantime, in my dream, she returns to me when I sleep, and I tell her: Welcome back, in the meantime, sit, and she props up the pillow, as she always did, for it is unnatural for a mother not to prop up her son’s pillow and for the son to be the one to prop up his mother’s pillow, wipe her cold sweat, smooth out her hair, hold her cold hand, and say: Don’t be afraid, the place you’re going to you won’t come back from empty-handed as you have O so many times, for the place you’re going to holds no hope, no loss, no regret and sorrow, not even a mother’s grief. The place you’re going to lacks nothing. It is complete. 12. In the Hebrew, a play on the words “tepid” and “compromise.”

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As Agreed Look, as we promised one another, we changed nothing and the world is as wonderful as it was, the rain tarries this year, but it will come: it will come as long as we’re still here. Look, as we agreed, I am in one place, you in another. We didn’t become one, which is also natural, and in your weakness and in mine there looms a promise, too: after memory forgetfulness is all. And if the road already may incline downward in the famed sloping print of life’s curve, it does, in some sense, aspire upward, and aspiration is a great thing in life, on this, too, we agreed, you surely remember. And if now I’m alone and aching and ailing more than ever, this, too, was a choice, if not always conscious. And if you too are alone, it makes my loneliness less just and this should sustain you as well. How fortunate that we’ve agreed on so little: on parting, on loneliness and fear, the basic certainties, and there’s always something to return to, you will see how young we will be in the end, and the end, when it comes, will be almost just. And everything, you will see, will be almost welcome.

Three Poems That Weren’t Written 1. I wrote greetings for a friend’s wedding. My lover peeked over my shoulder and said: 36

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Thank God, you’re writing lyrical poetry again. I met my friend after his wedding and he said: Even the dishes I love the most she can’t cook. This, too, I included in the poem. My lover read and said: You persist in writing such everyday stuff, you do it only to annoy me. I went to visit Israel who was wounded. We had to make an effort so he wouldn’t notice how hard it was to look at his face: it was as if the odor of burning still stood in the room and the odor of charred flesh, and the only eye left seemed as if it had moved from its place, if such a thing is possible, I’m no doctor. When we came home my lover said: Now, for sure, you’ll write a political poem. I told her: No, it’s still the same poem. And she asked: What’s it about? I said: About the times gone mad, except that we’ve learned to live with it, which is a great evil; and a man’s life is as hard as ever, we’ve seen it all before, but we mustn’t announce it so as not to disseminate fear and confusion. She said: And that’s a poem? And I said: No, indeed, it didn’t come out too well, you’re right, I’ve decided to scrap it. I’ll only publish this so at least they’ll know what it contained. 2. The second poem came to me in a dream, and I spoke to it: Welcome, you’re so beautiful, it’s been a while since you came to me, such a beautiful poem. N ATA N Z ACH

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But when I awoke I couldn’t remember a thing, which made it all the more frustrating. But perhaps this is the price one has to pay for waking up. 3. The third song is sung and played on a luxury liner. A luxury liner, all lit up, sails from Haifa Harbor. You can’t hear the song from where I stand. O sail away ship of my youth, to remind me that nothing begins nor ends here.

Widow I bought a Turkish perfume, The Gift of Heaven it’s called, and dabbed my earlobes to appeal to men. Men don’t go for perfume, their eyes are shaved genitalia, they weren’t attracted to the scent, they went straight for my breasts. I, too, have tired of perfume, make myself up only when I feel like it, comb my hair out of habit, put lipstick, blush is no longer in fashion. When I come to see you Saturday I’ll bring a cake. I didn’t bake it so I’m not responsible. You’ll open the door for me, overwhelmed by my perfume. You’ll look deep into my eyes, stroke my hair on the Persian rug.

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So come rest between my breasts, my heart is filled with aging stars, but don’t come too soon we still have to wait.

Hayuta Hayuta remembers better days, all her past is before her. Sitting in a wheelchair, she displays memories like embroidery. In that small house, at the end of the gravel path with the geranium flowerbed, there was a green door and a mosquito screen. Every morning the birds took off in a metallic bluish volley, father went to work, mother was always busy. The radio played mitsvoth, in the suburb at the edge of town only good deeds were done, even Motale the misfit has grown up. Their acne disappeared, Hayuta remembers and sighs, with a strong, veined hand she strokes the wheel. What once was is laid out today before her. In the closet, in rows, shirts, photographs, bandages await her.

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And a girl in a fleeting world, already a woman in a warped mirror, primps her hair somewhat, knowing that only a little good is left.

Comrade Poet 13 My nails grow deep into my flesh, into death, and I’m a poet. In boots of exquisite leather I go round the globe in steadfast strides. Every shut place I open, wherever people gather I approach and watch. Ever ready, I recite my poems in festivals, my digital time diminishing with every recital. Every poetic muscle aches already, but I will yet scale the peak of Mount Everest, just to stand there. Blinded by the cold I’ll report on man’s condition, I’ll bend from my heights toward small naked women under mosquito nets in India. I’m great, I’m impressive, but no one invites me into his home, I’m too famous and my fame only hurts me with the young, hewed on my forehead like Cain’s mark. Yesterday the paper on which my books were printed still contained wood, today it’s recycled, but it’s good that I existed, took pictures, filled space. You could never deny my place in history, the Jews already translate me into English. I’m still strong. Listen, the earth still shakes under my feet in the stadium where I read before 100,000 cheering men and women. Here I go, coming, advancing through the snow storm, the cold. Don’t forget me: the alcohol was just a joke, a temporary relief. 13. This poem is a photo-montage of two Russian poets, personal friends of Zach.

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A Small Error in the Machine When the Nazis came they were quite polite. The father was a known figure, at least to them, the Italian mother was no problem, they only wished to verify a few minor details. That’s all, according to protocol. They entered the flat, didn’t even presume to sit down. However, that very night a friend—incredibly, a police officer— called and advised to leave immediately, preferably within the hour, for the injunction was already out— because of the wealth, as usual. Jews were always well-to-do and a Judas would always be found, even among Jews. And so an hour passed, two hours, two difficult hours for a man having a hard time deciding. But with first light he packed his wife and son, saying soothing words, such as: It’s only temporary, a small error in the machine. You’ll see, before the year is out we’ll be back. Said it once, twice, and only on the third burst into tears, weeping: It can’t be happening to me, not to me. . . .

Goodbye Berlin Hello Berlin, said the wooden leg, Hello Nazis, Hello anti-Nazis, Hello sons of Nazis, granddaughters of anti-Nazis, I’ve heard all your stories, what are they to me. Hello Berlin, said the wooden leg, I lost my sister on the train, or in the camp, the location no longer matters, I’m no longer the loving leg, I am, in fact, just the step-leg. I came to say goodbye, not to sing your praise. I’ll tread all over town, give a bleeding speech

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in a central, empty square. I’ll kick with my shoe, not my sister’s, all that wasn’t mine and is no longer hers, in a place that may be repaired but is irredeemable. Hello Berlin, here we meet again. Because of you, not me, I lost a sister, flesh and blood, made for humans. Because of you, not me, I’m only a leg that hurts, like back then in the train or camp, the location no longer matters. Goodbye to all that, every parting is hard, even for a genuine wooden leg, even from a town like my sister’s. On her behalf or mine I’m still around, spying on you all the time, damning your worldly ways. May your dust, Berlin, be blessed. May your memory be your grave. This is my sister speaking from my throat. Your dirt is her dirt, your dust her dust, and your past passed her over.

Confession: Gentle I was born to be gentle. Fact: I have gentle hair. You want to check? Go right ahead, my shampooed head is laid before you. Forgive the bald spots. These are just the teeth of time. I was born to be gentle. It so happens that my parents decided they must emigrate to a non-gentle country. They weren’t frivolous,

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they consulted whomever they could. Even Hitler supported their decision, said it was definitely wise. And so a man born to be gentle arrived in a non-gentle country. You tell me what choice did I have. I still comb my hair with a gentle comb, brush my teeth, grow bald, take my clothes to the cleaners, never insult the neighbors unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’s all a mistake, they said, some terrible mistake. As for me, I content myself with crying out in my sleep. Will it help, do you think? Don’t make me laugh, I’m a serious man. And were I not cursed by the times, I’d give you a sharp answer, perhaps not so gentle.

And Then We Had And then we had a quiet evening and we were quiet and then the storm subsided and we weren’t stormy and we knew it mattered not at all whether we were right or wrong. And then you took off your shoes and we were homey and I opened the window and we were breezy,14 first signs of spring stirred in the curtain, and I, at least, stood at the window, ruminating. Because of what could have been and will never be because of what I’ve done and keep doing still. And a bird flew away in the night, leaving behind not a clear sign, but a dark one. 14. In the Hebrew, breeze (wind) and spiritual share the same root.

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And I feared the spirit of the times and an illusive kindness, and I feared your delusions, and the heart feared its lies. But everything dimmed everything and said its goodbyes. And the night was magical and fragile and unbearably wondrous and every limb in the body shouted, Not now, not now, and I stood there, not knowing the why, and the how.

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SHIN SHIFRA

(b. 1931)

Shin Shifra was born in Tel Aviv. She studied kabbala, literature, and education at Hebrew University and at Tel Aviv University. She has published several volumes of poetry, prose, and literary criticism and is a renowned translator and scholar of Sumerian poetry. She has taught creative writing to high school students and is a lecturer on ancient Near Eastern literature at Tel Aviv University. One of the first vocal feminists, she participated in several international conferences for women writers, such as the PEN Conference in Yugoslavia, in 1989, and her work has been published in Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Polish. Her awards include the Prime Minister Award, the ACUM Award, the Leah Goldberg Award, and the Tchernichovsky Award. She was awarded the Amichai Award for poetry in 2001 and the President’s Award in 2004. The poems appearing here are from her collections Woman’s Song (1962), The Next Step (1968), Poems 1973–1985 (1987), and A Woman Who Practices How to Live, Poems 1986–1999 (2001).

That Made Me Woman They say it is good to be, and I the woman say: it is good to desist!

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Blessed be He who made me woman15 created of nothing! Blessed be He who hasn’t made me man who never dies and is not born.

The Spider of Sin The spider of sin wove around my bed the web of punishment. I escaped to the sweetest of dreams but the web’s softness pulled in magic spells to fear. Every spider—deceitful.

On Rain We will lie in the mud the rain will drench us and our son—will be born of dust - - - - - Too bad we worried about my new dress 15. Alludes to the prayer book. Men are to say: “Blessed be He who hasn’t made me woman.” Women are to say: “Blessed be He who made me according to His will.”

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Conceit You rose from the sea the whole horizon your muzzle to guzzle A naughty wave fled the sea yet always returns— only froth

Lie How foolish you are that you failed to see beyond the veils. How miserable I am that I lied so well. Tear up!

Father Tonight suddenly I sprang toward you from guilt to ripe maturity kissing your lips against his face

A Stranger A stranger was smiling at me

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who is this stranger smiling at me on this fragrant morning with such intimacy with such insolence as if we’d woken in the same bed. You— indeed we have.

In This Split Second In this split second between sight and recognition that this is me would you have loved me as you once did?

Sabbath Prayer Let there be in the house a troop of toddlers let them eat fruit by the rotels16 as we used to at father’s let them extend a tongue to have a cactus thorn plucked out let them split open a fig: Any worms? Let them bring in mud from the garden and I will yell at them let them quarrel and call each other names and they will give me strength like the angels of the recitation of Shema and my forefathers will be named in them 16. Rotel—a weight measure in Palestine during the British Mandate, equaling approximately seven pounds. 48

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Summer Dry thorns like a camp of crusaders limbs slashed only the points of blades the jutting of helmets— in the rooms blinds are drawn women tear their flesh off tan bodies— jasmine scents wild-leaved tendrils and the exhalation of the well in the orchard a million years ago. Blinds are drawn.

This Evening If things were tailored tonight to fit my size I’d put on a frock of crimson weaved of raw lust like the scent of unruly chrysanthemum harboring a promise of rain. Whomever I meet this evening on my way will be small for my size and when I return I’ll be an old hag and lust will turn to longing SH IN SH IFR A

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Ecclesiastes Every day the sun like a groom toward me and until night I waited for you clad in white— who is it tottering up the stairs the voice of my love your arms closed on me in a robotic clasp

Goat Our goat was going to die the whole neighborhood knew our goat was going to die. Friday near the ice-wagon our neighbor Shoshana asked me how the goat was doing. Our goat died, I said, not looking into her eyes. He is better off now, said the neighbor Shoshana, and I didn’t look into her eyes thinking she had no heart to feel sorry for a small white goat that died. Next day Saturday noon they found the neighbor Shoshana hanging from her neck in her father’s stable. If only I had looked into her eyes.

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Moonstruck Uncle Yerocham was so worried about Aunt Miriam he would leave her alone so she’d know what it feels like to sleep without him he’d shut the door on her while she fluttered like a dove in the large bed covered the window with a blanket locked the door twice and again unlocked it and all because at noon she dared to mention, it doesn’t matter what, Mother guessed that perhaps he was simply jealous of her spirit because that morning for no reason her eyes shone with a nuptial light and so he determined to restrain her, she turns the house into a grave, he hollered at the top of his lungs, I was a child on a family visit to the house of Aunt Miriam and Uncle Yerocham. Moonstruck, she walks in her sleep, explained Uncle Yerocham when they found Aunt Miriam walking barefoot at sunrise, only Mother guessed

Dove Aunt Miriam and Uncle Yerocham loved like love-birds ate from one plate ate the Sabbath meal from one plate. Uncle Yerocham was so worried

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about Aunt Miriam, Don’t go out in the blazing sun, It’s freezing out, he bought and bought only the best, shoes even lingerie. Aunt Miriam got thicker and thicker and thicker, gorged on candies in hiding and kept silent silent, and Uncle Yerocham, the most compassionate of husbands, raged his voice through the rooms, She simply doesn’t know how to talk to people. In the kitchen, at times, I heard her spit, To hell, in pursed lips, and I couldn’t understand how a quiet woman practically a dove loads one word with so much hate enunciating every syllable. He ran his home with a mighty hand and when they shut the gate behind her, she spoke and spoke and spoke until she flew away— and they had sons

Vegetarian Eats her father he gets stuck in the throat not to swallow and not to swallow— To get rid of the gag like a twisted snake she swallows herself to vomit— Many weeks she eats only ice cream

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Shame At the airport a man raised his voice to a woman—Why must you always—a minute after he struck her face with the heavy suitcase as she bent forward to rescue his briefcase from falling and scattered papers. Inadvertently perhaps, perhaps not, for all the while, as the onlooker watched, he didn’t bother to glance her way or ease the burden of luggage, coat, purse, umbrella. The onlooker caught the shine of a tear and she lowered her eyes, on her head a crown of shame.

A Woman Who Practices How to Live 1. A woman who practices how to live visits her husband’s grave, the scent of grove patches brings tears to her eyes, salty, salty, from longing, a woman practicing, suddenly resolves, it doesn’t become her at all to place at his head a large clay potted plant, as the narrow stretch would allow between his space and hers, waiting, frets about whether to plant bougainvillea, red as blood, civilized, or purple as a feral desert sunset.

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2. A woman who practices living may go to the cinema on a first summer evening, and doesn’t, may go to a Danziger exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum, and doesn’t, instead she speaks on the phone with the gardener in charge at the cemetery. 3. To cover with aptenia her adjoining lot, suggests the gardener, and she’s evasive, he suggests pine in her adjoining lot, and she’s evasive, to uproot a pine in her adjoining lot when the time comes, doesn’t feel right, she stammers, and the gardener in charge at the cemetery, mistaking her motives, guarantees it’s a good omen for longevity, a plant, she requests, large, bougainvillea, a temporary pot easily transported from place to place, when the time comes, as I lived, she whispers to herself, a woman who practices. 4. A woman who practices living permits herself to admit to someone, True, I’m afraid, and permits that someone to throw in her face, Home?! Who’s waiting for you at home, woman, you’ve decreed divine punishment by premature death, a woman practicing dying whispers to herself, True. 5. A woman who practices living goes to market to buy fish, the stench of the sewage flowing in the gutter rises up to her nose, chickens hang from hooks, a man steering a cart strikes her ankle, her eyes blurry from so many pyramids of apples, pears, mangos, at home she can’t swallow the fish the stench sticks in her throat. 54

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6. A woman who practices living climbs the stairs on a sweltering day in some office building on Kibbutz Galuyot Street. She mounts the stairs and a man leaning against the bannister, a cigarette dangling from his lips with the ease of a southern street, a stubble of a beard, revives her spirit as she climbs with sore feet and says, An old woman, why no escalators, and the man leaning leisurely smoking a cigarette, Not an old woman, ya ruhi,17 one day there’ll be an escalator, ya ruhi, my soul. My soul, said a loving man in her ear many years ago, now in the ground, my soul.

17. Ya ruhi, an Arabic idiom, meaning “my soul,” frequently used as a term of endearment by Jews originating from Arab lands.

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ISRAEL HAR

(b. 1932)

Israel Har was born in the city of Chelm, Poland. He arrived in Israel in 1936, and lives in Tel Aviv. His first book of poems, A Pauper’s Discourse on a Bush, was published in 1962. He founded and was editor in chief of Sifriat Tarmil (The Knapsack Library). Har has published four volumes of poetry and is the recipient of the ACUM Award, the Metula Award, and the Prime Minister Award. The poems appearing here are from his 1994 collection Edge of Darkness and Bread.

Morning in a Foreign Place for Yosl Bergner Move away from this blue let the heavy curtain cut between me and the cruel morning. Like so. Yes, now I think I feel good in this reddish darkness (angels and a moon painted on the wall) and if up there they don’t strike the piano keys I will hear the sea

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which never rests will never rest the whispering sea the raging sea the rising sea the roaring sea absorbing the sun lusting after the sand the blue sea the great sea in its love breaks to the sand at his lip the edge of the pit. Salt clamors in today’s picture; a shore. Points of dreams embrace. The moment of first meeting

Grave in the Sun for Mahmud Sabag, in memoriam Noon: a man in acrid clothing drops on the sand on a beach to return. A hard sun on his back sun on his neck acrid clothing on the sand he dreams of love dreams grass his face in sand he dreams a cradle his eyes see a shadow a hard sun on his neck sun on his back fingers eyes face

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a hard sun like a hump riding the sea his back his face in the sand dreams love dreams grass the sea rocks like a crib dreams waves gentle waves lap at the foot of tents at palm-branches on a man’s grave roses small waves gentle waves lap at the feet of a man acrid clothing falling on sand at the noon of his life a man is interred in sand at the noon of his life a man is bound to love love in his soul death on his neck the beat of drums a choking in his throat the beat of drums and a mourner’s song a tent palm-branches woven with roses on a man’s grave in the sun death in his throat found peace in the sand

A Cradle Story A. Suddenly—at his age not young not old in his sixty-third year my father misses his father-in-law—my grandfather out of whose bed my crib was made. Let him rise from his sleep “and I have some questions and talks to discuss with him.” B. Grandfather was immersed in study and didn’t feel the fire

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that burnt the bread didn’t notice the fire erupting from the stove and catching the shelves didn’t watch the flour burning the walls and the roof are about to collapse— grandfather sinks in the depths of study and the village is on fire C. Tonight an infant in my father’s arms pulls his beard gently he parts her fingers and releases his hair between the walls of Beit Yosef after the inauguration dinner at midnight rain on your face in my arms to your bed D. In time dawn rose with all your aunts and uncles we went up the mountain to visit a grave on the way orchards sparkle to dry in the sun the carcass of a horse between cars racing on the road colorful workers in the cabbage plots sprinklers and the dark ploughed soil of the valley like clouds in autumn skies it is cold on the mountain E. At all the bus stops in the gray wet city people in long lines under umbrellas and I among them to return to you I’ve come your mother stands lighting the candles and you’re asleep with longing

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F. Come come happy one rise and shine let us know no more sorrow

A Sour Pickle the Angel of Death for Yaakov David Abramsky My father passed away like a Jew: unprepared. He knew where he came from he knew where he’s headed always saw it before him and yet: unprepared. It happened in the month of Shevat at eleven o’clock in the morning. The parchment of his Torah on the desk the ink in the inkwell in his right hand a quill— a craftsman working at his craft— he suddenly felt an urge: hankered for a sour pickle. And no woman in the house. (His mother, in my childhood, was buried down the slopes of the Carmel a few steps from his infant son a grandson who would never walk into her arms; his father in the mountains of Jerusalem a bit to the south and above my mother and now he still dwelling on the plain surrounded by housing projects and a wall.) It happened at eleven o’clock in the morning in the month of Shevat— the voice sounded forty days before his birth— a sour pickle. Sixty years he suffered from heartburn. His voice in prayer always loud and clear as crystal. 60

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He who has eyes to see would feel it in his ears: clear crystal beneath the fire of heartburn. As if late meeting someone he put on the rabbinical hat and crossed the street. It happened at eleven o’clock in the morning before noon on a day in Shevat. He already had one foot on the sidewalk: a sour pickle—the angel of death a bike hit him. Ran him over. In his pocket they found a piece of paper with my old address. —And you’re faithful to resuscitate the dead.18

Dust Instead of Glory A man sits on the ground for his mother his wife sits in her room on the ground a man cries for his mother living on the earth a man and his wife sit he is the man sitting for his father on the ground she is his wife sitting in her room on the ground a man sits weeping for his father his wife on the ground recalls a girl and her father an infant and her father fleeing their persecutors running in the day from their persecutors at night sore heels pursued at night fleeing in the day a girl and her father 18. From the prayer book.

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fleeing their persecutors at night from their persecutors in daylight filthy rags the feet on the ground fleeing their persecutors a girl and her father have reached the water a girl rides the bones of her father’s neck hard against the bones of her thighs a man and his daughter bones swim in the great river running from their persecutors have reached the water a girl on her father’s neck floating cross the great Yenisey bound east opposite on the bank her mother brother and sister now her feet too on the ground her father one moment his head above water in the tide the depths of Yenisey swallowed my father forever and I and my mother and brother and sister on the bank watching we’ve come to the promised land always his voice in my ears now in your ears too a man a man and his wife on the ground

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sitting now a man and his wife sit on the ground for the son in the corner in a wide bowl in olive oil a memorial candle floats quivering flickering on the ground large shadows a man and his wife on the ground sit a father and mother sit on the ground crying over the seed and an infant girl from the arms of her father was left on the ground

Australian Story I worked hard. I planted a bush. A neighbor came: Ah—rosemary. What a great scent. It reminds me of Lodz Ghetto.

Pauper’s Talk With a wooden spoon I scrape a stew from the bottom of the pot yet the ration does not satisfy. I’ll sing to the morning croon to the nettle whose bloom takes the form of a spike or bevy

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whose leaves are streaked with toxic hairs and is good fodder for animals and feed for birds. And under the nettle a myrtle will grow with a thick tree branch of white yellow buds its perennial leaves fragrant. Go break bread and eat for no money or price like Isaiah who called in the market: Oh, come you thirsty stand on line and be sated

And Tomorrow I Too to Die Like This for Bell, with eternal love— Warm is my heart in my thoughts fire burns I spoke in my tongue: (Psalms xxxix, 4) February twelfth nineteen ninety two. Guenadi died yesterday from cold and hunger. It says in the paper. Comrade Artzi from the welfare committee said there is no justification for dying of hunger, it says in the paper: no justification. Albert, Guenadi’s friend in cold and hunger, says Guenadi was skinny hauling crates for two or three new shekels, collecting remnants of rotting fruit and vegetables, and if there’s no food—you drink because of the cold. Sympathetic neighbors

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gave torn blankets of feathers of birds who died of cold and hunger in the snow of yesteryear. It says in the paper. I read: died of cold and hunger, and I read again to understand what is written to understand what I read, died of cold and hunger. And comrade Artzi says there’s no justification to die of hunger, it says in the paper. And comrade Haim, the Socialist legislator demands with a new law to increase his pension by a third: from eight thousand three hundred and forty new shekels a month to twelve thousand four hundred and thirty new shekels a month. A law that will affect two additional comrades in the land. It says in the paper. By now I’m fed up with law with lawblow. (A twitch at the corner of mouth and eye seems to indicate one should blot.) Let there be a law of joke. Yet even a scoundrel within the law should not be allowed to joke while a man of cold and hunger is lying dead, it says in the paper. Because of a strike social security didn’t pay for the burial. I read again and repeat what it says in short lines not poetry not prose in the style of “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun

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or I Am Hungry, said Georg Fink, a realist. Reality. The style perhaps somewhat clumsy, a slice of reality: an abandoned structure in Shepher Alley behind a market the first Hebrew city between naked walls heaps of garbage and waste a stench and freezing cold in the building during the day. At night the reality structure of Shepher Alley is dark. Comrade Artzi says: No justification to die of hunger. Albert the friend tells: One has no strength to haul crates so there’s no money to buy food and skinny Guenadi says to me bring me food I’m hungry and it’s very cold at night so he drinks today he’s dead. And comrade Haim the legislator demands a greater pension. And the comrade from the theater in the capital the one with the green eyes, a known liar, misleads a working man toward crowded endless halls of hunger whose end cannot be justified. And comrade Guenya concluded, And tomorrow I too to die like this nobody knows.

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All is said in the paper Guenadi Druker died of cold and hunger. And the days are days of a lofty age. Crafty age. Born and unfinished --------------------------------------------------a praise full of fraud bespeaks a serf of dust seemingly floating

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DAVID AVIDAN

(1934–1995)

David Avidan was born in Tel Aviv. He is considered one of Israel’s leading poets and a major originator of contemporary, avant-garde Israeli poetry. Avidan’s work has been translated extensively, and collections of his poems have been published in English, French, Russian, and Arabic. His awards include the Abraham Woursell Award from the University of Vienna, the Bialik Award, and the Prime Minister Award. He published nineteen books of poetry as well as plays and children’s books. The poems appearing here are from his collection Something for Somebody—Selected Poems 1952–1964.

The Stain Remained on the Wall Someone tried to scrub the stain off the wall. But the stain was too dark (or conversely—too bright). At any rate—the stain remained on the wall. So I sent the painter to paint the wall green. But the stain was too bright. I hired the plaster man to plaster the wall clean. But the stain was too dark. At any rate—the stain remained on the wall. So I took a kitchen knife and tried to scrape it off. And the knife was painfully sharp.

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Only yesterday they sharpened it. And yet. And I fisted an ax and pummeled the wall, but stopped in time. I don’t know why it suddenly occurred to me the wall might collapse, and the stain will remain anyway. At any rate—the stain remained on the wall. When they put me to the wall, I asked to stand close to it. I shielded it with a broad chest (who knows: maybe). And when they slashed my back, a lot of blood flowed, but only from the back. They’re shooting. And I believed the blood will cover the stain. A second round of shooting. And I believed so the blood will cover the stain. At any rate—the stain remained on the wall.

Housing When he was thirty-five the sporting principle still guided his financial life. Perhaps even excessively (a big boy with a bald spot, as he was once defined by some very good and very very stable friends). Later— ten or fifteen or more years went by with great speed. The sons already at the peak of procreation. The wind slightly bent his body, and the sun mercilessly expanded the reigning zone of the bald spot. Houses damaged during the battles were repaired. In the meantime,

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new ones were built. The wind would remind him moment-moment that in fact he is not so young anymore. The sun, too, as mentioned, wasn’t very generous to him. And suddenly he wished with all his might for something of his own. All his days he had been just some hireling, a complete hireling. At least his own flat—he told himself—at least a flat that would be all his own. Another twenty-five years went by. In the meantime he paid every month substantial amounts toward the flat. And at the end of said twenty-five years, and he’s about seventy-five, and his wife, too, by all accounts is at the edge of the grave, the flat, for which he had paid with the best years of his life, was all his. Now it was possible to tap the walls with a certain peace of mind, stroke the handsome tiles and also feel you’ve done something with your life (maybe simply just a legacy but the sons already are far away in time and place). The flat is like a daughter. The bathroom is all yours, every square foot. And then suddenly to die from a difficult illness or old age or just many-many years of fatigue and used-up irreparable breath and distress with which you’ve built your home. One bright day, ancient hands grip the hallway walls as if in a desperate need to confirm something solid and durable and not transient in this sudden fog that has enclosed you, and which will soon, no doubt, call upon your spouse.

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Incident The houses shook as if chilled. Facing them neglected lawns fluttered in the rain. And indeed, our misfortune struck and struck and lurked and advanced like a blade in the grass. And we took into account all the particulars. The forecaster wasn’t wrong and also predicted rains. But our misfortune struck and struck, and our blade moved in the grass. We tried to forget the whole affair. We rationalized: just an unfortunate disagreement. But our misfortune is the whole affair, and so at times disagreements occur. There was moisture in the streets. The usual. It’s a good thing we remembered to take a coat. And it is good that we are so resilient. Maybe in fact it will all be dismissed still. Because perhaps one day we’ll be very changed. Then only the warm winds will lash at us. And for a while during the year also a little rain. And we’ll lounge a lot upon the grass. Later we’ll go out to roam the earth. And the road will be wide. Not obstinate. But our misfortune struck and struck and advanced and gobbled like a blade in the grass. The houses calmed down somewhat. Facing them neglected lawns dozed in the sun. And perhaps this thing never occurred. Or perhaps it did only yesterday.

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Interim Summation Yes, the night was full and crammed. At least the two of us here, young, at the foot of the bridge. Over there benches and low fences. Over here a stubborn dull silence breathes. Yes, the night is full and crammed. At least they didn’t hang us from low fences. And we tried to see this night with good eyes. We even tried here and there to express decent opinions and supposedly we succeeded. Yes, the night was stark and honest and I was more or less content. Later she zipped herself up with a zipper and suddenly we stood and began walking. And we saw how a warm wind covers over darkness and a cement floor. Filthy. And the bridge seemed like some ruined city we left behind and went walking. At any rate—it was a typical night out (embellishing should be charged to aging). And yet why did we feel so clearly that we came back as if to a different land that is all benches and a density of walls and washed streets and the hour is late. As said, it was a typical night out (misgivings to be charged to aging). When we got home it was almost morning. We went up. We yawned. We made coffee. And the built city panted toward morning

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like a woman in heat toward a handsome male. And the built city groaned toward morning like a throat to a knife. And morning fell like a cool white parachute. And the morning a clear summer morning even fair. At any rate—it was a typical summer morning (exaggerations to be charged to aging).

Power of Attorney (for whom it may concern) What justifies most of all the loneliness, the great despair, the strange submission to the burden of great loneliness of great despair, is the simple cutting fact we have nowhere to go. On clear nights the air is cold and at times on cloudy nights as well, and there’s rain and hot spells, and beautiful bodies, and also faces, that sometimes smile and sometimes don’t, sometimes because of him, sometimes because of her. The landscape is simple and unambiguous, angels do not climb up and down the ladder, sometimes you hate, sometimes love, a few friends, but mostly foes, and a strong urge to flow, like a river, alone, in broad daylight, to remain always young, and to dream about a foolhardy rush, in broad daylight, like a river, alone, to flow and flow, only our body, day by day, grows old.

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What justifies most of all the dream, the great despair, the knowledge that there is no justification and looking for it anew every moment, the excitement, the dread, what justifies most of all, what justifies the great despair is the simple cutting fact we have no place to go. Only our body, day by day, grows old, and we a river, in broad daylight, to flow alone, alone to flow, what justifies, what justifies the dream, what justifies the great despair, what justifies most of all. P.S. The nights are clear and the air is cold, there’s fervor and energy but not love, no longer a smile, no longer words, angels on the ladder do not climb up nor down, the poems, as is their way, only tell what can be told in words, and so off a cliff they pitch themselves down to the great sea where waves rise and fall, rise and fall.

Personal Problems Because I loved you so much I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you I loved you so much. I loved you so much. Until other days came and I could tell you. I could tell you because I loved you. Because I loved you. The trees blossomed in green and the sun grew dark.

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And the more I loved you the darker it grew. Distant. Ready to leap. Like a certain breed of panther. (Truly, it did remind one of a panther.) And then we came to town. A lili knew me. In the morning she woke me. And still I loved you. Final light came suspending all doubts leaving only the movie-house white and blazing in the sun. He who has something to hide shouldn’t be seen in the sun. And he who loves mustn’t go into town.

Dance Music We reflected at length. Light flooded the forehead’s rectangle, the eyes, the eyebrows. We asked the same questions and were answered as always. Winter arrived and saddened us. From others we asked nothing and from ourselves we asked only little. But we grasped that daylight is not hostile and that night is only a passing nuisance. Rain came and silenced the tune. We turned on the radio, dimmed the lights, and quietly dove into dark and shadowy depths. The hairy creature awoke in us. Man is the sole goal of all creation. And so woman found us. We were hard and festive until the end of night. Why did light flood the eyes, eyebrows, the forehead’s rectangle, the back, the body. The rain why did it come, and how would you explain that we passed underneath and did not sink.

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Will Power One measures his trembling with a shaky hand. It is hard hard to trust a trembling. Between border and border a small legacy: a homeland. And even a smaller one: a birth certificate. But behind him darkness a demarcation between two glowing borders governing his weakness. Or, all at once it seduces all the motives, and he becomes a man instantly floating only with a wakeful memory between the starting line and the grave where he turns from side to side.

Safe Distance Forget me. If you believe in the sun, criticize the flowers, rely on the winds, forget me. I was born into a too classified world, laden with innumerable considerations and obligations. Had I been born fifty years before, it is possible I would have known myself under more favorable circumstances, with a different birth certificate of thick paper and Gothic characters. Too bad. And yet now I to myself. Myself to myself. Bone of myself. Only from afar do I hear the old drums. And the eardrum can barely receive them. And the eardrum can barely emit them. Sounds. Shadows.

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Rings. Later everything will be wide open as before the deluge.

Last-Last They’ve always waited for just this moment. Since then everything was folded everything approved. Only something was less solid, bolder, born without a silencer, and therefore it grated. As if oil were spent off the earth, as if the thin earth consumed it all. And later with a soft hum they led what was left into the darkness.

Experiments in Hysterics There are people who’ve got nothing to lose, there are people who’ve got nothing. What haven’t they got, what haven’t they got to lose? There are people with a time-bomb inside, they’ve got time that is about to explode. What have they got inside that is about, what have they got to lose? And there are, of course, other ways to describe the feeling. It’s possible, for instance, to slow down allatonce the wheel of reflexes, then suddenly all goes back to its crystal form. They’re visible, those who’ve got nothing to lose, they’re visible, you see them, perhaps even see them in the image of an advanced submarine, a submarine in fact that hasn’t been tested yet, a submarine in fact that may never be tested. The deep waters receive it with a quivering sigh. It is their big moment. They have no

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reservations about the speed, they have no other speed to offer. Yet it is clear, this is not the point, this is not the point: will the walls hold up or not? Of course, of course they’ll hold up. The fortune tellers, the best ones, have nodoubt, to wit, there are fears, but nodoubt, the best ones, the very best ones. And here’s the point: Will hold up? Will not? And the more important question, that there’s noneed, although the possibility exists, possibility always exists, to couch it in powerfully rousing similes, the more important question, the most important, is this: Am I, and suddenly, of all things, in first person, leaving noroom for mistakes, am I already afraid or still afraid, already afraid or still already afraid? Very important, then, to keep writing. One must not miss opportunities. Immortalize yourself while there’s still time, before you stumble. Tomorrow you’ll be changed, tomorrow will be late. Tomorrow is always late. This is the system, there’s no other. There is a later one, but it will be effective, definitely effective, starting tomorrow, only when it will be too late. Come, come with me. Summer will never return. The earth begins to travel. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the circus. Everything will travel in the circus. The crust of the earth will move slowly-slowly, to the sound of distant chimes, with an overwhelming effort, fully insured. There will be no motion more assured. Come, come to the sudden joy, remember me favorably, speak of me favorably in that other morning when I’ll wake up anew into the murderous unreal speed of impressions to which I’m subjected, it seems, irrevocably.

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DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH

(1936–2005)

Dahlia Ravikovitch was born in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Yehuda Amichai’s, Natan Zach’s, and David Avidan’s contemporary, Ravikovitch was a major force in shaping modern Hebrew poetry. She studied at Hebrew University and worked as a journalist and a teacher. She published twelve volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, several children’s books, and translations of William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Her poems were translated into twenty-three languages, and collections of her work have appeared in the United States and England. Her awards include the Israel Award, the Bialik Award, the Prime Minister Award, the Shlonsky Award, the Brenner Award, and the Ussishkin Award. The poems appearing here are from her 1992 collection Mother with Child.

An Exceptional Autumn Slowly slowly I see it vividly, how I was trapped here. Ten in the morning, a pastoral tranquility, following a night-long vigil. Plants bloom wherever the eye falls. Patches of fabric cover every available surface. And the kettle. And the household implements conspicuously spare. And the calm within. And from without, the plaintive wail of a toddler:

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they’ve snatched his swing. Someone digs with a simple farming tool— I’ve forgotten what it’s called. (Forgotten? Ah, well.) Steady blows, and the rustle of a hose being dragged along. Everybody here sweeps and cultivates the fauna and flora. The women also knit a lot, manual labor is of the utmost importance. This diligence and drive to be useful paint a false idyllic picture. But for the fear of the Labor Movement’s creed,19 men would have swallowed each other alive. It’s been three days already that my mother sleeps the sleep of the just. I said to Ido: Grandma sleeps in peace and quiet. And Ido said: Is it perhaps eternal sleep? God forbid, I said, not eternal sleep. Just peace and quiet. And yet, without sowing fear, I tell myself eternal sleep is best of all.

An Attempt to Express an Opinion Rain on the square of Santa Maria Novella. A few people with umbrellas, a very light drizzle, and I ponder the meaning of the word banal; have I understood you correctly, 19. Alludes to Avoth III.2: “But for the fear of the ruling power men would have swallowed each other alive.”

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and did I have an opinion at all. Rain on Piazza Santa Maria, and rain on Piazza Santa Croce, and rain falls on the city’s pavement and upon all of Tuscany. And what is the little of this that will cling to me, the little that will actually be left me; for most things, virtually most things, are merely make-believe and lack substance. A very light drizzle only slightly dampens the cobblestones, doesn’t drive people off the street, doesn’t leave behind a dense slosh. Have I clarified to your satisfaction my position on the banal, have I understood your meaning, have I expressed an opinion at all?

On Life and on Death20 Nights he’d get drunk, spill his glass, mess up the table, at times yelling: No more talk! Waving his arm, attempting to verbalize— (all at once I forget what it was about, and what it is that stuck in my mind). It seems he specialized in death as subject, he saw his years arranged in columns, columns, twenty years, or twenty-five, he knew it was a diminishing story, he knew it wouldn’t have heights and peaks, he would shed his years like rotten teeth. He used to strike the table and smash a plate, 20. Also a slang usage among children when faced with a challenge.

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would break whatever stood in his way, twenty years or twenty-five he couldn’t extricate himself from despair. He was a man without faith. Heroic tales proved too much for him; he wouldn’t even thumb through the Bible. If he had an insight, it was by way of negation. This is not a story of possible salvation. He saw his life ahead trudging along, he saw it spread before him and dwindling, plain as a jar of pickled greens, up until a natural death, sudden or protracted. All at once he felt a strong pang of longing and for all his labor, this was his payoff. At last he was buried in a plot of dry land and for all his toiling, this was his lot. And so he foresaw his end from the beginning, a life not worse than any other, an ordinary death and a hasty burial.

Omens When the glass drops a splinter shoots, and a piece of paper slips, and something shifts or stirs, and something splits from the proper frame— one must always be on guard. Now I write and pause, to think, many sheets of paper got stuck in my throat. I, if I may say so, am no longer I. I’m split, wasting fast. A quiver in the air. The mould is missing. Perhaps it is I who’s dropping quickly.

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And I refuse to believe it. I simply refuse to see.

The Cat Ido said to me: Men work outside, and I leaned over and saw: a cat went by. A mottled cat with gray and orange spots, an unusual combination. It went through the nettles and quickly vanished, sneaked past. The leaves of the margosa tree, not yet fully dense, are dark green. An un-historic morning within the boundaries of home and yard. Something like a light wind flutters among the leaves. The yard in the east is already shaded. In the apartment across, cheap ornaments are clearly visible on the wall. We’re all mute. The cat saved my life.

Ready Alert I’ll tell you the truth: One can be content that there are so many corners in a room and a composition of colors red, pink, dark green, and a delicate lace curtain over the small, melancholy window,

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and a feeling of devotion among the objects even as they persist in remaining apart. And this is all there is in the room and how seemingly little not even little that holds much but plainly what’s visible. There are things I hide in my heart to throw dust in people’s eyes. And I tirelessly expect with a groundless tenacity that all this is but a drill to preserve the strength to preserve the readiness.

Lying Upon the Water A smelly Mediterranean city squats on the water, her head between her knees her body fouled with soot and trash. Who would raise from the trash a rotten Mediterranean city, her feet covered with scabs, her sons dealing knives to one another. And now the city has been flooded with crates of grapes and plums, cherries are displayed in the market for the passersby. The setting sun is as pink as a peach; who could seriously loathe a Mediterranean city doped

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like a cow mooing in heat, her walls Italian marble and crumbling sand. Clad in embroidered rags, she harbors no motives, no motives at all. And the sea brims at her blind forehead and the sun beams her way rays filled with compassion as its fury subsides at setting. And the pumpkins, cucumbers and lemons, bursting with juice and color, exhale over her a balmy fragrance of summer perfumes. And she is not deserving. Not deserving of love or pity. A foul Mediterranean city— how my soul became bound to hers. As life goes on, as life goes on.

But She Had a Son for Rachel Melamed Eitan An acquaintanceship that began in mid-winter ripened at the end of spring. A smiling woman, forbearing. She had a son who fell in battle. She cooks and bakes, holds a part-time job at City Hall. Lunch is always set on the table. And all with a flat refusal to resign herself.

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As is her way, as if placidly, she may, all at once, halt the universe. It’s hard to tell what she’s capable of. Without actually saying so she voiced a claim. After all, a son was taken from her. No way can she justify this taking. Who would dare tell her: It’s time now you washed your face, be strong. What was, was. She departs on a very trying journey. It’s a vertiginous trek, back and forth. With her own hands she rakes coals underneath her, deliberately heaps cinders over her body. She is Rachel. Which Rachel? The one who had a son, and she tells him, day and night, summer and winter, feasts and holidays, I’m Rachel, your mother. Possessed of cognition and free will, there’s no comforting me.

Grand Days Have Gone by Her How did it go? Untypically, she was quick to recollect. A vineyard didn’t spring from the earth. An orchard stood there, sickly, slow to blossom.

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A walnut tree that bloomed failed to ripen. As though some natural yielding element were missing from the ground. Hard green lemons. A balding lawn. A great calm. In the west, the hedge grew wild and naturally the honeysucker (later named honeybird), were it alive today, would have been twenty already. There were manhunts in the valley. Fire in the brush. The summer burned as usual in a hellish blaze, the evening cast shadows with no relief. Between death and death they sang to her the songs of Zion. She wouldn’t go to bed before dawn, before a bird twittered. In those years she herself died three or four times. Not a definitive final death, but a kind of death throes. Great yearnings gripped her in the bosom of night, mighty emotional throbs. The years have their way of wreaking changes hidden and secret. It is simple for her to remember this. Grand days have gone by her. What a pity that now, so near the end, she has suddenly lost the ability to remain among the living.

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A Mother Goes About A mother goes about with a dead child in her belly; this child hasn’t been born yet. When his day comes, the dead child will be born, head first, trunk and buttocks, and he won’t swing his arms, won’t cry a first cry. They won’t slap his behind, won’t trickle drops into his eyes, won’t diaper him after washing the body. He will not be like a live child. And his mother won’t be placid and proud after the birth, will neither worry about his future, nor wonder how she will provide for him, whether she has enough milk, clothes, whether she has room for another crib. This child is a virtual saint, he wasn’t born even before he was born. He’ll have a small grave at the edge of the cemetery, and a small memorial, a modest marker. And this is the life of the child killed in his mother’s womb in January, 1988, for political and security reasons.

The Tale about the Arab Who Died in the Fire When the blaze caught his body it didn’t happen gradually. There was no prior bursting of heat, nor a blast of choking smoke, and no sense of a nearby room one could escape to. The blaze caught him instantly— this has no simile— peeled his clothes,

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torched his flesh. The epidermal nerves were struck first, the hair fueled the blaze, God, he yelled, they’re burning, and that’s all he could do in self defense. The flesh was already burning with the shack’s boards, which fed the blaze in the first stage. He no longer possessed comprehension; the fueled blaze in the flesh numbed his sense of future, and the memory of his family. He was no longer connected with his childhood. And he screamed without any mental brakes and lost all relation with his kinsfolk; he didn’t ask for vengeance, deliverance, didn’t ask to see tomorrow’s dawn. He only wished to stop burning, but his own body sustained the flame. He was as if bound and strapped— but he wasn’t thinking about this either. And he continued to burn with the vigor of his body made of flesh, marrow and sinew. And he burned a long time. And inhuman sounds emanated from his throat, for numerous human functions had already ceased, except for the pain the nerves conduct in electric currents to the pain center in the brain. And it didn’t last more than one day. And it is fortunate that his spirit surrendered on this day, for he deserved to rest.

Lullaby They’ll sing to you your virtuous Ma and Grandma, the fringe of Ma’s kerchief brushing the blanket.

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They’ll sing, Ma and Grandma, an old wistful song. In the dim enclave in Djibalia they sat clasped together: a broken father spitting blood, and the fifteen-year-old son coiling himself like a hoop around the crushed body— the remnants of his father. Two lovers, two love-birds, their captors mocked them. Ma and Grandma sing you a song so you may sleep without harm, sweet child; Rachel weeps for her children with bitter tears. A grieving voice. And you’ll grow up to be a man, and the pain of Djibalia you won’t forget, and the misery of Shatti you won’t forget, and the villages of Betta and Hawara, and Balata and Djelazoon, for their outcry rose for many nights.

Train of Thought Who is she to talk? Who is she to talk? What else has she got to say? She has a twisted need to suffer. And in our land such pretty landscapes: vineyards hanging from the mountain ridge, the shade of clouds on the plain, and light, and fenced-in lots. And three olive groves as well, uprooted as punishment. And three old women, toothless.

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Due to old age, what else? Brutality is not the only viewpoint. Then why, suddenly, on the pure Sabbath, on the joyous Sabbath, an image encroaches of the man they had beaten to death. Him and his son you shall not put to death on the same day. The blot of a light cloud settled on the plain. In Zichron Yaakov the wine vats burst with the nectar of grapes. And our barns, too, spill over with grain, and the ravines overflow with water, and beneath the overturned stone a scorpion crawls. The song of nature. And that Arab they beat to death. Virtually pelted his flesh. But not in Zichron Yaakov, and not in Mazkeret Batya. These are veteran communities, languid, blending in the scenery. Who is she to talk? Who is she to talk? She is just looking for ways to suffer, to say a bad word. She is not one of us, she doesn’t see all that’s good and beautiful in life. She doesn’t see us as we are. We came to our homeland.21

Rina Slavin Rina Slavin lies in bed all day, pen and paper nearby, 21. A refrain in a popular pioneer song.

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three cups of leftover tea and coffee, a pillbox, and two deodorants for variety. She opens her eyes eagerly, utterly burning toward a new day, yet doesn’t raise her body from the bed. Perhaps she is numbed, perhaps lazy, or, in elegant speech, indolent. A small alarming clock is also near the bed so if she wants to wake there will be no setback. Rina peers at the clock, realizes that half the morning has already past. And what about the remaining half? And what about noon and again the afternoon and a little before dusk and the glorious sunset so near her window which she misses anyhow. Rina Slavin waves a muscle-less limb, flicks away an ant, or a strand of hair that spots the linen or the floor. Her house is clean, even immaculate, and the tickless clock leads its hands near her bed or pillow. For the life of her she can no longer split and divide the times according to hours, for she doesn’t have time in the ordinary sense of the word. She holds a mad hope to rise from the bed and perform great deeds, or just rise and perform, like Deborah the Prophetess, 92

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like Miriam, Moses’s sister, but, like Michal, David’s wife, she only gazes out the window, contempt in her heart. She is also torn by self and public derision and pilfers her days without a flute or any other musical instrument. Amid the forces of nature that wreck her she dozes off which is the best way of all to swallow time, to swallow time.

The Greenness of Leaves It is the year nineteen-ninety in the Western calendar. Wild foliage rich with compassion fills the window dotted with occasional, pink yellowish blossoms like scattered omelet crumbs. A big red flower doesn’t bolt from the green. A big flower is not to be seen. The year nineteen-ninety is not the year of large flowers. A blind of gaping slats is drawn over the foliage, and over the blind a lacy fringed curtain. I’ve never had a worse year in my entire life and the greenness of trees spills pity like a maternal solution containing artificial mother’s milk, calcium and minerals. Dear, a year of green light and shade a lacy curtain and a blind of gaping slats is not to be termed a year of life. In the year nineteen-ninety life drained from me as from the bodies of desert drifters whose bodily fluids have dried up while waiting to be rescued. DA H L IA R AV IKOVIT CH

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A Private History for Itzchak Livni Nine words I said to you. You said this and that. You said: You have a child, you have time, you have poetry. The window bars were carved in my skin; you wouldn’t believe I’ve endured this. I really didn’t have to, humanly speaking. On the Tenth of Teveth the siege began; on the Seventeenth of Tammuz the city fell; on the Ninth of Av the temple was destroyed. I withstood all this alone.

A Beetle’s Life A black beetle slowly makes her way. You watch her and say: How ugly she is. A hunchbacked body, tireless eyes, she’s arrived here from Pakistan with no hidden motives. Give the black beetle credit. She came here to work, to aspire for a bright short future— a beetle’s highest joy. Don’t harm her, she beseeches your mercy and creeps onward. Deep in her silly heart every beetle knows you won’t spare her, you won’t listen.

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ASHER REICH

(b. 1937)

Asher Reich was born in Jerusalem and lives in Tel Aviv. He studied philosophy and literature at Hebrew University and began publishing in 1960. For many years, he was the coeditor of Moznayim, the magazine of the Hebrew Writers Association. He participated in the International Writing Program at Iowa University, and his poetry is featured in numerous anthologies in Israel and in Europe. He has published twelve volumes of poetry, a volume of short stories, and a novel. His Selected Poems appeared in 1986 and won the Bernstein Award from the Federation of Israeli Publishers; it was subsequently published in French and in German translations. His other awards include the Anne Frank Poetry Award, the ACUM Award, and the Prime Minister Award. The poems appearing here are from his collections Selected Poems (1986), Works on Paper (1988), Fictitious Facts (1993), and Winter Music (1996).

The History of My Heart Like light I travel through my loves who fade speedily unawares. Real

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time will not to be found in suns or clocks. Time is the metaphysical pulse of a human heart; the other cosmos teems with creatures of cell-like shapes a mysterious civilization moves as it does around the invisible sun. Oh, my world lives and moves in its natures: the emotional gravitation. This is the history of my heart, filled with dates of love: dark ages of humiliating defeats. Melancholy kingdoms vanishing in a renaissance of conquests and discoveries. The future spills into the present like blood cleansing itself, like a regal solitude which rises and falls and appoints itself ruler over me, again.

Fragments 1. You and I and a brook. 2. You and I go into the brook. The brook changes 3. You and I a brook. What flows in me what goes through you— are we changed? 4. The brook, as brooks do, longs for the ocean and we, wet souls, are extinguished from our place— are we the same brook?

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5. You and I are not in the same brook. Sight deceives in brooks, things are lit in the sun— you see me in other waters I see you in a different light.

New York: First Swim As usual, as in the beginning, it all began with water. Max Ernst’s blind swimmer rose from the river, drenched with longing for his life on land, fleeing every abyss of his time, as if absconding his eternal waters. I watched as his centrifugal body shook off plutonium in the water. I also saw how the water thirsted for your mouth recoiling from it. The entire island ran like a rumor. You, too, ran. Your spirit, too, changed seasons like the green nakedness of Central Park which changed colors into autumn. Later, we crossed the wailing Hudson to Jersey, to the frozen future of the American dream.

New York: Second Swim Through a lit tunnel under the river we went back to Manhattan. The island was wrapped in silver clouds. There we lost the sounds of bread far from the land of honey. There your stomach couldn’t tolerate the sugary

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load of the city’s pies. In Macy’s you threw up. In Alexander’s I bought a pair of woolen long johns and got a long erection. We felt such glass-lusts as tall as the Twin Towers. My face in the clouds was like an autumnal sun in the Atlantic sky. The eyeballs of my eyeballs filmed everything. The tourist blood in us whirled delight, and still craves soothing moments with books at Rizzoli’s. Like the bears in the commercial you and I flowed with the human stream of the Marathon. At night we strolled with Eliot’s cats and all your fears were thoroughly eroded.

Requiem to a Dog in the Rain A winter-haunted sky. Icicles like stalagmites on the ground. The highway slippery as an eel. Injuries of rain and a dog in a puddle at the side of the road. Sounds of Bach blast from the radio. Oh, God Almighty. One hand on the wheel and with the other I search in my pocket to find the name of the place: Stockdorf. Cars zoom by honking nervously. Potholes. The car hops like a harried frog. Another hour’s drive to Stockdorf. The rain keeps falling. Death embraces the dog. Cars continue to honk.

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Sights 1. The wagon of Johann the neighbor lies at the side of the road like a freight that ran off the tracks. Dark clouds bring to burial the lady of the north sun. It’s so peaceful here: so this is the pure stillness, not much unlike death. 2. My lover sweeps leaves in the yard. Every morning the days of corrosion set upon us like smoke without flame. In the nearby stable a cow is giving birth. A peasant woman yawns into the milk bucket. My eyes in the window, my feet tethered to a sagging squeaking wood floor. On his cart, still as a picture, an old man leans on his rake as if it were a spine. My lover still sweeps leaves in the yard. Summer is sunk in the deep.

Mud Hogs in the muddy yard. I hear the slaughterhouse sounds in their guts. Skies of puddles above the village. Heavy boots of a peasant

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and another peasant silently ruminating on the upcoming harvest. I see their mud-ploughed fields. As if in a transfixed calm a tractor sits in the mud. A cart dozes off. Cows dream. Near the fence a truck loaded with large sacks of potatoes. It stopped raining. I walk out to the evening puddles strewn with frogs like so many stars.

Nights First night On the roof of the house a pond fell from the sky our room was flooded. We swam in the dark— Second Night The tiles were changed. The house is warm sheltered— a sort of challenge. And Third The light of the house created the night to surround us with good sleep. In the dream animals followed us and only the snow falling in a white darkness completed our blind sleep.

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Mornings 1. Like you, the womb of the night also shuts down. The stars, God’s embryos, fade as if in a silent transmigration to another world. 2. In a dream we peeled stars like potatoes. With the infinite gaze of the stuffed fox on the wall we woke up like survivors of a disaster. 3. From bed I heard the bread oven sound a dark tone. The scent of autumn is like the odor of fresh paint. The tree, its sadness cast over the yard, stirs with little help from the wind. Here the occasional sun doesn’t raise its voice to the world. 4. To your surprising body I sailed with waking hands. Quietly we whispered from our shadows, they sighed with us like the mass of trees in the wind.

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The door opened like a generous smile. Feverish I walked out. Smoke followed me. Light and air carried snow flakes to my face and the day glowed from afar. 5. From my window a cow seemed like a dark bleating stain approaching the house. Dusk smoke still rises from the chimney. Above the house a half-charcoaled cloud ripens. The landscape drips perpetual ash. 6. In this light my hair grew gray. The trees in the yard are clad in white robes. In the forest snow drops from trees and the forest’s clearing lies on its back, patiently waiting for its green skin. 7. The mornings too are tired of fog weary of rain. The poet Sarah came to visit, wearing on her finger the Heide river. I opened the window, my eyes touched the river. 8. Clouds shaped like Holstein cows squat in the sky. Boys on a tractor scatter bundles of hay.

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I’m still listening to the wind’s snores in the dim route of my dreams’ flight— in and out of bed— I’m brimming with domestic hours. .

The Music of the Cosmos The winter outlasted the priest. The janitor found him in church hanging like a fish behind the altar. His wife told that on his last night he dreamt how in the middle of the sermon on John the Baptist his skull split open and strips of sky emerged with demons that looked like swine. To the sound of an organ his figure swiftly changed and wings sprang from his back. And when Rudolf the priest flew out of the church he saw the red Hydra with her seven heads and ten horns, and on her back, stark naked, rides the great whore of Babylon, already drunk with the blood of saints, whipping her whip of snakes across Hydra’s mane, calling out to Rudolf to come join her to redemption, to the second coming of father Jesus. The priest heard an abysmal harmony calling to him perhaps the music of the spheres sounded in his ears which he followed up from the earth to the stars. At our last meeting he spoke a lot about the sound of time sheer as air and flowing like water, about Pythagoras and Kepler und die Musik der Kosmos.

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A Recurring Memory In a night wailing winter, a strain of violins. With all the leisure on my hands I move an old chest to the other end of the room. Now the music heard is just the motion of articles in the chest and the scraping bass of shifting. The windowpanes, too, beat the echo of old sounds from my youth, from a different country, now moving like objects.

Fence For a long winter I watched the fence around the house. A long winter was registered in this fence that changed looks and shades suffered frost-bite was covered with snow and remained standing. The ashtray on the window sill choked again and again with cigarette butts. The winter grew rusty with first lights of spring. Green pervaded the eye of the fence. Worms emerged from the wooden eyelets to the sun and a bird alighted on its perch. I logged the bird, too.

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Photograph From the dark room in my brain— a sound. Someone in there develops a negative of my very hidden thoughts. The acid trickles out through the key hole. In the wet photograph I can see a man thinking a poem about his bitter life. He looks exactly like me, meets me as a muse on a dark street, invites himself into my home, settles in my darkness. I awake to leave him all my negative assets, binding myself to his fate. Yet, before I have time to escape, someone suddenly pounds on the front door.

A Different Sensation Poetry will steer me to another recollection a different sensation: years later your image suddenly before me like a luminous landscape of yourself rising from the commotion of the street. In the unvanquished light of the sun we met like two birds from a different summer.

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You looked up and saw your son with the face of a heathen the eyes of other gods. “What can I do, son, to bring you back?” For a moment the sun became the warmth of the womb and the face that wore pain and drew me in was my face before I was born. All at once the world was different. I knew what I had to know, I recalled all the possible worlds. And so we stood in the street crowded by sensation contemplating our time unhurriedly. A dog set his gaze on us, growling an impasse: To bark or go past— and the day was still imagined and the light held her warm palm in my hand writing this poem.

Odors 1. She waits for me. She sits facing me, looking at me with big eyes, sad as a Jew’s and the forbearance of twilight. She waits. Odors from the kitchen come and fill the room, her nose and mine. Yet she still waits. I am the one who controls her needs. 2. Is it patience or boldness? When she sits 106

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there, still waiting to get me out to the nearby field, in the dark air laden with scents of hay and dung. 3. Grasses sniff her all around and a smiling breeze pleasantly wags with its nose that carries the odors of the village. I stand and my thoughts travel and she runs runs runs to her green universe of cascading odors. A tree stands alert to a rustle. The breeze, too, stops here for a moment, breathless. A clean serenity vaults like a cat’s back at a moment of danger. I smoke. She pees. I whistle to her and she comes painting delight with the wag of her tail her ears wild with the copious listening to all that’s tiny and still.

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HEDVA HARECHAVI

(b. 1941)

Hedva Harechavi was born in kibbutz Degania Bet and lives in Jerusalem. An artist and a poet, she graduated from Bezal’el Art Academy in 1967 and is widely exhibited in Israel and abroad. She has published five volumes of poetry and has won numerous awards, among them the Prime Minister Award (twice) and the Levi Eshkol Award. She has participated in many international poetry festivals, and her work has been extensively anthologized, translated into Russian, German, Arabic, Macedonian, and English. The poems appearing here are from her 1985 collection I Only Want to Tell You.

Tonight I Saw Tonight I saw her fragments and the birds pulling her hair and the birds resting upon her back and the birds pacing across her face and the birds stepping on her fingertips and the birds perching on windowsills and the birds draping her voices with blood, grasses, and sand. Tonight I saw her fragments and there was nothing like her smashed to pieces.

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When She Goes Out Alone Nights when she goes out alone what does she want. To hunt lions? Drill the ground? Hear unearthly voices? Receive warning signals from the sea? What does she want. To feel human beings moment to moment? (A late-night café reminds her of thorns.) To balance water briefly in her hands? To fill the sun with strange fowl? What does she want. Gentleness has no power. That’s why she walks on tiptoe. Sometimes she commands convoys of red dogs she has painted and thinks she’s their escort. Sometimes she sits in a pink flute and thinks she’s asking for help she needs air— what does she want.

Imagine, Carving the Sky And I wanted to tell Batya this, only to Batya Batya Batya, and I’d say: “Batya Batya Batya” so that Batya, and others as well, I mean, with such ease she collects last remnants of consciousness.

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I wonder: Is this how you collect remnants? And the sky advanced on the garden, the stepladder. I ask myself how she would look were she to sit on the knees of the small window-cleaner, her head up in the sky, yes, now, too, at times, now, too, regardless of the time, now is the time to carve the sky. Imagine, carving the sky with a pencil, and I wanted to tell Batya this, only to Batya Batya Batya, and I’d say, “Batya Batya Batya” where is the calm in Batya’s eyes, dancing at the top of a skyscraper she has drafted, dancing with unconscious snails, dancing “Now, that jazz music gently steers motion” dancing “At first there was reality. Now that I have reality.” Is it she? Perhaps, yes, it is she. Perhaps. It is she, yes. Perhaps. It is she: throat, neck, shoulders, toenails, and the sky approached the corner, behind the door, clinging to the pipes near the steel sink, droning sluggishly. “A profusion of sky here,” I muse, it pleases me that columns of shrieks are meticulously grouped across the page. Also, the applause. Also that which drives the small window-cleaner. That which drives the small window-cleaner continuously. And I wanted to tell Batya this, only Batya Batya Batya and I’d say, “Batya Batya Batya” but Batya wouldn’t come.

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When the Music Subsided When the music subsided and next to me longings growled like lions and not not not

I a a a

had nothing on earth: God town where I could rise, anew, to life, child’s dream

Like Back Then When I Was Escorted The point of lucidity floats like a feather. One woman is crushed and she is still a woman removed by three centimeters only from herself. Only one eye is shut. Only one eye is drawn to the news (commentary) by Adi Raban. My heart is a drunken forest wisely locked. A night-flower listens. All that’s dear to me weeps and so the whole of creation, and the shame, the shame the shame, like back then when I was escorted, at times by silence and holiness and God God God and Elisha’s new sounds God God God and Elisha’s new sounds

Like in the Passing Year Back then she was like a binging preying beast her eyes always open

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roving after dogs straying in bushes and weeds. A somber light hummed in every room. Familiar rumors followed the rumors. A rose flooded a rose and together in the dark sang in a thousand voices. And all the voices for an instant were voices that all voices depend upon powerless and voices trickled to all corners new voices hid from familiar ones and suspect voices rang to known ones and voices from the heart were torn to pieces and the other voices wept there at the funeral among the leaves. And so all at once there was no Providence on earth no sign of Providence to be found in the skies

Like a Binging Preying Beast The light in the room grew bleak. From the corner she measured, measured precisely, the extent of her fears. A pink cloud drifted across her knee, singing. A peculiar sound of a strange weeping spread through her nerves. A gentle glimmer spills from her eyes. Commiserating mercenary angels stroke her head. For a litter of daisies, a whore plays the drum of God.

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This is the hour when even a volcano dips its head and weeps behind some weed and all the world’s wisdom resembles a grain of dust, drained and bitter, again and again the same commotion of sounds. The same whirlpool. The same blunders. Back then she was naked. She was a thousand years, she was one. She was like a crimson knife she was like the lustrous bird who lost for a while the planet earth cautiously embracing a similar bird until she became anew like a binging preying beast.

A Very Cheerful Girl As I say she was always a very cheerful girl always a little cheerful girl and summers we’d put her in the park on the ground under trees on the rug and she had a dog-leash here and a dog-leash there and the spirit of God moved upon the park and yearling lambs roamed from all parts As I say she was always a cheerful child how cheerful she was a girl with good manners who never made you worry

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a thoughtful girl, considerate, balanced, dependable. At times she would sit in a corner, eyes shut, smiling, and it was evening and morning and all things were gentle with tenderness with love just imagine, a neat innocent child playing on the ground and the entire earth sings for her as I say she was always a happy child a very special girl lively, sweet and even pretty she had a heart of gold, I mean so adaptable to change she never cried, I mean she never did that with others never broke toys (only once or twice) never muddled her speech no, it didn’t seem as if she needed me. Well, so she didn’t. (Even though I’m her mother even though she was always my little daughter.) Maybe I didn’t know her but I was always decent to her. All right, not very close, but I cared about what happens to her. This is the beginning. This is the background. These are the details. These are the facts. She was everything we expected and hoped for: a very cheerful girl.

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Go, Go Wherever You Go, But Go “You’re after a man who doesn’t exist.”—Ruth You’re after a man who doesn’t exist the man you want doesn’t exist it is so, it is so, that man doesn’t exist so what are you doing with a man who doesn’t exist I say and say and say and you repeat repeat repeat for what for whom it concerns you not me what happens to you doesn’t happen to me your dream is not mine the knowledge the knowledge you don’t understand concepts you gamble all the time who’s a dog who’s a God the changes you go through, the changes the changes, suddenly you float behind a kingdom of smiles suddenly you freeze because of some imprecision suddenly you’re weak: the earth is torn apart and no sign of life suddenly you disappear and when you understand that no— you want very much the impossible becomes a target reality sounds like a joke, an offshoot of some other joke. (I see a picture of some woman feeble flawed out of control with a child’s excessive aggression.) Your belligerence stubbornness wails and breakdowns—

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overblown, so much crumbles, God God and God again, only mercenary angels stand by your side. Only dark music could depict you. Lines of confusion powerfully sack you where where are you running barefoot in the dark how far you’ve gone beyond your limits how far you’ve over-spilled your bounds and life life and those who don’t heed your wishes. Over there all is naked broken undone and here you cry like a newborn. Go, go wherever you go, but go to someone who exists. It’s up to you, too. Up to the door. Up to all the buttons. What I’m capable of is not a model for orderly broadcast a thousand times already I’ve been telling you the same things, same things. I tell you, and tell you again, you’re after a man who doesn’t exist the man you want doesn’t exist that man doesn’t exist so what do you want with a man who doesn’t exist.

Already Night, Already Day My mother is a hooker without a dagger her corpse a body without a shield. A dead power. When she deceived me the first time I went numb. Voices laughed. A deadly smoke spread like a sea of rust

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across my forehead, my eyes, my neck, around my hands and feet. Every sliver of thought capable of knowing froze and wept froze and wept. (At times, when I’d smile like an automaton, a shape resembling me would soar and crawl soar and crawl but there was a lawn and a mountain in the lawn and a garden in the mountain and darkness in the garden and blood in the darkness and a white boat going berserk in the blood a boat I drew to please no one. At times, when I was finished off at once like some old bitch.) Now, each of my gestures is fully transmitted now, each sound I utter is reported now, I am absent, watching black stray cats I hear between my fingers. My dead power, mother, mother, mother, I spit on common sense I no longer care about your filthy death in the damp hole. One thing matters to me: your eyes, with which red did you paint your eyes. People ask about you. I have to hurl a word or two. It is evening already, night, day, noon already, I want wings, wings I want wings and to fly

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For Ruth And each beast had a white garden of its own and each beast had a sun radiant at night and each beast had islands of gold in a sea of miracles and a blood-oozing music quietly gathered among the leaves And all the beasts growled as drunks dancing, singing, cheering seeing what they saw stirring what they stirred and a blood-oozing music quietly gathered among the leaves And only one beast was devoured by longing, and all night gods and angels spit at her and spit and a blood-oozing music quietly gathered among the leaves

Here Everything Here everything is unclear doesn’t agree with anyone’s reason I’m about to burst distances kill me gradually and all I can tell you about years past

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about about about about about

longings wholeness crumbling dust and ashes sweet calm

and how a mob of saints arrived late in the evening or night or morning but as soon as they touched the ground I saw remarkable voices gathering in the sky and sights of bliss came to me lay on my knees slept in my lap and I had great perceptive powers powers I never knew before I didn’t wish to speak in the tongue of cruel cravings but I spoke and spoke and spoke only your irrational desire to relieve me of too many imperfections will expire when you see these things coming to pass

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NURIT ZARHI

(b. 1941)

Nurit Zarhi was born in Jerusalem and lives in Tel Aviv. She studied literature and philosophy at the University of Tel Aviv and has worked as a journalist and a literary critic. A poet, she also is one of Israel’s best-known authors of children’s books, several of which have appeared in translation in Europe and India. She has published eight volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, and a collection of essays. She has received every major Israeli award, including the Prime Minister Award and the Bialik Award. The poems appearing here are from her collections The Fish (1987), Village of Spirits (1994), and Hypnodrom Hotel (1998).

* For they are at the center of my life two girls a man a woman Why should I be afraid each thing has only four corners Full of intents I smile almost proffer flowers plan to sweep the accumulating dust But she knows everything about me and so screeches with the sound of shifting beds

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Beyond the wall the girls in drooping socks are smooth butterflies light as if happy And grandma-crow divines in the thicket of the pine from generation to generation to generation

* The rain reveals the hidden names of leaves my heart warm as if washed in blood a new season love cruising in our tiny heart as if in an ocean never touching If it were up to me first thing I’d give up on longing as on sickness but then I become even sicker all I can do is depart from myself through a ring of fire, forcibly awake from dream into dream And when this happens instantly I recall the hidden name of my heart as if it were an orphan. No, even this is too revealing, I’d have to name it a civilian in a long raincoat when in fact its cauterized name is a mad child no one would want in my place with the self-respect of a wet bird in a land where all must appear strong and beautiful More than anything I want to heed the true tablet of its commandments but what can I do it wants me to expose myself to all show what’s lacking clearly it drags me to destruction

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and I put it to sleep: Sleep sleep witless heart, all or at once you may achieve in death only

* Forgive my outburst, Sir, I think I was shot. I leaned, mistakenly, on love. But who cares for precision when they kill off presidents and children. And you suggest I don’t take it to heart. Because, as it is, they’ve knocked on my door more than once. I’m cautious since you always hit your target, I’m sure to keep my eyes wide open. Same as the pigeon who laid an egg on my window’s ledge, and the next day nothing—not even fragments. I understand why you shot me, Sir. Just another dream that won’t disturb you as you fall asleep.

Baby Blues And so, quietly, eyes shut, babies drop into the world, like rain falling in the dark from a gigantic hand into shafts, into a spider’s tent, a cold apple. Silence in the universe; the babies sleep in translucent beehives. Strange to the morning, eyes bluish with darkness, they grope with smooth fingers,

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warm-lipped to guzzle time. A moment and another they stretch and yawn, with appled arms, sugared teeth, they bathe in milk. In love. In fine sand. But who weeps in the universe, what do I hear, bitter wails, shriller than a dog’s whine, a seagull’s cry. Below the highways sobs are heard; no one will ever get to sleep. A chorus sings in the street. Babies, come and eat the nourishing meal. And the babies emerge from all the drawers, riding a cow’s neck, a crane, a crate in the river. But the wails continue, seeping like water under shut doors. This is the baby, where is it buried. Where did I put it, where did I forget the baby without water or air. Come to the table, the food is getting cold. But how to swallow with the voice in the throat. Open, open, tree trunks, rusty tin cans, graves that have never been plundered. Listen, where is it buried, where did I put it, where did I forget the baby without water or air. Silence in the universe. You no longer know why, or who. Me me, a voice is heard from the stone. This is the baby, like the filmy spine of a leaf. Lean over and look, let it drink, eat if anything’s left—

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The Marked Ship They’ve plucked the feathers off the goose then stuck them back on— now let it fly. And it flies, to impossible heights, to the non-existent continent, a land existing only because I couldn’t leave it. Who was it that fed us the first slice from the empty palm, the one we cleaved to as if to water. No wonder the bounds of our body drift more so than fog. And upon them I mount the foggy face of your love. I’m searching, what am I searching for the bounds of body drifting toward the right season. The stork with its beak, crimson as an anemone of fear, crosses the line of heights and the eye dispels it into cloudy stripes. Wave after wave fear descends. Is it possible to live this long with no respite from time? Summer and winter and again summer and winter without the appearance of the face with the speaking body with the mouth that decrees the body’s theme. Quiet, no doubts allowed here. These belong to the morning, like the music that sets the north on the gnawed heart and continues to feed on it. Once upon a time we were kids but of course it is all a lie.

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Convincing Herself She’s a Picture Convincing herself she’s a picture she endeavors to eat with her mouth shut and with an eye that sweeps a bluish landscape behind her she traces its movements. Look, here is Venice, exposed in its bluish, moth-eaten light. No, it’s Berlin, with its toothy roofs, exposing the mouth of madness. It’s enough that he turns his head toward her and so turns into a cloud. To her surprise, the picture keeps being drawn behind his back, it even multiplies. She adopts the demeanor of the onlooker, she must simulate the manner of his withdrawal. From the core of her strength branches swerve into the eye the sound of the sea swells. This is how she seizes the missing dimension. Behind the landscape behind the eye towers shift, the forest crosses the face. Here one can no longer shout: Stop. Here, consistently, one can lose it all. Therefore she lets her eyes fall, like glass balls at the foot of the picture, in whose windows the snow has been piling and the telephone keeps ringing and no one picks up.

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Nights22 1. As I sit before you, and matter and non-matter flit in a muddle above my head, and the body, like a spent jelly-fish, spills onto poles joined together in nobody’s heart, how can I concede that we all must enter and exit through shut doors, that, unfortunately, you can’t replace the story, you must replace the life. Above the broken land letters float like day-angels on their wings, jostle me to walk around the abyss, which remains torn from the jaw of my home. Like that dear monkey in the store, pissing a sparkling shower, never losing the mastery to aim. 2. Turn me into shadow, you, with the horse’s blinders over the eyes, and I’ll wait for you with the clammy fingers of moss, and when the listener will question what is and what is not, and whether the is is but a lie the dead tells himself, what will I say having lost already the lips of substance? That a large hand has tried more than once to weed me out, and that despite the spray of nectar across my lids, each hour of the night requires a slight push on my part to let it pass? That darkness sweeps my rooms from the street, from the antennae-skewered roofs, drowning in the golden familial scene? It is clear that from every direction the opposite direction is a dream, that we are responsible for our dreams as for our children’s names 22. Part of a sequence of nine nights.

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and for the bitter knowledge that only love can sweeten you to yourself. 3. Like winter gazelles emerging from the forest to lick the salt, I train a hesitant tongue across your soul enclosed like a stone underwater. You hear, it sings, the song that stirs my thoughts, but even if I rein it to a chariot of parrots I won’t be able to tear from my mouth the taste of loss. I know already the absolute flavor of the sickness of death, that while the faint grips the ledge the mouth keeps pulling at the vocal chords. If only I could shut my tongue from knowing that it is you behind my lids, but I won’t risk growing weary. 4. Like those who polish a hollow diamond I hone the anticipation for you until the edges grow thin. My elements are sorrow and time, or longing, squatting like a toad across the heart. Naturally, I’d like to give it back to you, or seek an ear that will rid me of it through the tongue, equal myself to myself or to the level of the earth, but it seems I’d have to swallow it to give birth to it again as the alchemist does; the universe doesn’t exist, not even in the least, a phantasm, like what church-bells chisel in the air, and it is us, the deluded, who while pointing the cosmic finger against us, without knowing its exact nature, we create love. N U R IT Z A R H I

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5. If this is death, let it last forever, our voices go round in space; from there I watch my body pull downward, is it my body that withstood such peculiar deaths. Know that its memory is shorter than its aches. Even objects, their fact is more lasting. Here is the desk I picked at the fair. The one I never liked still stands in my room, final as a mountain. A multitude of cups and glasses, those that crossed with me the thresholds of matrimony. Children’s lips sealed in milk, kitchen shelves, one will always remain to follow me like a lamb, and even though this body is mine, nothing ties us together but weariness.

Lightly Lightly, like painted fish going back to the river, the wrong path I chose in the dream winds me around my neck, and round again, like a scarf, brilliant in its hues of error— as if I were not assigned a body, as if tree-leaves are not made of air. And if the girl I let sleep under my tongue should rise, my pleated past would dissolve in the air. Lightly, as if the one whose body is about to be snatched won’t let go— like that son, on account of his father’s fright, confirmed the angel in his eyes— more so than a shadow validating the visible, a gate will open, creaking, at the bottom of fear.

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Stone How deep pain breaks, as the feet simply step on the hard ground of the lane. On both sides of the street buildings and in them all the people still alive rewarded for having loved no more than being loved, no less. This is sanity—when love comes— to offer a bed, a chair, sustain and raise it like a pet (a lion—or a cockatoo). Treetops are smothered, sparrows return to their window ledge. Is true love measured by the small coin of anguish, or is it the one which adhered to the floor, the walls. In my house, the floor and walls are made of floor and walls. Only in my presence do they reveal what they can turn into a void. Except for a few plants, and half-scribbled notes, I grow only stone. Day and night it tells me: Be a floor, walls, don’t disclose more than crows in their puzzling cries. This time you’ll love intelligently, from this place, no, from that one. Lock your mouth, your head, the nerve centers. Lock the vision, the hope, be sane, be a stone.

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MEIR WIESELTIER

(b. 1941)

Meir Wieseltier was born in Moscow, arrived in Israel in 1949, and lives in Tel Aviv. He studied at Hebrew University, and in 1982 he held an International Writers Fellowship at the University of Iowa. He has published ten volumes of poetry and is the cofounder of the literary magazine Siman Kriah. In the early 1960s, he was at the center of a group known as “the Tel Aviv poets.” He translates poetry from the English, French, and Russian and has translated four of Shakespeare’s tragedies, as well as novels by Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and E. M. Foster. His work has been translated into nineteen languages, and collections of his poems have appeared in the United States and in Europe. His awards include the Elite Jubilee Literary Award, the Bialik Award, and the 2000 Israel Award for Literature. The poems appearing here are from his collections Exit to the Sea (1981), The Concise Sixties (1984), and Warehouse (1995).

A Naive Painting A world is created in the shape of a backyard in the South of Tel Aviv.23 A tired eucalyptus represents the third day, a hungry cat, the fifth.

23. A mostly impoverished area in Tel Aviv.

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The Almighty on the right in the image of an old Bucharan man in clean underwear, addressing the virgin Daughter of Israel, a Yemenite girl of fifteen with a tape-cassette on the terrace across the street. He says: Won’t you turn off the music on the day the Temple was destroyed? The Ninth of Av is a mourning day for the Jews since time immemorial. And what does Yemima say? She doesn’t say. She turns up the volume.

To Be Continued The war is the extension of the policy and South Lebanon is the extension of Upper Galilee; therefore it is only natural that a country will make war in Lebanon. Youth is the extension of childhood and South Lebanon is the extension of Upper Galilee; therefore nothing is more natural than children and boys shooting each other in Lebanon. Burial is the extension of the Rabbinate and South Lebanon is the extension of Upper Galilee; therefore the military Hevra Kadisha24 will dig fresh graves in Lebanon. The news media is the extension of prattle and South Lebanon is the extension of Upper Galilee; therefore the papers thoughtfully consider the feats of the war in Lebanon. 24. The rabbinical burial society, the only one authorized to bury Jews in Israel.

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Poetry is the opposite of talk in Lebanon and in the Upper Galilee. Therefore what is said is as if it weren’t said and we shall yet go to war in Lebanon. 4/2/78

Condolences to the memory of A.N. Later is too late later he is dead. You haven’t yet stopped to enumerate his afflictions on the fingers of one hand. Later is too late. First grimaces in his memory won’t do much good. That’s how it is, each eats from his bowl of soup. Peers at the next table, orders a meatball. In the meantime, he is dragged through the indistinct house that was his indistinct house. Time is always shorter than you thought. When you had time to think. Later the dust rises from the cemetery’s parking lot.

A Moving Electric Message At the end of Independence Day 1972 a small plane rose in the evening sky of Tel Aviv and across its belly it ran

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a moving electric message: For health and pleasure eat a lot of chicken Each meal a bliss with the delis of the coop In a small café on Dizzengoff between Nordau Boulevard and the Northern police station (still ablaze with a Menorah and a battery of lights) people sat as in a minyan and watched TV and in between one lyric and the next sipped a last sip of coffee before sleep. All is quiet in the neighborhood, last night’s great fuss is over with, all returned to their places in the expected speed: the customer to the café, the kids home, the small flags to the closet, and the worry to the heart; the two regular prostitutes to Levinsky Street and the alarm clock to six. On darkened verandas stand and weigh the night a man and a woman in pajamas, in their fifties. A couple of feet separate them yet they don’t speak or exchange a glance, as if not one tongue is spoken in the land. Oh, the great Tel Aviv, a dark city as though celebrating a strange holiday of people’s droning gibberish: Oh television, Oh buses, Oh cabs, Oh Jews.

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Only in Hebrew Only in Hebrew beautiful rhymes with coffee, a doctor with a baker, and so poetry will break down on mats, facing the sun, becoming a myriad of trembling pumpkin seeds. Poetry will turn white on flat roofs, will wane in the soft breeze to a faint sheen, reminiscent of human bones.

My Wisdom Hommes de l’avenir souvenez-vous de moi Je vivais à l’époque ou finissaient les rois Tour à tour ils mouraient silencieux et tristes Et trois fois courageux devenaient trismegistes25 Guillaume Apollinaire, Vendemiaire (Alcools, 1913) The whole of my wisdom contracts to the bulk of a fly on a bright window-pane, what were mountains and vales are but a scratch on glass. A lion roared? The grazing herds probably heard but didn’t bolt away, just stamped their feet and dropped their gaze to the shell of parched earth.

25. Men of the future please remember me I lived in an age when kings were done with One by one they died off sad and silent So brave they became necromancers

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To the sound of the shofar one limping goat goes back to the pen. I don’t see visions, only clothespins. The bang I hear is the sound of a drop of water on tin. And a mousey voice squeals: Go, prophesy, hurl yourself over the cliff and continue walking.

Cheese We live in a difficult time when it’s hard to write about the basics like a kiss or eating cheese. Not that it was ever easy, and really they are so few, so rare in fact, in every generation if you blow off the dust, the pages that aren’t clutched in the bony fingers of theology, ideology, or even the wild desire for eternal life, for the afterlife of spirit or page yes, that’s the poet’s wooden leg, the seasoned hope that the elusive paper will bury the bronze. And the cheese buries nothing, the small cheese, soft, a most fitting noun to illustrate the adjective spoiled. Not to mention the kiss, that even to seal it in a square or in a triangle of being, as with cheese,

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you can only presume, so absolutely it is fused with the motion that preceded it, with the gesture that came after, with the slackening of the bodies. It has no ego, even its shape is intimated only in the gymnastics of neck and torso, the cranes of the kiss, and yet it explodes the groin, while the real kiss is depicted in the fervent hidden furor taking place in a thousand blood vessels in the body. Therefore poets forsook the cities and fled and the Philistines came and dwelt in them.26

The Bible in Pictures II But one day a great Bible sailed in my dream as a black ship turning every which way as if directionless in mid-ocean. I approached it, saw passengers and sailors cast about as if they had fallen asleep where they stood, tumbled in surprising positions, frozen in a dancer’s bow. When I advanced even closer, I saw they weren’t stirring, only roaches still moved across their faces, in the folds of their clothes,

26. Alludes to I Samuel 31, 7.

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those same roaches that seemed to me like columns of live letters. The sea, as if dozing with them, looked like a muddy puddle almost yellow, the blue drained and faded. The dome of the sky blazed above in a white-hot gray, but it wasn’t hotter than usual and I saw a quiver upon the water little fishes darting to and fro.

Burning Holy Books Holy books, my friend said in anger, there’s no such thing. Books, books: let them discuss books with us. The night was hot. At noon the light strips the room, and things are clear: across the holy we’ll affix a sheer grid: from here we’ll inspect it closely; we’ll observe a fissured holy beyond the grate: iron or mathematical lust. And so, will it seem less holy? Evening descends. It will be a mistake, all our own. But the grid must be placed. Courageously, cautiously. It’s night already, time to preserve the piece of holy junk.

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The 19th Century: Nohant, June ’76 She coiled with pain terrible pain as if a monstrous corkscrew were deep in her intestines. Her eyes, dark, beautiful, warm as roasted chestnuts, opened for moments and read in the eyes of the specialist doctor the inevitable inscription: George Sand 1804–1876 (Just don’t let them pee their pants or call the priest.) Later she glanced at a letter from Flaubert. The incorrigible fool, again he’s involved in a ludicrous attempt to salvage the failing business of Commanville, the ne’er-do-well husband of Caroline. Ah, the gloomy familial perversion of the great solitaire. And despite it all, he’s also writing a new story (“in which you will note your direct influence”) a story of a simple heart. She knew she could never sit again at the table, whet the nib, incline, rouse his phlegmatic heart with an ink infusion, thank him for the gesture, caress his amiable, noble silliness. She turned onto her side with great pain, reached for the nightstand—she still has the strength to tell him a few words on the telephone. But then the pain returned with renewed intensity: she remembered: this medium hadn’t been made available yet.

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The Lost Uncles And the last shot of the quart bottle you downed without me. The embroidered tablecloth began to crumble, the aunt’s face turned yellow, she is fading. Only the empty bottle is crystalline as new. Grandpa’s phylacteries were given to some other old man. Even your voices I’ve forgotten. I remember dark eyebrows, almost a stare. In a dream I was commanded to bear seventy sons to be whipped like dogs.

The Fowl of the Air The paper dinghy was tossed into the puddle and the lake filled with birds. The bird plucked her unnecessary wings, tore her beak and licked the blood of the open wound, new lips. At last, she said, I’ve arrived. The odor of scorched grass, remnants of thorns, a baked earth, the faint trickle of water in body temperature. The dull glow in the haze is the sun, said the bird. I’ll get to work, we must build a city and a tower, its head in mid-air.

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The Flower of Anarchy The anarchic flower gave off a wonderful fragrance, it gleamed in my youth from bios and books and with a handmade lighter with the hazards of hope I offered it to you and the world. The world bit my hand, but we kissed. The flower rose from the blood and death machine beautiful and right like a daydream, it resembled you, and you got prettier every day. When it feigned immortality, you shook with fear and laughter. I held you, but didn’t sleep nights, our fragrant privation didn’t last, its necessary wilting grew like an embryo and the great anarchic wind blew the roof of what you thought would shelter our love. The world smiled, why not, and we didn’t even cry. The gardens we crossed gave wild fruits parakeets in the branches repeated all our promises the gaping wounds smiled at us like flowers and already all we wanted was white rest on a bare mountain. You looked back I turned into a snowman. The flower of anarchy still blows in the summer wind leaning bodies reek of sprightly recollections and dreams sneak at night with a whisper to sweeten the trying awakening in the built city.

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There’s no snow in our parts and we’re still smiling.

Not a Poem Not a poem a stone I fling in the face of a young breathing soldier not yet nineteen. But instead of shouting, You jerk, we’ll screw your sister, I’ll whisper to the porous stone, to the stone in its flight, Think, kid, think.

A Childish Farewell Song to a Prime Minister Conceited and shortsighted people have restored, the devil knows when, the term stature. There’s no justice in language. A man’s stature is a pre-determined given outside his control, a result of genetics and nutrition at a young age. So what can he do, waddle on stilts? After all he is not a clown. From now on, any tall columnist, any graffiti scribbler at night will have their fun at his expense. And he, on the heights of a chair above the people, sits like a child-king, his feet in golden slippers, small feet of pride that won’t touch the ground. And what will he strike their faces with? With what? He’ll stand up on the sturdy footrest, the short word, No, and will stomp, stomp, stomp on our faces.

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The Wheel of the Century If we compared this century to a Ferris wheel visible with the naked eye even from other planets (microscopic particles spinning off it into space) it would seem from up there just a small spark in a chain of lights quivering in the darkness of the universe, and one wouldn’t see how it pivots bit by bit on its axis. But we, don’t we, know it from up-close from the front the back from under and above and our inner selves. From the pure cool clouds that roll past to the galloping virus in the hot blood, we, from where we stand or lie, may compare this century to a giant torture wheel that from afar only seems to vibrate on its axis, but in truth its slow rotation accrues a slow and terrible speed, and the number of the tortured handcuffed to it (no one bothers or manages to sort out the keys, the millions of keys that have long rusted or cast into the sea) swells from decade to decade, and only death prunes it incessantly, for the dead are no longer tortured, and still it keeps growing. But numbers are such an abstraction, they puncture the eye and remain translucent, while the tortured man, camouflaged in a cloud of brilliant confetti, or wrapped in bright-orange conceptual fabrics, is one and only, intimate with his private tortures and nothing more.

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RUTH BLUMERT

(b. 1943)

Ruth Blumert was born in Israel and lives in Jerusalem. She holds a BA in microbiology and biochemistry from Bar-Ilan University and an MA in Hebrew literature from the Theological Seminary in New York. She has published three volumes of poetry, two children’s books, two novellas, and a translation of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Her awards include the Prime Minister Award and the Jerusalem Literature Award. The poems appearing here are from her collections Exiles on a Strange Planet (1991) and Acquaintance from Another Age (1996).

Antiques The bulldozer turned up a gleaming marble hand— it is easy to see that its cutoff extension is striking. My tearing eyes shut tightly and under my lids shards spun into one and became me. Sounds and past tunes are audible in spite of incoherence and arbitrary cutting as in an erased tape— something happened in me. Back then I didn’t understand the scratches no longer hurt much up until the scream and the rip. Until silence prevails

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The Combination The combination to the safe in my head forgotten I try it like one who dials a number tens maybe hundreds of times and the number is not listed anywhere perhaps listed but not in the book at hand the dial tone always familiar and the voice always a surprise that’s how I meet myself The inner voice like from the other end of an especially long cord responds and when it’s hostile and disconnects the fingers freeze and the safe like a cemented corpse sunk in the Hudson

In Time In time, when the sign is given, you will find that you alone were chosen to see and understand what it is then you will flee from the ark to an olive branch that will break under the weight of your burden and your pain and with compassion you will carry it to the four corners of the earth or you will jump from the ship demand that they hurl you overboard to save sailors No painting will contain the terror

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the fluttering in the cold belly of the fish and the before and the after Sons of prophets, pimps of signs will crash their plane on the isles of Utopia and from submarines will shell the cliffs of Ararat

Entropy The wind that blew in our region finally pushed us out to sea. The howls frightened the jetties ports and dams collapsed the sea overflowed somewhat and a wind blew no less frantic and vaporized the seawater with our tears. The salt sank in the desert the water moistened the earth and the fish and sponge enjoyed the calcified deposits of our bones. We’ve given back unto nature and only our spirit moved upon the face of the water27 swirling and whirling like a virtual mushroom of horror

Chances I could have cut the veins in my wrist with a knife. A razor blade. If I were in the kitchen in the bathroom anywhere. But I’m hanging standing 27. Alludes to Gen. 1, 2.

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standing unable to move not even to hold something as simple as a knife. So I’ll write another book of poems someone will read it will say something the weather will change my children will grow and bear their own I’ll have grandchildren. Fine.

Breaks During the breaks between burning and burning in hell I accumulate mileage in space there’s no denying it is dark and frigid One day when my heart will be weary of transitions that stir cold fire in scalding ice I’ll knock on the diaphanous gate

The Departure from the Garden of Eden The departure from the Garden of Eden was swifter than the departure from Egypt. For instance, even matzos and bitter herbs they couldn’t take the fig leaves just an additional excuse for expulsion: a protected plant. There was no manna. There were no quails. Sleep on the bare ground. Cain an escaped convict and Abel in a safe place

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underground. The sun has gone down already but the snake keeps whispering even though it doesn’t stand a chance. From a crumbling altar we ate Cain’s sacrifice. The memories of pain the pain of memories. The Garden of Eden forgotten as if faded on a map. After many years, Eve is hollering. Seth is born to lay his hand over our eyes.

Jerusalem, Bus #18, 1986 Somewhat warm in the bus, an overcast day. Sporadically, an insolent wind swirls through a window, flees through another, laden with breaths of passengers wrapped onto themselves, perhaps overly so. My eyes are on the driver, an unpleasant memory, definitely. It’s good that I’ve decided not to tell him that between two holes in my new punch card an open number disturbs my peace. One travels on another bus, in a different direction, not to one’s house, to a different place, and the sights within are edged with those from without, the people foreign, as if from another city, not one among them familiar from the habitual regular route, and one must give in, without leaving the shell, and let the eye accompany the new human. We travel a while. On a bench in the market, a man clad in black sits, his face willfully turned to the wall of a nearby building; perhaps a practice of many years. And a harried woman with shabby bags, her head covered. He noticed, he didn’t, it no longer matters. He is

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looking at the wall. Somewhat tattered pants, a white beard, his eyes already dim. Some are looking at a screen, two-dimensional pictures cavort before them and they absorb and adjust absentmindedly to the proffered flatness. A practice of many years. Through the windowpane of the bus I observe. Real people, three-dimensional or more, warm, clumsy, wrapped, gloomy on an overcast day, and the driver, wide-backed, folded red earlobes, coiled like ear-caps, quite a repulsive face. Disagreeable to my taste. I recall. Once, years ago, when he stopped at a bus stop out of town, he admonished me with overt rage. I hurried down the steps and fell on my face and then everything went blank. I knew I’m being watched, that my clothes are sullied in the mud, that I’m hurt and someone said, Get up, I’ll help you. I don’t want to, I whispered. Don’t want to? Don’t want to, I repeated to myself, licking dust, burrowing. It’s your fault, we saw it, says the voice to the driver, watching from the height of his chair. Apologize. Don’t bug me, here’s the number, you can complain. The bus left, people walked away, only the obstinate one remained until I stood up to limp. That’s the driver. A mist of sadness like steam. A sensation. Again a stop. A small group mounts. The driver upbraids a boy: Your punch card, but the boy is jostled into the bus. Someone says, He’s deaf, he’ll soon come back to pay. The boy returns, red-faced, flushed, slanted eyes, a bit shabby, hands the card to the driver who mutters something with unexpected kindness. On the seat across from me sits the flushed boy, his face on fire, and his red slanted eyes that say, I’m sick, clear up a little, pale a little. Is it the flush of he who saw the voices, the scolding, the tone of voice saying, with learned compassion, He’s deaf, and he rejects the fawning caressing voice of the driver, and through his slanted, not Chinese, slightly crossed eyes, he looks straight ahead with the stubbornness

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of a statue that has obliterated its surroundings. Like Harry S. who shot himself in the head in a rented room in Canada, weary of rented rooms, of part-time, occasional jobs, and of loneliness. We met one Saturday in a synagogue in Brooklyn. My husband perhaps suggested I invite him to Kiddush. But Harry S. looked at me and said, She is pretty, and I didn’t invite him. For this, for the way he looked, or for fear of the obvious defeat that marked his face. I didn’t know back then. The kid across is not yet defeated. A kid. His fire-red face. It is not the flush. A heavy school bag. Slanted eyes. Skinny. Who takes care of him? The breeze steals in through the window a heavy drop lands on my forehead. It’ll rain tonight, says someone from behind. Great, let it rain, replies the firm voice of a woman, it’s time.

Waves of Love Waves of love are logged in geology. They quake the earth’s crust in small squeezes that twist railways and warp plains. They’re just as harmful as other waves that bear names more scientific or exotic like tsunami but they jolt people and objects in the same places walls and garments. Like the membrane of the heart so the earth’s casing is an inflammable febrile membrane susceptible to clots and dissolution.

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Silent Film Talking to you is like walking on eggshells, you said, and presently you seemed to be treading the froth of broken eggs as if crushing grapes in a vat. You meant to say I’m impossible to talk to that the broken eggs won’t become omelet or wine. I was thinking about hardboiled eggs, about French omelets and other kinds of omelets you’re so fond of on Fridays and on airplanes. There are still some rituals left. I try to think about things we could discuss in a sound manner: the weather. Want to take a walk, now, go out. It’s chilly. Take a sweater. Last time you caught a cold you gave it to me. A dialogue is a conscious crashing on a cement runway the words are spit and are scattered. The artists of silent films you loved know when to exit, enter, how to act. They disregard the captions which interrupt in between the segments or at their conclusion, oblivious to the band playing in the hall, to the whispers and whistles, to the spitting and chewing, to the stomping of feet, to the shouts of bravo! And their faces project an innocence, even on a screen in a remote cinema hall.

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great if only someone had lent a sensible ear. In the meantime we all tread the same similes like a prisoner on an outing whom an eye observes through a glass lens machine guns pointed at his feet his body his head convincing him that as always all is preordained and freedom of choice a given. So go and get tangled with philosophical / ethical / other meanings and be bitter and when you mend a sock the sock won’t cry out with each stab of the needle, grateful for any kind of care. Only the pricked finger concocts a dramatic story with a happy ending where the aberrant villain is punished and fades but the owner of the finger dies and her daughter, in a glass coffer, is surrounded with dwarfs true, friendly, and the prince who emerges from the heart of the forest isn’t he a hunter, an adventurer? Yes, he removed one deadly apple and went back to his castle with the grateful booty, the fair prisoner, their lives a sealed book perhaps even to them. Don’t be upset if I don’t write you, it is an illusion that the universe responds. You’ve touched my heart like a poisonous but a stimulating apple. For a moment you’ve touched my heart the others— masters of theirs.

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Bitterness and the world’s redemption are a destructive pair, enough to open eyes and illuminate. The worlds will see to their own.

Additional Dimensions Now that theory has split from physical reality and truth no longer sprouts from the earth I’m inclined to outrageous abstractions yet not imaginary: ten known dimensions (aside from others so far only conjectured) one in the other in a snailish spiral like the universe, like you, like me, and it’s beautiful. This beauty is painful. The impalpable intangible more than ever when an elephant stands on a turtle that rode a snake’s scales and beneath them behemoths and beneath them an abyss. Now that theory has split from reality truth is reflected everywhere.

Metamorphosis The gentle demons that followed me tormenting my breath with nettles resemble today a secretary behind a desk diggers in secret archives people who knock on doors to extort

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letters and favors administrators who set up tables at the gate of the Temple to hawk blood they had exacted from my veins dose after dose. The intellectuals and all the scholars wonder like me about my existence stroke and pull my graying hair. The demons that sought so the human essence depreciated astonishingly in a reality too meager to contain the myriad of subtleties once possessed by the gentle demons who kept watch over me.

Morning Brown deposits in the coffee cup everybody out of the house. Through the window the grinding of traffic on the road. In the shifting breezes thoughts come in and leave. Quite a nice day and I quite exhausted. And still, I parallel you, God. In different proportions we both mourn.

Lost in the Alleys of the Flat Two in the morning the embryonic day stealthily intensifies

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silences the last cars on the road. Contrite, they brake, switch off headlights, people sneak into entryways, a light goes out. And again a star. A street lamp. A steamy fog. The night’s too alert the action too lit. And I, sinner, peek through the slits of the blinds, wrapped in a curtain a sheet like a lost ghost in the alleys of the flat waiting for day to be born to be hot like yesterday noisy like the soles of shoes and to drive away the chill I’ve gathered in my bones as I count cars on the road going past from here to there rushing to different homes at different addresses at two in the morning.

* Most of the time I doze. They say: It’s age, it’s winter, and I rise, planning my next nap. In the meantime, phone calls, work, people saying: The children understand. Most of the time I doze without dreams, at least not those that one remembers. I experience death in its elusiveness: the beauty of snowy havens / grassy havens

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is bewitching. Black, too, is bewitching and soothing; a vague dread of an incident that will disrupt it. Most of the time I’m alert to possibilities of crumbling and dozing with no awareness like a stone. No. Like an atom released from its unnerving currents with the aim to develop a new element. Creation. My children will endure, they have healthy genes. The book I’m writing— what will be done with it? Elijah went up to the sky in a storm but first he wished to die. And this after the Carmel, the miracles, the widow in Zarefeth. These are but fleeting states of gathering strength. I show signs of life, I even awake from my sleep. Everybody’s pleased. No matter— I’m planning my next slumber.

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YONA WALLACH

(1944–1985)

Yona Wallach was born in Kfar Ono, a suburb of Tel Aviv. A high school dropout, she studied art at the Avni Institute of Art and published her first poems in 1964. Later she became active in the circle of “Tel Aviv poets” and published six volumes of poetry, as well as plays and personal columns for magazines. She won several awards, including the Prime Minister Award. A posthumous Selected Poems 1963–1985 appeared in 1992. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages, and in 1997 a selection of her poems was published in the United States. Over the years, she has become an icon of the feminist movement in Israel and has been acknowledged and recognized for her bold and revolutionary contribution to contemporary Hebrew poetry. The poems appearing here are from her 1985 collection Appearance.

All the Trees All the Trees have ribbons in their hair and all the trees are somewhat broad and all the trees are quite feminine and all the trees are not tall

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they’re rather short and all the trees are pallid and all the trees wear pale pink bows butterfly bows in the hair of leaves and all the trees smile feebly all the trees finish feebly what they’ve begun not long ago and all the trees are not sturdy and all the trees are not naked and all the trees wear frills somewhat pink feeble as well and all the trees are not strong and all the trees finish not forcefully not mightily how come not mightily

House Said the House House said the house tree said the tree landscape said the landscape man said the man God said God what said the what meaning to said the meaning to

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seeing said the seeing talking said the talking I said the I you said the you love said the love What did the house say to the tree what did the tree say to the bird what did the landscape say to the man what did the man say to God what did God say to love what did love say to the roads what did the roads say to talking what did talking say to the I what did the I say to the you what did the you say to the landscape what did the landscape say

Come to Me Like a Capitalist Come to me like a capitalist I’ll be your laborer I’ll work so hard you’ll have no mercy you won’t pay me you’ll take everything from me plunge me into debt I won’t see the end of I’m a serf you a squire you’ll pay me with goods and take them from me with plots of land you’ll allow me to give back what land mental an expansive wilderness

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I won’t make bloom all will be yours I’ll have no spirit left no living space personality leave me some personality some so I’d feel bad I’d know don’t be egalitarian not my buddy not a communist as it isn’t written anywhere as though it never was

Tuvia The earth murmurs Tuvia the earth draws near to observe you from up close Tuvia how do you look Tuvia the earth murmurs the earth draws near Tuvia the earth whispers I have something to show you Tuvia oh oh Tuvia ohohoh Let’s count leaves together let’s count the stars the clouds let’s count components Tuvia

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the earth whispers let me just come close Tuvia The earth draws near flee it’s not so bad what’s happened flee it’s not so bad let’s count components fluttering leaves let’s count leaves together let’s count how much there is in everything let’s count the grains how many there are in every clod Tuvia the earth draws near to observe you from up close Tuvia the earth is a grave look at her through the eyes of a gravedigger the earth is ash look at her through the eyes of oxygen Tuvia the earth is home Tuvia the earth is nowhere Let’s count the people together let’s disturb their sleep Tuvia Tuvia let’s count the hairs let’s count the roads let’s count the places let’s count houses the houses

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Tuvia let’s shatter walls together let’s count the fragments let’s watch the people each on their own outside the houses Tuvia let’s count the crumbs the emotional fragments let’s count the women apart the men apart what’s left in the middle is held held held held dazzled the earth opens a gaping mouth such a big mouth round filled with sand to eat what eat you dead or alive

Sleep with Me Like a Journalist Sleep with me like a journalist notice what’s not don’t notice what is probe my life pick at scabs lay bare wounds that won’t heal hurt me you’re the sadist

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I the masochist bring up painful memories ask how it was the first time remind me of my shortcomings so I won’t feel like doing it won’t get it up make an impotent of me and then ask me small questions as they do at welfare at customs the important issues turn instantly to gossip don’t let my heart my intellect cross over leave me drained of knowledge hurting with no understanding no love utterly alone outside hear what I haven’t said don’t hear what I have said leave me totally gossiped out without a world without friends no inclusion no objectivity gouge my eyes in group sex it will help matters the big questions leave to the press they’ll solve them for you will solve for you the world’s riddle. Men will solve the world for you not you yourself yourself a woman. Lesbian love song number 1a what else is there if not a love song.

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Come to Me Like a Jew Come to me like a Jew no manual labor no joy of productivity be intellectual allow no inspiration quote a lot for you have no deeds quote a painting for you won’t paint quote a story for you won’t tell yours you will forsake for memory’s sake greater than your life hate yourself well ape me be me become me any borrowed identity but yourself you’ll never be you so I won’t have something to hold on to hate your country detest all poets don’t forget to hate each one and me as well if I’m still around hate women with a devotion you lack in life always come before I do so I won’t come ever. And say women can’t come, or only one in a million.

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Let’s Make a Little Philosophy Let’s make a little philosophy investigate concepts what’s sensation and what is order and what is appetite and how it jibes with manners let’s make a little order what is order where does it all begin and where will it end clear silvery dots will twinkle will rise like bubbles upward upward these are the longings so they arrive derived from silver but decisions are quickly made and habits are changed marathonically and all the philosophical questions are always there as cover-up they don’t change

All At Once Everything Seems Dear All at once everything seems dear everything was so cheap before pitiful and fading lacking luster now all is suddenly dear sparkling and alive how alive are the colors all by me all from me

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all is my situation. To you all seems mundane everybody seems interesting who are they their lives what are their lives all seems trite uninteresting but this is your situation the routine outlook the matter of routine the little interest see all is interesting you decide conclude how things seem and each objective conclusion is a field of pretense I won’t venture into of course all is overblown hyperbole the extent of interest is power and so is beauty and all that’s positive all the rest are mishaps we explain away and mend and mend and mend and mend and mend

Woman Becomes Tree Woman becomes tree here her two hands arms

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raised to the sky two branches split from her body from her trunk reposed on invisible knees she is beheld down to her knees her thighs the roots of the soil the alluring curve of her abdomen the hollow of her trunk her abundant hair long boughs branches here woman turns to an ancient trunk she is so pretty and perfect I’ve never seen her before but I knew she is the woman turned into a trunk no green leaves no mark of growth all had dried long ago the beautiful face turned wooden all is uniform did it happen at once with no gradations what can’t be transformed in the flesh happens instantly in vision and what can occurs first handiwork comes later there’s no point it is after all only perception that creates such an image I know well whom we’re talking about

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When You Come Lie with Me Come Like My Father When you come lie with me come like my father come in the dark speak with his voice which I won’t recognize I’ll crawl on all fours and talk about all that I don’t have and you’ll scold me: “Materialistic.” Let’s part at the gate say goodbye a thousand times with all the longings that exist until God will say: “Enough.” And I will let go won’t lie down not with God and not with my father I’ll want to lie with you but you won’t permit together with my father you’ll suddenly appear as one in charge of inhibitions my father will be an angel a military commander and the two of you will attempt to make something of me I’ll feel like a zero

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will do anything you’ll tell me to do. On one side you will be God and I’ll wait till later you will not have the power and I just a slob trying to be polite will cut you in two and myself too part spirit part body you’ll appear as two and I too like two seals one injured dragging a fin or two women one always limping and you one face and another barely visible.

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RAQUEL CHALFI

(D.O.B. omitted as per Chalfi’s request)

Raquel Chalfi was born in and lives in Tel Aviv. She studied at Hebrew University, Berkeley University, and the American Film Institute. She worked for Israeli radio and television as a writer, director, and producer, and she has taught film at Tel Aviv University. She has published nine volumes of poetry, and her work has been translated into English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry as well as for her work in theater, radio, and film. Her collected poems, Solar Plexus, Poems 1975–1999, appeared in 2002; in 2006, she received the Bialik Award for poetry. The poems appearing here are from her collections Free Fall (1979), Matter (1990), and Love of the Dragon (1995).

Travelling to Jerusalem on a Moon Night The window travels the clouds travel I travel the road travels the moon travels the trees travel the pane travels the moon travels the passengers travel the earth travels the mountains travel the planet travels the thoughts travel the time travels the light travels the glass travels the galaxy travels the moon travels and God eternally stands

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Hair of Night 1. To weave the locks of darkness a thick braid on the downy nape of the earth to mold with moist hands the clay of dark craving trees knitted from trembling coiled branches of allegiance and a broad meadow waiting in vain 2. Night combs its long hair like a woman sitting at her window at night 3. Night hungry runs barefoot through the streets weeds spread rumors about it 4. Night begets day what will day bring night its dreams undone breaks into the heart of a city rips a street into bands how I wish to dye the night’s hair a startling orange 5. How we wished a blaze will spread in the twigs twigs as blaze sweep the trail of excess words leave a clear polished dance floor for thick dense emotions spin into dance, into a giant ball 6. How I wished the great night’s hair would wrap around me like snakes but warm

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7. Such a truth and even the down of dusk stiffens the mind’s shutters get knocked violently a blow of darkness rescues a night whose hairs got all tangled up 8. Dreams the heart’s sweat on a night’s taut skin its hair gathered its temples damp the secretions of dreams dribble from it drip drop cool salty 9. Such an old night its chimes still clear we crawl on its belly and it welcomes us inside like a mad satyr who’s fallen asleep blissfully

The Water Queen of Jerusalem The Water Queen of Jerusalem dives into history history is hard and she grows fins she has no air and she schemes gills rowing through memory the Water Queen of Jerusalem owns a bathing suit made of Yiddish

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the Water Queen of Jerusalem wallows on a stone beach in Ladino fearing the rise of water level in Arabic the Water Queen of Jerusalem has no sea in Jerusalem she has a history Jewish and she holds holds holds her head above water

Reckless Love blues I was a little reckless he was a little reckless in a cheap café on the eve of Purim everyone around us with the face to the tv up on the wall. He broadcast to me on a high frequency. I wanted to broadcast low-low but it came out high. I was a little reckless he was a little reckless. My hair was unruly his hair was unruly my past was undone his past was marred he had a nervous tick in his hand and I chain smoked his dark face twisted in a child’s smile in my face raced electric currents we were reckless and we knew we wouldn’t come out clean. Outside people with plastic hammers banged each other over the head and we drank hot chocolate. His eyes transmitted a black madness and I bit into it as into a cake. The waitress came out of a Fellini movie and asked if we wanted Hamantaschen. He talked about epilepsy. I about paranoia. It was the eve of Purim. Two clowns showed us some tricks.

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We were like children when a large ship blares and leaves them behind. Later, in the park, Your skin is like velvet. Later, in the park, Go home, or your wife will cuss you out. Later later later I was pure and beautiful. It was Purim in the street. The air was scented with early spring. I put lipstick on my nose and matches in my ears. A red-nosed clown wept his childhood with him. He was damaged I was damaged he traveled in me in sea and land but he was reckless and I was reckless he spoke of seizure I of conclusion. He called for help I called for help. He spoke of silence and I agreed with all. What a thing it was a great madness. We were like children when a large ship blares and leaves them far behind in the sand

I Drew My End Near I drew my end near and it came near a couple of cats sat in the tree like calm fruit I called it to me and it lingered on the street corner one cat leaped and sat on my shoulder I stroked the animal but my hand hurried to stroke the blood that strolled in my end. My end is soft, I know, and patient, I wanted so to rub against it be warm at its side like an old woman next to her old man

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Sitting in the Wall The wall has a mouse the mouse has ears the wall has ears Gavriela has a heart the heart has a crack soon we will patch it up for her The mouse in the wall sits and weeps recalling its youth you toss it some cheese but it nibbles bitter nostalgia Now the three of us sit like she-mouse and mouse and one despondent she-mouse sitting in the wall and the wall doesn’t know what’s going on in our three hearts

Monologue of the Witch Impregnated by the Devil I can hold in my belly all the heavenly angels all the small demons in hell. I have enough warmth to wrap the world in a down cover. In it drill for me dens of love. Let them not tell me I’ll give birth to a monster. All the bells of the depth ring madly in the depths of my womb. When a man sleeps with me God sleeps with me. My love knows me until he loses himself to the bottom of a last fall. For him I am a vortex that doesn’t stop ripples ripples in the universe I’ll spray chills over ancient continents I’ll stiffen with pleasure the sea’s soft down I’ll breed lizards with so much love

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I’ll sweep the earth with searing flames if not with pink babies. I’ll unruffle the eiderdown of my love feathers feathers into the sky. I’ll refute gravity. Split open my belly as you did the wolf ’s. Put stones in my belly! But first let me devour everything with so much hunger so much hunger

And the Whiteness Grew Stark He went. And I went and a growing white distance went and opened and the whiteness went stark went and stretched I could have called after him he could have called after me but his name went and grounded itself at the tip of my tongue. He went. Or maybe I did. And a space a large quiet space went and spread out between us growing more and more comfortable like a tired wanderer in a white bed. I went and he went and air pallid air and guileless went and spread between us with the speed of light light growing and spreading. He could have called me. Yes he could have

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but the word that was the thread to which I was joined fell from his fingers and the thread went and wandered becoming entangled. I went he went. The air between us multiplied like the plague. He went. I went more and more it was hard to feel the fingertips the tip of the tongue the tip of the thread was impossible to find in the knot that went and grew terrible went and grew dark like a mountain where a myriad of shadowy satyrs lie faint after an orgy. He went. Now there isn’t even a dot on the horizon. And only the empty air goes and grows heavy goes and shuts.

Elegy for a Friend Who Lost Her Mind You were a field of breaking poppies under the weight of the tar of madness I watched you go mad under its weight— a glossy insect under an exacting creature in the dark I watched the warm creature pervade your body I watched you get crushed inside and out the muscles of your face trying to escape the truth you know about yourself you’re suddenly mad suddenly and there’s no escape I watched your body freeze not in the hot tar of madness frozen in the basalt of the sane cold fear

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and in your heart the blazing heart of lava in the black heart of frozen basalt A girl that wishes to be good even in the face of the terrible dybbuk clinging to her flesh my friend my body is crushed in your anguish my heart consumed in your Jobian hurt and the sights the sights haunt me mad

A Concealed Passenger Find myself in Café Marsand humming like these old ladies seated round tiny tables licking cream-puffs with care with trembling hands smearing blazing red on collapsed lips Find myself sipping whipped coffee with an eager mouth dispatching the last of my senses to grip the pleasure before I drown before I drown Find myself in the large mirror opposite concealing in my haughty body a very old anxious lady her heart beating beating bent in fear a concealed passenger

Blues in a Jar Now it’s better now the troubles in a jar with a twist-on cap.

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Now it’s better the shadows don’t leap the abyss buttoned up the mouth shut the fist tight the air tart but all is held with a cement clip all is utterly safe you can see the horrors twitch inside the round glass beneath the screwed-on cap— such comfort. You may sprawl on your back inside the large jar and observe with interest the small jar and neither the one nor the other will open. Now it’s better. Now everything is in a jar with a twist-on cap.

German Boot Jerusalem, the holy city, is cold in winter, / including holidays and the Sabbath. / And one Friday, in early afternoon / the clouds weren’t / red, not even golden, and the rain didn’t / drip like a discreet tear / but roughly probed my body all over / on Ben Yehudah Street, in the holy city of Jerusalem. / My blond hair turned black in the rain / and the rain came down on me like a blow under the belt / and my feet hurt from the cold / like from a terrible heartache. Now the question is asked / How does it happen / that a nice Jewish girl from a good home 178

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parades in winter / in the cradle of religion practically barefoot, / especially since take off thy shoes is not the point here, not to mention / I was always weak in Bible studies. / My dark hair clings to my forehead with a wet kiss / and the rain plays havoc with my body, / and the answer is simple and very antilyrical: / my shoe-size is forty-one. I was in Paris last summer and couldn’t find / boots my size. / I found a French lover / discreet and experienced, but not boots my size. / I was in London and drank beer but no boots / for my large feet / and also in Italy, which is a professional boot, / no boots for me. / It’s been seven years that I’ve been looking for boots, / and even in heaven I thought for sure I won’t find any. / And so, today, in Jerusalem, as the rain / raids my body, and my large summer shoes / are like small Solomon pools / in which I walk / and drown / as the hail wrecks my body, / on Ben Yehudah Street, / in the window, I see boots, / like shoes with a long neck, / brown, soft- and kind-eyed like Leah. Seven years I’ve been laboring for Rachel barefoot with no shoes / hoping for Leah whose gaze is soft and brown on my feet / already mad from pain / from servitude / to their size that knows no bounds. / Seven years already that I go crazy / for a cover for the flesh of my naked feet / such turpitude in a rough Jerusalem winter / seven years already and no boots / in all of Jerusalem and the heavens too / and here / in the window / sits a pair of boots / like two lovebirds. Oh, my soul departs and I enter / the store behind the boots. / Oh, oh, yes, the man brings out / of a frightful box a pair R AQU EL CH A L FI

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of brown boots, or / maroon, what’s the difference, as long as they hug my feet / without stifling, / as long as they don’t hang at the tip / of my toes like a proverb, / oh, hee, they mount / mount my feet, and their brown skin / climbing, climbing / up my legs, softly snuggling my ankles / kissing my knees / and stopping there. Ay, ay, ay, what boots! / Such leggings were never seen in all of Jerusalem! / I face the mirror / and they watch me from there, / pretty like a pair of brown-eyed gazelles, my long legs held in them / and they rise even further up. / What great / legs, what a delightful warmth, how / brown and warm and lovely are these boots. / Ninety pounds, says the master of the boots, and I say / No, seventy, I’m just a student not even twenty. . . . / Not possible impossible at all, absolutely not / for it is imported / and impossible absolutely out of the question / for this is extraordinary boot, / made in / Germany / ---Like a blow in the feet / and I ask:—Are you sure? Maybe made in Sweden? / No, absolutely not, he says, impossible / to mistake, it says here, “Salamander. Germany” and this / is the most best possible. / But what about Made-in-Israel?! / I pull off and wildly toss the brown boots / and what about Made-in-Israel?! / How come they don’t have my size, / I, who was made in Israel! / It is only the Germans who like comfort, he replies / in a clear German accent, / that’s why they do so big boots / for ladies. / —So you have nothing else?! I shout. / —Nothing. I stood there two hours, afraid to go out into the water / that no doubt will rape me now,

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a savage army, / and will soil my feet. / I stood there two hours / looking / intermittently at skies and boots —And what about Volkswagen? he says to me. One / all right— the other no? You can’t live like that, life is / life. / I stand in the shoestore, my feet naked / and cold, desperately craving the touch of / salamander. / And now my naked feet in the mirror / seem to me / size fifty! / Whereas before, when they were wrapped / in this overflowing beauty, they seemed / size thirty. / —With Volkswagen it’s different, but these are boots / I say to him, my heart revolting at me. / At any rate, about two hours went by, / —Quick lady, I close the store, tomorrow is the Sabbath, / so if not now— no boots! /—Maybe I’ll think it over tonight and if I decide that boots. . . . At any rate, I stood there thinking / about this brown skin. And what is salamander, if not a creature of fire and a creature of water too, / and what about lampshades, and the fine skin / of all sorts of uncles who weren’t my uncles. / I am, indeed, an amphibian creature / with a practical and flexible conscience, with no / hangups, I’m always in touch, / my name is Rita, I’m totally / uncomplicated even if sometimes I read books. / What’s important is comfort / but / salamander is a water creature, industrious and intelligent (see / Chapek’s book on the subject), that erects / walls under water, erects cities / and large dark machinery underwater, / it’s dark there, and who knows what type / of skin it is, this skin may be /

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suede of eyes, Leah’s eyes, Sara’s, Rivkah’s, / the eyes of Rachel in face of the knife / And these brown boots of a marvelous cut diaper my feet like a lover’s hand / sculpt my ankles so that my feet / seem almost Japanese in this German boot, / and tomorrow is the Sabbath, and this is a God-fearing Jew, and if not today / then when / boots, / and if not salamander then who is for me, oy to me and woe to me, to the eyes that see this, / my beautiful feet that look like this / and the rain outside, in the Jerusalem street, a rowdy rapist / brutal, / and salamander is a creature of fire / burning in the fire but not consumed / but the eyes of Leah, the eyes of Sarah, the eyes of Rivkah / the eyes of Rachel, the eyes of all my uncles and aunts there / were consumed were consumed / and here is salamander burning in flames but remaining / intact here before me / here at my feet / a warm blooming flame And on a Friday afternoon / on Ben Yehudah Street in the water, / my feet in boots, and my heart in my feet, / and the men of Jerusalem, Jews and Gentiles, whistle to me / for the legs. What a sexy pair of legs, says / one Mustafa, and right after also Dani from Ramataiim, / and my legs rejoice and the warm brown skin / so shaming / clings to me as if it were my own skin / as if I grew legs in velvety suede / sad as the eyes of Leah my ancient mother / and I walk and walk through the streets of Jerusalem across Katamon and Rehavia and Abu Tor and Me’ah Shearim and my feet are warm, perhaps too warm / this suede, and a wet sensation in my feet / perhaps after all these bastard boots do allow in a little /

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rain, or perhaps my feet sweat as in the mikveh28 / and what’s this pressure, some blood perhaps in the big toe / drips through the toenail, something squeezed / unknown and clammy sticks in my feet, / some dirt perhaps, or perhaps / the skin rubs my skin, / or perhaps it’s just the blood / roaring in an orgy of warmth / joy in the blood vessels, warm at last / after seven cold years / but no, it’s the heel so suddenly clenched, / as if caught in a thicket, held in the fist / of Esau, Israel’s calamity, what does it matter if / it was Jacob, it’s the heel that hurts / so badly, something is the matter with my boots, / but I’m already walking in Mamila Street, and my feet / so sexy, a whistle here / a squeeze there, and the blood erupting / from its vessels / from so much lust / brownish warmish sweetish and my feet take me to / my current lover / and he whispers: What legs! and he peels off / my flesh the sweater and / the pants but not yet the boots, / and I march to the bed and the soles thump, / and the boots / the boots the boots fondle my feet / and I’m already spread-winged / and my lover—on top, in heaven—wants, wants very much / to shed the boots / off my feet / but / the boots / aren’t shed / the boots won’t be shed and won’t budge / and my lover lacks manners and I lack speech / and he tries and tries / and they persist, the leeches / and I mutter and kick / I curse and pound my feet / yet the boots are welded to my flesh / and then / he pulls out a knife / tries to peel them off / but the boots adhere / then he pulls out a saw from under the pillow / and tries to saw them off / but they adhere adhere / so he pulls out an axe from under the bed / and tries to cleave them / but the boots cling / won’t let go off my feet / so he swears 28. Ritual bath.

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and pounds / and I curse and kick / but the boots cling / what a dybbuk of boots! / And my love / in a demonic dybbuk / begins to rip them / a dybbuk fighting a dybbuk / but suddenly pain / all at once / and he tears my skin / off me/ and my love / tears the boots off me / and the skin/ and the boots are kicked to the floor/ and I’m a love-blazing flower and the spot I lie on holy and my spirit fades in smoke and the entire world swoons and the secular angels in heaven call out Holy Holy and my feet red with shame

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MORDECHAI GELDMAN

(b. 1946)

Mordechai Geldman was born in Munich and came to Israel in 1949. He holds an MA in clinical psychology and lives in Tel Aviv where he has his own practice. The author of eleven volumes of poetry and three essay collections, Geldman is a regular contributor to the press as an essayist and art critic. The recipient of the Chomsky Award, the Brenner Award, the Amichai Award, and the Prime Minister Award, his work has been translated and published in Arabic, Czech, English, French, Greek, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. The poems appearing here are from his collections Eye (1993) and The Book of Asking (1997).

Friendly Dragon All that I saw were but flitting shadows most of the time background events kept coming forms were postponed for other moments more and more forms were postponed until they vanished in the sequence of backdrops. All that I didn’t see this morning—surfaced on its own: the dreams, the I pining for its prospects, the remnants of yesterday, lust deceiving its fences, fragments of other worlds, the sheets out of which I emerged,

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the yellow arc of piss, the water I buy from City Hall to wash my face, the toothpaste that neutralizes the sense of taste, the fire, fire boiling water for the Brazilian fruit-powder, the fire, the old, perpetual fire which will consume the entire world, the garments, the garments of pretense, the face of deception, the face designed to its owner, no one will see my face, the driver, the I who leads my face, the I who participates in civilization, the two bonsai trees you must place in the sun, the tiny statue of the meditating man, the cashier at the cafeteria punching the price of coffee, I didn’t see the light of morning, I was in light but didn’t see it, only now I see the pen, I wrote, write, will write, and I’m surprised I saw the pale postal clerk who sold me stamps and envelopes, and I felt for her, her excessive efforts to please, her doubts about her looks (am I being too coy, too incredulous? Am I mirrored now in all that is visible?) But what I truly didn’t see this morning doesn’t surface on its own, is not even included in blindness, but is tossed somewhere like the newscast of TV photographers that grow old the instant they’re broadcast, the masses starving in Somalia, the defeated boxer, the plane-crash survivors, the farmers on strike, the floods, the earthquakes, the fires, the man who murdered his wife and daughter with an ax, by fire, by the sword, by famine, by plague, the man traversing Niagara Falls across a rope. It seems therefore that I’m seeking to see it seems therefore that poetry opens like an eyeball

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burns in a blue fire seductive like a friendly dragon.

Porno 2 Even though the labia, usually, are not judged in terms of the beautiful or ugly— just as you don’t evaluate the earth in those terms— her labia were beautiful and pure, and in the gigantic dimensions of the screen her lips became a glorious gate a gate into the path of desire. But the director of lust decreed that even after she has stripped even after the enhancing of the gate (on the mound, red grass) she will reject the actor’s touch will say, “Not yet” in a whispering voice, pulling out of her cunt, one after the other, tiny, cute panties, panties designed with hearts, berries, and pheasants, as if asserting that even after having stripped even after displaying her cunt in her hiding place she is still clad a bride forever, a virgin forever, and those who do things in her cannot rob her all her grooms will remain bachelors forever, as if asserting that even after having stripped she is still dressed to be undressed and in her depths there’s no mother nor mercy but she gives birth again and again, as if compelled, to the robe of disrobing to the moment of surrender to a gaze.

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Porno 3 There was a scar across his thigh but his other parts were intact to the extent that even a gesture of his hand was retained in memory for a long time. They didn’t film the soles of his feet but the ever-concealed member was magnified gigantically during the intoxication of his blazing motion. He got the scar, one may assume, in a knife-fight, or in a car accident, driving recklessly, but his beauty accorded him a certain calm and when he touched the women there was in his touch remoteness and power, lust and boredom. No doubt—a dangerous character yet his great danger lies in his enslaving beauty— a beauty deeper than the exactitude of his parts a beauty worn like a magic garment.

The Hottentot Venus29 (Porno 7) In what chains they had brought her to Paris to show off the wonder of her great buttocks we’ll never know, but a crowd of men, eager and curious, paid for the spectacle of her buttocks for five whole years if there’s any wholeness left in the observing and the observed; we’ll never know

29. The Hottentot Venus was the name given to the Hottentot Sarah Baartman who lived in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Two scientific papers, full of prejudice, were written about her preserved vagina, by Blainville (1816) and Cuvier (1817).

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what the Negress thought about the men and women of Paris, its virgins, its wives, its ivory whores, their buttocks, compared to hers, deprived in weight and adoration; we’ll never know if she learned French, enough to say: Sir, a black ass is worth gold, Monsieur, un cul noir vaut de l’or; we’ll never know what she thought of the mansions of the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, the bridges of the Seine, or the cathedrals where at great heights slender naked men were displayed on a cross or women clad in white and gold women who gave birth without lust or intercourse their womb full of mercy, a temple, an oyster, their eyes fated to see God their eyes fated to lament the suffering of their son; but she must have had gold earrings or earrings of some golden substance for it is impossible that in Paris they would have let her be without jewels and adornments and she certainly had tears and a talent for weeping that at times materialized between one show and its next; and we’ll never know how she died— was it the city air and cigar smoke that finally got her or perhaps the cuisine renowned for its delicacy turned in her blood into a deadly dose of cholesterol; all that is left of her is but a crumbling piece or, if you will, gone to pieces— what has remained of the Hottentot Venus is much less than the Venus of Milo exhibited broken in the mansion of the Louvre. From the Hottentot Venus a coroner had left us only her glorious enormous buttocks and her black vagina whose lips are thicker than the lips of her mouth an illustration of a vagina that is a dark vessel an illustration of lust that knows no bounds

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a matri-typical cunt of all the whores in town a black sin lurking in the most pearly of women. Those who still seek her buttocks, particularly the view of her vagina, may find them in a large preservation jar kept at the Museum of Man near Trocadero in the very same town that worshipped them; it is easy to charge that coroner with necrophilia racism and misogyny but harder to credit him with excessive lust for that Hottentot female to induce him to conquer the oxygen of time and to grant what he saw as the best of her the status of an embalmed Pharaoh or a Nefertiti a gift from the morgue for coming generations for the French and all other nations.

Holy Ground For whom was intended the new sign “holy ground” posted at the Muslim graveyard— that final parking lot overlooking the sea among the towering hotels? Is the sign designed to deter lovers not yet frightened by death and its dead who make love on tombs saturate stones with salacious juices moan and chirp at the edge of the abyss camouflaged by bushes and growth? Or perhaps it’s a sign for the Jews the deeds of living Muslims having increased their hatred to offer a Muslim skull or a skeleton hand as a plaything for a child

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who may yet grow up to be a pathologist or a doctor? Or perhaps the sign was meant precisely for the dead who must never again desire earthly desires must not return each night from hell or heaven through tunnels dug from their graves to share in the joy of lovemaking with those who do it on tombstones? The meeting ground of love and death is a particularly holy one since a poet like me for whom another love-affair has ended yesterday is a kind of a compulsive Orpheus always pursuing a missing bride the hell of her rejection his death within hers and finally returns at his side nothing but poems sparkling fresh like dewy leaves.

Dolinger When the neighbors opened their front door whom did they open the door for for whom did they wait in their rooms and why did they leave it open like this? When the neighbors opened their door Dolinger sneaked inside and made their home his without them ever taking notice; in other words, he lived in their rooms, seeing but not seen. At times he stood at the dining table, silent and sheer, and watched them eat. At times he sat and watched with them idiotic games and soaps on TV.

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At times he listened, inquisitive, like a visitor from another planet, to their barking, biting quarrels; at times he sat without them on the terrace and looked at the sky and the branches of the great mulberry tree, and nights he slept in the living room or on the windowsill. You must be wondering who is this Dolinger and why he chose to live with my neighbors and why a door that opened by pure chance decided his fate for many days? Well, this Dolinger grew to hate the life of the single poet, fancying instead the odor of sweet stench of my neighbors’ apartment, its essence an artificial orchid spray; to the bachelor’s poem Dolinger preferred coitus kindled by scant desire electronic gadgets collecting in the kitchen defrosted Chinese dinners eaten quickly in front of a flickering rectangle as Amsterdam burned at its edges as Somalians starved to death as diseased Indians lay dying among cows and rats as Croatian women were raped by the thousands as nipples swelled like ripened figs across beds of soft porn as a woman in a bathing suit and high heels stepped between boxers to display the number 8 as the picture of a kidnapped girl was shown as investigators soaked the investigated in baths of excrement as the everyday kept bending to the rule of the remote-control as the actual dissolved into a dream from which no one awakes. It is possible he just grew tired of being alone yet possibly Dolinger is a poet

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of a poetics different from mine his main topic the life of my neighbors— the life of obsolete automatons subjects of words others thought hermetic monads always fleeing into kinship beyond the field, beyond the fire, far from the voice of Aeschylus.

Tonight I Yield Tonight I yield to a gaze— I who postponed attachment to a woman for an unlimited time am compelled, surprised, as soon as you enter the café, to imagine our joining together: at first deeds of procreation which quickly bear a child like that dark one floating in the populated space menacing with karate moves the crowd of cake-eaters; later, the Sabbath table, covered with white cloth, its entire sweep serving one purpose: support a vase of roses? No—a pair of candles burning like our souls. And then a house and a sycamore are drawn, and from the valley the scent of fire, a strange mist blankets everything, perhaps smoke.

I Won’t Travel This Summer I won’t travel this summer I feel no longing for the tourist’s life I prefer the feel of a book’s page, a leisurely walk in my neighborhood, ruminations

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A languid summer showed me that my proximity is full of distances areas I haven’t reached yet elements resembling rivers and a mountain range waiting in the morning mist for the lonely drifter In Milan Square not in Milan I observe through the car window a tree shading green grass a shadow tree on radiant grass and I am startled, dream-like, as if I had arrived in my neighborhood for the first time. In a dream divining my travels I realize I must hurry and pay it a visit to observe its vigor to grow and become its totality even proffer gifts of dew in flower bowls to shade with feral light my feverish steaming city of hollow blue anxiously anticipating Muslim suicides I don’t know if I’ll have the time— so many journeys are a must to every near distance to everything the eye wanders past seeing not seeing; perhaps tomorrow I’ll notice my room and sail across its unveiled spans into the closets storing testimonies about my past into the drawers that had developed a life of their own to the pile of exiled papers; I might write a travel-log about the movement of my eye in the kitchen about the agile lizards which are but minuscule dinosaurs and about a variety of black and red ants that turn my crumbs into loaves; and I’ll write a paper about the lamb and the slaughter about the seven cereals stilled in the jars about health angels made of soy 194

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about the piggish lusting mouth about the denial the vomit and the continence about the food forever lacking about the food that starves you about food for the soul and food for the body about the lost breast and the missing god and also about the humming doves on the window-ledge copulating and copulating with no care no shame

Abused Neighbor A neighbor, her face creased with lines, who lives below me in a crowded flat, fell in love with me, I think, because of two accidental hints hinted, in her view, in the jeans that dropped twice from my clothesline onto hers— stretched below and parallel to mine. For she perceived desire in their yielding to gravity a perception that rose in her eyes in our fleeting encounters on the stairs. Clearly, if her husband on every occasion hadn’t listed her flaws hadn’t crammed them in the neighbors’ ears on hushed Sabbath mornings, and if her face hadn’t been creased by the prison of her life and its warden to the point where she was completely cut off from the passion of suitors, she wouldn’t have perceived in the jeans hints of love and pleasure with the neighbor upstairs, namely me. It is also clear that had my life been replete with love the neighbor wouldn’t have entered the poem. M OR DECHA I GEL DM A N

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Yes The sparrow that collected a piece of cellophane seemingly prefers a plastic nest and so progress is borne on a bird’s wings; and I collect to my brain a nesting bird— into my brain plagued with yearning for a nest into my lamenting brain30 I collect from the street a bird specialist. Buying furniture, organizing the closets, plastering the kitchen, sorting out the photographs in the album— all these last activities, says the sparrow, are nothing but nesting steps. Lacking a real mate of either sex I deserve to be heckled for succumbing to delusions yet it is possible that the soul knows its mate is approaching his stride heard in the mountains, towns, the clear spring skies; in the earthly and heavenly media an undeciphered message has already been received even if the intellect still laments.

Why a Frog The frog originated in a movie31 the movie about the nun and the frog: within the cold stones a young nun falls sick but the law of the convent forbids a cure 30. In the Hebrew, nest and lament have the same derivation, and yes and nest are homonyms. 31. A movie by Alan Cavalier, Therese, telling the story of a young Carmelite nun who fell ill and died in a convent, leaving behind a diary, The Story of a Soul.

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and a moment before her death crowned with a wreath of thorns bleeding, not from her period, a sister-nun proffers a sort of a farewell gift— a small frog beating like a heart— and the frog is not a future prince not a prospective prince not a prince awaiting a kiss a frog is a frog a he/she

Almost Flowers I almost brought flowers you said and I thanked you with humility and joy for almost flowers would be flowers blossoming in our fancy in the lusting flowerbed of my soul and yours— flowers from a field not a shop budding tiny and quivering in the spring’s breeze white blossoms with dewy leaves awaking in our hearts a new virginity— an innocent touch, stunned and drugged in the miracle of our hunger also blossoms of angels’ trumpets will soar in the skies of our love and peach blossoms translucently pink will drop through the night upon our bed and with them almond blossoms vertiginous, joyful, reclusive, and paper-blossoms where we signed our names again and again will adorn our common grave visible already through the mist of our future in a plot strewn with violets.

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RUTH RAMOT

(b. 1946)

Ruth Ramot was born in Ramat Gan. She graduated in 1975 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published four volumes of poetry and is the recipient of the Tchernichovsky Award, given by the Writer’s Guild. She works as an editor and lives in Tel Aviv. The poems appearing here are from her collections Slices of Heaven (1994) and Sealed Waves (1998).

Blue Prince for Vladimir Blue prince, mine, in a robe of thin ice. Prince of night, mine, tender in skin lustrous with lusts. No leader, no commander of armies, you, prince of robes and skin whom the King must clothe and the Queen pleasure.32

32. Alludes to (and reverses the male-female roles) Exodus xxi. 10, “If he take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her conjugal rights, shall not be diminished.”

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* I leave, taking with me the plastic utensils, the roast drenched in gravy, the laundry bills. The bedclothes that saw everything—remain. Rest in peace. I won’t be coming back.

They Assault Me the Flowers As I lock the car door the red flowers dotting the side of the road assault me demanding that I accept this exact order imposed on them. To grow precisely here. In red. Along this mosaic path. They regard me with a flowery silence demand that I relish their sweet scent. A man hurries ahead, opens the front door. Now I have to say, Thanks, to acknowledge his useless courtly manners.

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* Quiet and an evening breeze come in through the window not bringing peace to the pile of newspapers on the floor at the foot of the bed. Dreams have drowned me tonight delivering their meaning their tongues licking my mouth. Used up dreams. I come and go in them as I please. Spent dreams. Quiet and a light evening breeze now coming from the sea muffle the shadow of the lamp along the wall endeavor to mollify dreams. And in contrast the sunset. Its predictable colors again ravishing.

In the Soft Curve In the soft curve drawn from the mother’s body to the stroller stray souls drift

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getting set to become one with the bow. From the overturned trash can at the street corner leaps a yellowish cat scrawny. It runs runs as if someone’s waiting.

The Scent of Wind for Gili, Daniel and Itamar A bus cuts through the illumined darkness. Outside the coffee-house the scent of a non-autumnal wind. Gradually, I’m filled with compassion for the womb that bore me. No longings. My heart goes out to my children who long for my womb. Day, night.

Painting Time paints with honey brushes— a sun invades the girl’s bed; she’s curled like a fetus in a warm wet stain.

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A hazy shadow of a pear tree the shelter of her climbing feet lingers on the terrace of the small, red-roofed house. On the clothesline the wash. Arms and legs swing yes yes to the gentle breeze— soon the honey will dry. At long last, the picture will hang on the wall.

* The moon doesn’t fit here. Tonight its yellow hues overflow; antennae drill black holes. Doesn’t fit the wet asphalt reflecting the car’s headlights reluctantly giving off light. Doesn’t fit my shoes that suddenly feel tight the stain I’ve noticed on my sleeve as my hands grip the wheel. This moon doesn’t fit the town I was born in, yet I can’t remove it nor my gaze hanging onto it.

Toward Evening Toward evening my wishes go naked

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in paper canoes sluggishly they drift in lakes of murky moments a wind moves upon the water its white kisses delivered one by one and a great calm descends upon the water

Hot in the Corner Café Hot in the corner café in Trastevera. The pale blue shirt I ironed—how I ironed— adheres to me consumed with beads of sweat. Even the breeze that stirs the fringes of the striped tablecloths doesn’t stroke. Someone so utterly left me. All resolves drown in the greenish Tiber River flowing heavily not far from here with leftover bottles and paper wraps. Dead for moments in the bosom of rotting falling leaves in the shade of giant parasols laden with dust. Just to rise from the plastic chair leaning on its side I have not the strength.

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Someone so utterly left me here.

Arithmetic I’m no good at arithmetic I compute and calculate and something’s always missing. At times I try to add yet there’s no place to take from since everything grows empty, leaving nothing to add from. At times there’s nothing to subtract. Like I said: I’m no good at arithmetic.

Time-Saturated Time-saturated I am and the sorrow of years lingers in my body observing me now with dogged resignation. I count sorrows with a very private pleasure suddenly remember the slabs of marmalade on the cracked marble in Mr. Kozlovsky’s grocery store. How I aimed for height to better see its colorful magical streaks how I held in my palm my one hundred grams. You’ll never know its taste on my fingertips. 204

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Love Song People who smoke calm me. The time they take to bring out a cigarette light it inhale— this span of time lulls my fears. The faint aroma reminds me that forbidden acts are still possible. And I seat myself in my father’s lap watch his hand holding a cigarette my gaze kissing his finger stained yellow from nicotine my hair trembling from the smoke’s caress. My father was a smoking man a man who listened to the radio. Here’s the news, and first the headlines. When he is near me the smoke of his Matussian comes straight from his mouth to mine.

Room Number Forty The key to room number forty. Forty, please, I try in English. Forte, explains the chubby reception clerk, means “strong” in Italian. He says and smiles, heaves his muscles. From then on, whenever he sees me, he says, forte, raising his arms as if lifting weights. Forte, forte, I weep,

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go up to my room with a bag of figs splitting open in my hand to sweeten my banished hours in Rome. Later, in mobbed cafés, I go round and round repeatedly banish myself from all the piazzas drowsing among the alleyways immured in sun and shade. Relentless, my new leather shoes gently tear tiny strips of skin off my feet. I walk, tightly holding my new leather purse. And frankly what do I need it for?

Nuns Such homely nuns I saw in Campo di Fiori. If I looked like them perhaps I, too, would have become a nun. During haunted nights I’d come to Jesus’s body, not the one on the cross. The one who lived before the crucifixion.

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For I’d said: “If I may but touch his garment I shall be whole.”

* Yesterday when I sat in the café and you weren’t there the windows filled with heavy raindrops and I saw the sea pull us to its bosom and I couldn’t remember who was next to me and it didn’t matter nor did the sea. Later the storm receded waiters rushed to open doors so that passersby won’t fear come into a café menaced by the sea.

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AGI MISHOL

(b. 1947)

Agi Mishol was born in Hungary and came to Israel in 1950. She earned her BA and MA in Hebrew literature from Hebrew University, and her first volume of poetry appeared in 1972. She is author-in-residence at Tel Aviv University and poet-inresidence at Hebrew University, as well as the artistic director of the International “Mishkenot Sha’ananim” Poetry Festival. Mishol has published eleven poetry collections, and her Collected Poems appeared in 2003. A frequent participant in international poetry festivals, her work has been published in Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Spanish; collections of her poems were published in the United States and Ireland. Her awards include the Prime Minister Award, the Dulitzki Award, the Harry Hirshorn Award, and the Amichai Poetry Award. Mishol lives in Kfar Mordechai, where she grows peaches. The poems appearing here are from her collections Fax Pigeon (1991), The Interior Plain (1995), Look There (1999), and New and Collected Poems (2003).

So Overbearing Had Become So overbearing had become the body’s crust within the house that hardened she beckoned agony to a waltz; behind the curio glass on top of lacy blackbirds crystals shook with desire

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for a knock and agony became a lever for unbelievable pleasures— candlesticks grew tense, the memorial candles, the tapestry dragons, and in the dimness the frontal lobe’s wonder intensified; horny tipsy she-imps fizzled in the cupboard flushed with wine. Agony waltzed at three quarters and the bitch, already pink with Vivaldi, begged release from the light wished to shed her fur wished to ride a broom to infinite bliss. And to the sound of dwarfed words whispered in her ear she sprawled herself upon sloping skies couched in a soft downy existence unlike any other.

* I remember a short speech I worked out in my head about how I hush my life to hear the poem that would come if I advanced half-way to meet it. But instead I breathe life into some expired lover with the point of my pen knock him to the floor of the page, count to nine.

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It Seems Miraculous to Her Even now as she is locked up in her head with all the antiheroic demons who limp across the breadth of her emotions who goose-flesh her skin reciting lonely lonely she is not prepared to shed her biography and definitely not the pain she’s been brooding like a golden egg. And it is not as if she lacks a brooder who would substitute for an hour in which she could become just flesh that harbors breath and nothing else. Yet she is loath to miss the plot things like the telephone a thought or the hum of existence whirring onward in her body.

Turning to Rest in Sappho’s Poems We’re sprawled across the cool stone under glittering stars bite into an apple honoring all the loved ones who came to rest between our thighs. We talk about love in great detail talk about life that turns us insatiable,

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about the tree that is a green fountain. Her beautiful head is next to mine her curls in mine. She says I say and our giggles escape into the vine whose scent twines from us.

Afternoon Nap My bulging cat splays herself across my bare belly. Embryos stir between her belly and mine. Perhaps they’re mine perhaps hers. The hour is weary.

The Interior Plain Here, in the interior plain, I herd in the meadow with my Walkman— I pick up a stick split a pomegranate whistle to the dog

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To the list of things that give me goose bumps I’ve added this morning Billie Holiday singing I’m so lonely.

Revelation In the very early morning on my clothesline I saw a pink angel held by a pin and below it a black kitten trying to catch its sleeve

Like a Bird Tagged Like a bird tagged on the foot she walks around a wedding band on her finger as if someone might investigate the course of her migrations might come back to check whether she has nested has reproduced

In Her Bed In her bed, after you’ve shined and opined, have already displayed that famed peacockiness, it will be my voice from a corner in the ceiling that will intimate for you Marcus Aurelius’s dictum:

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When meats and delicacies are placed before you, you’ll do well to envision that the fish is the carcass of a fish, and the meat that of the fowl or sow; and so the Florentine wine is but the sap of grapes, and copulation but the friction of an organ followed by a spasmodic, viscid secretion.

The Sacred Cow of Hardship In the hour between wolf and dog the sacred cow of hardship promenades in my yard as if this were India. A mottled cow fat cow, cow, hey cow, what are you looking for here where the Oy blooms, can’t you see how weary I am unable to tell if it’s sleep I seek or death. The weed of eking a living wraps around me, draws a slash of silence across me; I have nothing except the brown stupor of your eyes. I, too, am not at my best, am wrapped around the void like a pretzel round its hole; my laughter exhales vanity my face the vanity of vanities, my body the folly of follies; on the one hand, oh, the fear of death, and on the other, your bewilderment. One thing is clear, oh Lord, my shepherd, I am done for here, and I have yet to decide whether to slaughter or write about you as you squat at the asterisk between the stanzas take life impersonally like a morning erection. Already lines leap at me to tell about the gorgeous pink packed in the contour of your teats as I build upon you verbal towers

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even if there’s no hardship in the word hardship and in the end I’ll be pierced by the two-edged sword my poem directs upon itself.

The Irritating Manner in Which I Exist in Your Fancy I who was present down to the airy triangles between my fingers have now slipped into the slumber of oblivion with nothing to offer to those around me who are but a blot on my optic nerve. And you, if you make your way through the hoot hoot of pigeons toward me (unlike the love magician toward his gifted volunteer in the audience) you’ll see that my house schemes against me a Sleeping Beauty-ness to last a thousand years, that creepers cling to my windows with a soft green brutality that my hands sink like soot into the fur of my dogs that my flesh has grown thick that the hair on my legs tangles undisturbed and that I’m not the Agi at the end of the path33 a pining puppet a peg of love

From the Depth I Called Hey 34 From the depth I called hey you moron, see how torpid I am from so much Riesling 33. In the Hebrew, the poet’s last name, Mishol, means path. 34. Alludes to the prayer book: “From the depth I called thee, God.” Interchanging a letter, the poet turns God’s name into a slangy form of address.

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how every moment a moment sets here without us under the mango moon as a blue yogi lizard creates for herself out of sheer volition a new tail as long as the night

When Soft Angel Plumage When soft angel plumage sprouted in my flesh (I’m half angel with breasts half with a penis semi erect) I wasn’t amazed didn’t wave and to where the spirit moved I went to die from here a little Yet there was no outlet for the spirit but through the body; half the night I roamed its squares until I waned with the city with the hum of the ocean and with two rectangles of dawn that formed in the window.

Morning and She Pees Morning and she pees yet she is far removed

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still dozing on a mound in her head from where she listens to the popcorn words that lazily pop on the plane of her consciousness For instance: water or water in the kneecap as a woman said yesterday in the clinic the one who sat under the sign “urine” Not the one who’s going to die but the one who as yet is going nowhere and in the meantime only says: Water in the knee is a stone on the heart. She is done peeing yet remains seated, musing: If a stone on the heart is a boulder on the back and if a boulder on the back is a log between the eyes or salt in the wound (she’s wiping) or the brow of steel or the stiffened neck35 or the whole spirit encoded in the body— it can get pretty crowded She won’t wash her face in the brutal freezing water it is better to wake, veil one, veil two, morning fog, etc., rather than bolt up, gaze wide-eyed as one foot romps the euphony of stars and the other runs errands.

Estate No peacocks will strut in my yard it’s enough that this morning I rose from the sink to the triptych of my face 35. A group of Hebrew idioms Mishol distorts in the poem.

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too pink to my liking, what with the honey-blond, and curly to boot, God, how tacky I’ve become so, no peacocks. I’ll purchase a pig purchase a pig so I can speak entirely new phrases, such as, go check on the pig, or, the price of pigs has risen. But no peacocks. I am that pig from the previous stanza splayed on my side in a puddle of hurt so shove your “my tomboy my muffin my soft cheese tomato” for words aside and you aside I’m the cute hedgehog turned porcupine the livid porcupine multiplying in every pupil of our pupils; I’m the metallic green fly rubbing its forelegs before your face spinning malice even if behind my back clovers have begun to chatter spring reporting on my impressionistic life and on the clear pink I show the world when I yawn.

Woman with Pitchfork Just as I sit with complementary nipples, one red one green, my gorgeous cat walks by, the Russian Blue I intend to spay, and you bring over in a hat your most successful eggs and all that you have said throughout the years

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to this woman and that, and now want to check what kind of creature I am— Chimera You’d hoped for peace and alfalfa, right? For a metrically hooting dove, right? Laura36 I am not. You’ve seen for yourself how when I walk without a bra my tits sort of dawdle one pace behind the body how my fingers, when not alert, go each their separate way; and besides, I’m a woman with a pitchfork who unstitches all your similes back to life.

Nocturnal I a. In the house all is contained: the sugar in the jar the bread in the bread-box the knife in the drawer the food in the pot the evil spirits in the folds of the drapes one upon the other the pillow-cases the blankets the underwear the bras all is contained: the music in the grooves of records the rats in the attic of rejected items. 36. Petrarch’s Laura, known for her beauty.

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b. If the woman should rise from her bed and open the fridge it will be possible to see her face to see her gaze in the cheese looking back from its holes, but in this wan light it is clear her hunger ogles another light not the flickering blue of the television not the red projected from the digital alarm nor the neon of moon that sparks the lamp of her soul. She requires another light in the night waiting like a black armchair to devour her. c. Not for nothing do I stand like this at night leaning over the sink manning my position singing: Far away a dinghy goes For everything that can leaves the earth: the chimney smoke a prayer leaps of joy Yet the people in the house breathe like sheep asleep in their rooms, God their shepherd And beneath the house ground water and beneath the water a lava of torpor.

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Nocturnal II Again the husband bones the wife and she chirps a little before falling asleep. Above them stretches the tile roof, darkness, stars. At this hour the lonely under their blankets lonely even more and a bird shrieking across the night is their soundtrack. At this hour the husband thinks of his fruit. Not far from here, silent among the leaves, fruit swell for him, ripen, full of juice; so much comfort (he reflects) in their generosity, every year they surrender their yield, how soothing the precise return of events: the oxalis, the yellow-weed, and that gripping one whose name (dead nettle?) he always forgets. The cool fruit swell and ripen for no one. Even the beautiful name Persimmon given them by man is unknown to them. At this hour the woman reaches down and with one finger covers the simple line between her legs with one finger calms the tunnel of life. In the field floats a thought without a thinker

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about how Nature has no imagination. All in its season. The infinite sorrow of the circle. The insult of one option. No persimmon will ever grow a cucumber.

Shaheeda 37 “The evening grows dim and you’re only twenty.” —Natan Alterman, “A Souk Evening” You’re only twenty and your first pregnancy is a bomb. Bearing explosives and metal shards under the wide skirt, you advance through the souk, you, Andaleeb Takatka, ticking among passersby. Someone has screwed with the bolts in your head and dispatched you into town, and you, who came from Bethlehem,38 chose a bakery no less. There, you pulled from yourself the safety latch and together with the Sabbath challahs the poppy seeds and the sesame seeds blew yourself up to the skies. You flew with Rivka Fink, and Yelena Konreiv from Caucasia, Nissim Cohen from Afghanistan, Suhila Hushi from Iran, and two Chinese men as well you swept along with you to your death. 37. In Arabic, female martyr. 38. In Hebrew, Beit Lechem literally means House of Bread.

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Since then other incidents have overshadowed yours yet I keep talking and talking articulating nothing

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DAN ARMON

(b. 1948)

Dan Armon was born in Jerusalem and lives in Tel Aviv. He studied literature and theater at Hebrew University. A poet and playwright, Armon serves on the editorial board of Helicon. He has published six volumes of poetry and is a recipient of the Prime Minister Award and the Pinsker Award. The poems appearing here are from his collections Duration (1986) and Footprints (1989).

The Squash Watchman Sitting in the field watching the squash. They’re interesting, squash. Each on its own lying on its belly and the sun tickles the fat end a bit smeared in mud but the skin is smooth. And each a little skinny around the middle. With me they all snuggle in the sun as if listening to the drone of flies and this hum

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The Apple the Cucumber and the Plum The fruit is done. Now it has touched the bounds of its form ripens toward what’s beyond and with a sweet longing turns to rot from inside. The sea is not far, from here you can sense the depths of blue, the song of blue, and the fruit knows: each tree and its fruit the tree is the one to decide and every normal fruit loves its tree. Even if the poet’s fruit is not to be foreseen. Suddenly on an apple tree cucumbers grow, but love is foreseen. There’s a cucumber in the apple’s flavor. Both face the sea and the wind, or with wine, and the woman observing. To woman to breasts to taste the apple hums and sings: I’m a young cucumber who hasn’t yet known the taste of a woman’s bite. The sea engenders its own appeal the poet approaches his end next to the woman facing the sea and a plateful of plum pits

Midas of Sugar 1. Sits on the balcony reading a crime book shaven neat very clean 224

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on his head a black pressed yarmulke. At the right time he rises and walks to the TV room, watches the news, yet another crime for dessert. Somewhere God is there, too, not ignored, no, on the contrary, gradually He joins the brave cops, the arms of the army and the law, and at times is even implied in the curl of Reagan’s smile, or suddenly appears in the sweet taste of candy reached for absentmindedly when the all too human camera lingers on crushed bodies 2. Everything you touched turned to sugar Midas again you smile approaching raise your hand smear stewed sugar across my face shove God pastries into my mouth

Stairwell The people we wanted, wanted badly, were not there, in vain we ran up the stairs One facing the other at the door, lost like refugees from a storm facing a blocked shore, we realized how much we needed their refuge DA N A R M ON

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“What now,” you whispered for both of us, your strength, in fact, didn’t hold in the sure solitude, and you left for the roof From the bottom of the stairs a sigh from a dusty dark coat a hand reaches for the banister Between an old climbing step and the next silence fell like departure and later a hesitant sigh, and another step like a coerced return to life a resigned sigh and again silence, withdrawing from the thicket of the neighborhood din Dimly, as I’m abandoned to this march of climbing old age, love is renewed, I haven’t known about this power as if forming on its own until my eyes, alone, met yours and in the quiet, in the desolation between two steps we heard a sound through the window— a bird gathering its wings and landing on a branch

* In a temporary shelter barely following the music on the radio. Through her gaze I receive a beat a passage from tone to tone from heart.

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I’ve dropped the strategy, imagined plans for a new order, and no longer aim as some master to break time across my knees. The body within still harbors the old remote drive for life, still swims in love, even if against its will, in the blue days, and later, I’m cast in my corner, practically hurled to the wall, and music on the radio the only comfort left musing in silence.

Play in the Kitchen He forgot to play saw the instrument lying about indifferent chords taut He didn’t see the many notes that were hanging there in the past, full of life When he plucked a string a sound muttered as if disturbed from its grave

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Is it my death he asked himself but his self wouldn’t respond He went into the kitchen seeking succor in the aroma of tea Another kind of green in the kitchen’s window the neighboring roof Shingles and still pigeons pepper trees flecked red lots of sun From now on he reflects I must play in the kitchen

* In a gesture of argument during sleep or a question or looking for something a hand was discharged from under the sheet reaching back behind the head and a nipple was released from the edge of the sheet To escape the heat legs were pulled apart and the sheet folded sweeping over the mound of wheat and a large peasant foot bolted at the side of the bed

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Across the desert of the floor exposed in the rising light convoys of ants on their way from the crack in the wall to the adjoining kitchen And while the carpet flared its colors the woman turned and discovered the half length of her body the half of her back sloping in shadow the half of her behind borne in a blot of sun the slant of her leg stretched out her foot pointing downward at the side of the bed

Eight Short Ones * A chameleon crossing the road doesn’t manage to achieve the color of tar. * Her face there in the hazy mirror she couldn’t observe. * Tonight a moth struck the eye of the newscaster, end. * Blossom of the almond-tree; one lazy bee fed up with flying.

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* Ant, a grain, a combination that connotes toil and gluttonous ingestions. * From the blackbird in the growing darkness the beak remains. * Yom Kippur on the roof of the synagogue pigeons quarrel. * Swallows scatter and shriek: Eureka!

Baking As the heat reaches the innards a motion begins and the bread awakes to fill its mold. Morning. I emerge baked with sleep— today’s mold: bright blue at noon red, graying at the edges, waiting. Before I’m done they arrive to eat me.

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I haven’t as yet put in raisins. Barely some salt.

* A dark backyard, Tel Aviv, near the garbage cans, spring behind the house. A back window cast light on your shoulder, and a gesture of your hand as if saying: “From the point of view of the ant, see how tall the grass, the yard a wide plane, what are these strange cliffs the houses, what are these people, strides, as long as they don’t step on you, and the noise of cars stirs waves of pleasure in the heart.” Your eyes sparkled in the grass, that light fell on your thigh “Come, kiss me.”

Fire A charred field at the foot of the olive tree a rock still blazing and warm ashes in the wind A stunned bee drops at the mouth of the beehive

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scorched, in her wings useless honey At the bottom of the tree-top black leaves black too is the trunk its core still transporting life to silvery green and light blue With one pull the rope is torn where charred and so you and I

Candle A candle in the room a quiet presence of fire a woman on the couch her eyes shut; quiet presence like a domesticated pet a placid bird or a cat on a chair attentive to its stomach like some Buddha like a lion now diminished seduced by caressing human hands; fire clings to fuse. Love like a living thing held by two like a candle might ignite a world like a lion must be appeased with candor.

* The wondrous wilting of a flower in the calm of a vase. 232

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Red still burns in petals eaten at the edges. One already fell to the water its body still light. Floating with the vigor of stored matter. I recall an old lady in Greece at the door of her house in her white village gazing for hours at the sea— or was it indeed the sea? I also recall the joy in my hand thrust across the water, rowing, blessing the source of my life.

Song of the Valley Barks rise from the valley a valley of vast darkness crowned with strings of light; each tiny light in the distance is a house and a man a dog barking at the door; each star is a passion cut off from the promise of fulfillment and grown cold; each lamp light in the distance is a passion kindled and a man coming out to the door: here is his barking dog, a darkness rustling foliage and where, or to where, his passion. DA N A R M ON

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At the end of the leash stands a man hushing the dog. My heart tonight a baby in its crib smiling to a thief in moonlight I am the thief caught in the spell who for a baby’s smile gave up caution and was captured.

* We’ve stabilized the emotion: with much effort we molded a jug, a perfect form, a resplendent emotion laid up front on the shelves of a glazed personality, after it burned it was welded an awareness was scrubbed off debris and adorned with enchanting flowers It stands ready as if waiting for some lunatic or thug to kick it to pieces— the simple way in which hearts break.

Travel Matter, where do we go where does it travel. Humming and whirring the old refrigerator shudders and goes silent. 234

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The armchair is patient cradling in its bosom upholstered flowers and the live flowers are still good for a song of appeasement In the lake of the window the neurotic cruising of butterflies In the café the din of discussions into the wee hours And later a word here a word there saying goodbye or arriving too late Chairs folding for closing-time and shouts on the beach a wave shatters at a waiting pier And the boat is just travel in motion

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YITZHAK LAOR

(b. 1948)

Yitzhak Laor was born in Palestine. He studied at Tel Aviv University and holds a PhD in literature. He is a poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and editor of the quarterly Mita’am. In 1972, he was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the occupied territories. In 1985, his play “Ephraim Returns to the Army” was banned by the censorship for “defaming the IDF,” a ban that was annulled by the Supreme Court. Laor has published ten volumes of poetry, three novels (two of which were translated into German and one into English), two collections of short stories, and two books of essays. His poems have appeared in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. His awards include the Kugel Award, the Prime Minister Award (twice), the Bernstein Award, the Amichai Award, and the Israel Award for Literature. Laor lives in Tel Aviv and writes for Ha’Aretz. The poems appearing here are from his collections Night in a Foreign Hotel (1992) and And Loveth Many Days (1996).

A Note I’ll leave you in writing this version in Hebrew, our common ground for love, strife, separate bank accounts and perpetual defense against the spite of the State and its Hebrew lies (I’ll be exact with the truth, the punctuation): “I went out,” I’ll write, “I left the hotel.” “I took the road,” let’s say, “I went north.”

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“I took” let’s say, “a truck, a Volvo,” let’s say, “gray,” let’s say, “I traveled.” Did I or didn’t I drive? “I disappeared, forgive me,” (I’ll add for a measure of sympathy) in this darkness, like in a sickening daze, if to start, better start at the beginning, nothing is to be taken for granted, at the beginning there was chaos and all the rest must be toppled (without longing without remorse) scrutinized, jolted, gouged, made ghastly, razed, “I may come back,” I may “not come back,” “I may give up,” I may “return to stay.”

Silhouette Like a buoy your breath was left upon the dark water, your body anchored next to mine. Cruising or floating, I hold on to the sounds, a radio, or a whisper from outside or the adjacent room, perhaps they quarrel or joke about the morning trip, perhaps a man talking to himself, and if I wake you (translate for me) how fast will you recall how I hurt you? In me, for instance, there’s no anger left. I wander in the dark where I recognize nothing but your breath, your body a dark silhouette which remained after we turned off the light

Sleeping in Another Place A heavy light floods drowns the room, soft as glue, and the wind beyond the shutters casts dancing shadows across the wall. You can’t

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set music to this dance, not even internal beats, nor can you distinguish in this yellow light any familiar object, not the teddy-bear that stuck to you like a defect since your childhood. Tonight I could have been darkness, not seeing, not seen, not drifting. Outside nothing can be seen, and if I lay my head on a cool strip of darkness, if I rest a moment on the bank of this great river whose other side one cannot see, don’t have to see, don’t want to see, I could be darkness, sheer, mightier than the flash, the candle’s flame, the bed hanging at the bottom of the light like a plunging paratrooper. The world is a quiet, very deep cave, why be afraid? “I’m not staying over.”

Poetry The dead died in summer and the poem was written in winter, and spring and autumn have gone by more than once but I write it again and again: The dead died in summer the poem written in winter. I write poetry so as not to crumble And what do I do when I do not write and how come I don’t crumble? Perhaps because poetry is a sort of walking and stopping (At times I wait for the bus at the bus stop and if it doesn’t arrive, I’m filled with apprehension and walk to the next stop and again I wait, and again I walk, stop, miss the bus, late, slow, and hurrying.) I write because I’m crumbling 238

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I’m a poet at points where I don’t write and don’t walk don’t even sit. Where in this vast space is the point where I (think me, not crumbling, writing, a poet)

Gouging A man goes out to the dark from a dim and hollow doorway he walks, stumbles, exhaling mist. The houses, too, exhale fog, like the cat’s eyes. He goes back home, doesn’t write poems, doesn’t read poems, essays, how not to write poems, not to read, he wants to be seen without seeing to be a gaze. Somewhere, they found a corpse, gave it a name, the eyes of beasts fill the world with darkness, like a tub, memory is plugged. It is not death that watches us with a thousand eyes, but blindness

Sweat Without a shirt she waited, stooped, her black hair YIT Z HA K L AOR

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(as if shampooed) probably expected to be stroked. I touched her back, skin to skin. Perhaps when she trembled I noticed the sweat. Perhaps she perspired when I turned off the light. Perhaps she discharged sweat when she came. Then she moved but once. I stopped. She got dressed, shy, dry (as if after bathing). She doesn’t want to, fine, I was filled with disgust. I think. I need a verb here. Something has changed. I can’t be precise if I don’t write the word disgust

The Narrator’s Death I. Preparations for your death began while still in hospital. They promised, in their hearts, in the smoking and weeping area outside, near the elevator, never to forget you never, and right after you died in their hearts they addressed you in the second person, and promised out loud in the third person never to forget you they said we won’t forget you our Iris sweet Iris beautiful Iris Iris Iris we won’t forget you (because we love you very much, for they had lavished on you words of love when you were alive, and wiped your tears and soothed you and comforted and comforted you because you had cried, I don’t want to die, why must I die

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I’m still so young) and on the night before the funeral Batya, who loves you fiercely (and you loved her fiercely, too) had dreamt how they dress you up as a bride and you wait in the room to be taken to the huppa, so Batya dreamt right after you died, on the day you turned twenty-five and you were no longer, you already the cold corpse There are such moments: A great pain and faith in the eternal before images vanish and words emerge from the open wound the soul and inflame longing and offer comfort and we promise truly not to forget the dead which means a word which means faith in a word which means prayer which means the love of words. Beyond it one sees nothing truly The world given us again and again in words is taken in silence. Not so. (The world is torn and in the middle like a limb limp and torn your mute body is tossed) II. Later we talk as if words are fingers

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and at their tip we can touch you as if just fog lifted for a moment from the cold ground as if we hadn’t stepped only this moment on the cold ground to distinguish between human and all that isn’t human between the living and the impure between the speaking and the mute between what was and what will be and what will not be “We won’t forget, we won’t forget you, our beloved, your beauty, unhappy one, will serve as a monument. Not one of us will ever be as beautiful as you, and on the way to our conjugal bed as we mourn our youths we’ll remember you in words at the time of our happiness.” (And I, too, sit tonight in a distant land, it’s Friday evening, and I tell myself how once we spent Friday evening we were in your room you were wearing pink and you were even more beautiful than your memory as it suddenly appears in mine in a cold and distant winter.) A word is the balm a word is the wound a word is the salt

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III. We won’t forget you, everyone will remember something: a color, another color, a childhood scene, another scene, a rally, a quarrel, a lover, a moan, a whole limb, a wounded limb, a body of a girl/boy, a woman’s body under/above a man’s body, alone, in all its beauty Let man remember his passing days as if on the high road as if at the center of the universe and the course of your life joins, breaks, disappears And who but you remembers a beginning an end in one sound a single dash between shade and light And now you no longer have you have no narrator

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MAYA BEJERANO

(b. 1949)

Maya Bejerano was born in Israel. She holds a BA in literature and philosophy from Bar-Ilan University and an MA in library sciences from Hebrew University. Bejerano has published ten volumes of poetry, and her collected poems, Frequencies, appeared in 2005. She also has published a children’s book, a book of essays, and two collections of short stories. Her poems have been set to music, and her work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Romanian, SerboCroatian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Her awards include the Prime Minister Award, the Bernstein Award, and the Bialik Award. Bejerano lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a consultant at the Tel Aviv Municipal Library and conducts poetry workshops. The poems appearing here are from her collections Selected Poems 1972–1986, Voice (1987), and Beauty Is Rage (2001).

Poetry Now that her face is clean and pricked like a sieve with necessary truths—poetry may rise, bend a moment over her make-up table and face the mirror, any old mirror found in a store, a shop in some bazaar or other, and leap— cackling inside. So as not to mess up masks that will have to be erased and then wiped clean with water and soap

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it is advisable that each gesture line and color will be drawn with care the mirror a vast arena a watchful bull will look into the face of Mrs. Poetry as she leans into her own reflection will sneeze will dip horns— let’s wait and see how far she’ll go the bull in the mirror and Poetry facing it; the bull may exit the glass and ravage her as she bends a ravaged poetry—that’s what we’ll have if tamed poetry won’t face up to the bull in the glass

Data Processing #10 In a desolate hour I smell something burning behind my back. My lost kingdom; guarded solitude and weeping ahead. With what right? You do what you do, where’s the ending to your heart and, for instance, in what fashion does the rain strike her mane? Her mane strikes an abandoned rain. At this moment, all concentration is so precious. To take down a few facts: to drop like a diamond; and that the waists of houses have turned red. Sparks on the road grew more intense in my eyes in the night I swear. A dybbuk came in between angels—our singing feet. Dazed with wine, I’ll stagger like a flower of many leaves, to willingly swoon on an almond bed, a birch bed. But I’m engrossed in data, gathering. Let someone gather me onto his bosom cold or warm. An outrage, it seems, has been committed, but the good news, it’s been proven wrong. And again in the ashtray a bird flutters its visions. Like a teat of sweetness my heart beats more and still more. In my mouth melons of words get ripped like chamomile strips. Look, a horizon filled with character frolics there, a full salamandria.

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Learn from its manner for manna it is and just as pure. I emerge from the odor. Fresh narcissi warm in my vessel. Not accidentally, a rain of narcissi, yellow wasps. To leap or not? Leap farther like gazelle to gazelle, a hazy race behind you, dogs ahead and at your heels, their tails gain up on their snouts, their tongues a stray hawk. Praying hau hau, my way got lost in the moon, my hunger has been decreed for love simple bread incessantly digesting orchids of rain.

Data Processing #12 for Nissim Aloni At the first moment when I asked myself where in town I could cry at length without being stopped on the road with a tease: “What happened, is this what happened to you then, it shows.” Anxious anticipation—a colossal clear runway claimed by me alone. Everybody traveled in the spirit of her speech. Snickering killers bending over something coiled, like a leap. “Just like a dog,” not the killers, it’s another couple now. And before this I recoiled. You said something that broke me to pieces from so much joy. The night. Distant. A waste. In the dangerous park lay a wounded man—forehead, in the illuminated rocks; the flashlights fled to the bright intersection. In the dark the curve seemed to grow distant, no transgression met me, I take up

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your time with imprudence— a great dramatist of fear. Some fool up the ramp dared touch my face. Rage mounting with beads up the chest, the corners of the mouth. The sole of my gait wipes every step that’s been treaded on—to forget and feel something offensive or domineering. The tickle39 of oblivion soothes and a vicious flying balloon drags me to the benches. It is again the clanking umbrella that got lost. I dissolve from the south of town to the north looking for it. A large palm is about to stop its flight, to cool my ardor with the assertion: This emptiness and void is a danger—to pierce and to silence. Nightmares—M-a-y-a let your fancy run free . . . fancy; funny fancy. . . .

Data Processing #14 Run. Run quickly. Before the town disappears on you, heavy. A short-circuit cast darkness in the walls. This is a moment they want to rob me of. A tugging shout or a shove, a mission, a miss. I fled with the edict of silence not to speak twelve hours. My conscience is cloaked with sickness and cold. My room expires in its beauty. Stamens sink in my hands, a bottle is tossed from my window, leaving me mixed up with a drink, celebrating, and deep blue velvet. You’d better buy me today—the incident between the town and its strangler. Don’t liken it to anything beautiful, it is after all a rare expensive stage design reaching its peak: 39. In the Hebrew, Bejerano playfully combines the words “tickle” and “grammar.”

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the divergence of streets, the exit of people into houses, the infinite hats and the encounters at the painted corners the curtsies before gates and courts and lanes just an adventure with who knows whom? I forgot to speak with intent before sunset to go where the role waits for me— gliding. I’m hungry, outcast, and a memory of pounding smiles, and the muscle strain of a maid toiling in the dark some time before dusk, a mistake. Between her and herself lark is her name.

Lust Layered in flowers on bedclothes intermittently rumpled and taut to the air coming in through the curtain and wrapping us; it caught us bare-assed exposed to lust, harried, bent over, buttoning up, tying shoe-laces; we said: we have to buy and smooth out we have to mop and discard we must arrange and fix we must go we must find out we must wash and check we must clear and air and discard again until in the round sloping stomach down the pelvis and brown skin a tide swelled in rapid damp steps like rain drops in shuddering stealth ordering us to remove some of our clothing,

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off the tongue and face, the shoulders, the waist, the center of the chest and genitals and from the long leg muscles there rose a quiver of strain time after time after time

Don’t Stop the Motion Don’t stop the motion. Come in with a stiff pointer and the limp expression of a barefoot Renaissance Madonna the smile of a man in mid-life; we’ll discuss the connubial positions of lions and tigresses, moist twisted tongues, ravenous teeth, a couple of tender howls and the whole sex business is done Don’t stop the motion. Enter with a taut pointer and say with a limp expression: “I want to sleep with you, dear.” A barefoot Renaissance Madonna, a woman in her prime, fragile, at times hot at times cold. Don’t stop the motion.

Passion-Dress Rings of blossoms opened orange brown and red and our body sprang as a statue

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of soft substance; we mold our lives with great artistry, stay at home, move within its eager walls. What is this mysterious work performed by a master artist? One must obey his instructions, but, in fact, the two of us are stronger. Isn’t he our friendly death—a worn-out bell we tangle with while making love on the floor, on a nomad’s straw mat, having stripped off our clothes and donned a new dress, a passion-dress, and made a hut, a dream-hut, the form of matter.

The Hands of Autumn The deluding seducing warmth of autumn is short disrobing like a fashionable hanger dress; and the pine nerves of the city all around arching threads in mourning growing gray against a pinkish, darkening backdrop before vanishing toward evening. Slim handcuffs close on the loud blue heart, and beyond the sea drops and hides facing a sea of blue air above. And I fancy myself as the white quivering flesh of the oyster lying on a stone bench an earth basket reflected in the eyes of a glorious god as I diminish in the hands of time

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A Galilean Landscape, Important to Note A rectangle that is a doorframe in a hotel room, important to note a suite of two smallish rooms, one of a million just like it. The Kinneret40 is grayish today. The horizon merging with clouds, the blue of steel important to note I grasped it, at a certain hour, let’s say early noon, possibly morning and later gradually also late afternoon of a warm sultry winter and important to note that I wasn’t alone but beheld the shallow silvery veneer of the Kinneret that contained in her memory something important to note the sweat of the builders on her banks in fields that did not exist then, the tears of all those who drowned in her, the voices of the pioneers, the ripples of fishermen’s paddles, the engines of ships, the cries of pleasure and thrill important to note of tourists, shouts of dining pilgrims, all was bound and stored in her depths peels and remnants of meat and charcoal, bread crumbs, empty wrappers and the fish, important to note, were wonderful and resentful. I stood at the level of the seagull’s trust not alone in the door’s rectangle the brilliance of the sun still blinds from the room in the small hotel suite an idea is tossed, a seagull is mercilessly crushed important to note

40. The Sea of Galilee.

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that in the last minute the seagull was borne in the rescue net of my gaze important to note at the edge of the closing line of the Kinneret well marked and always ominous—depending on the season the look in her eyes and her will— one could see bougainvillea shoots and dense bulrush stalks a lake in dark green, and the rot of flowers, stone pebbles as jetty and the presence of palm trees invited one to be buried there important to note.

Pecan Leaves 1. The pecan leaves were just a backdrop the pecan leaves were the late backdrop that came later and before the backdrop of the pecan leaves there had been a myriad faces wishing for multitudes (like the apples of love-sick Shulamit)41 I cannot give the exact number. Faces near and distant faces from up-close and far away faces expected to arrive faces gone by we were all entwined in some presence quite rare— friends intertwined in the presence of let’s say music strains of some light music Clark and Humel Korsakov and Bach the Beatles and Gershwin. 41. Shulamit of The Song of Songs.

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The piano keys strode up and down the fat chords of the contrabass teased in their low tones and the trumpeter who resembled the shadowy Father Frolo, and so the medieval church of Notre Dame immediately leaps to mind, thanks to Tzvia, the trumpeter attired like the court musician in the palace adding to the twining process the stain of the effort visible on his lip. I try very hard to continue playing keep up the pitch and the train of faces grows heavy and is turned already into pearls white pearls the sun in a blunt angle beyond the right-angled, filtered, radiating simply, humbly. About 2pm, given to description with no difficulty: Luzit, The Terebinth Valley, Agur, a stone structure towering above— a Turkish bath acacia trees spectacular in yellow olive branches and carob. I want to go back to the white pearls behind go back not because I left a snake there or a mouse; a cool breeze entered to blow the notes and someone hastened to grab them with his switched-off cellular phone. But we haven’t smelled the blood yet (not the blood of the Maccabees)42 we only played played and paid attention to how the musicians whipped the air near us playing with us. 42. Name of a flower.

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2. The pecan leaves will be the pecan leaves are about to be a backdrop any minute any minute in the backdrop; they sat with their backs to the backdrop, just like that, Eliezer’s old parents and he next to them facing their house that’s about to crumble— about to crumble for decades now, like them, and that was the main subject. Three people in a stream of afternoon light pecan leaves as backdrop resting in their exact spot and the silence silence even when appropriate felt intense. And the silence stirred up the scent of blood

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RONNY SOMECK

(b. 1951)

Ronny Someck was born in Baghdad, arrived in Israel in 1953, and lives in Ramat Gan. He studied Hebrew literature and Jewish philosophy at Tel Aviv University and drawing at the Avni Academy of Art. He has published eight volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in anthologies and magazines in the United States, South America, and Europe. Two selections of his work have appeared in Arabic. He has participated in international poetry festivals in Israel, the United States, and Europe, and in 1992 he attended the Iowa International Writing Program. Artwork based on his poems has been exhibited at the Artist Museum, Lodz, Poland; the Um-El-Fahem Gallery, Israel, and in Gubbio, Italy, and his work has been set to music by Elliot Sharp, produced by Tzadik Records (Zorn). His awards include ACUM’s 50th Anniversary Award for Special Achievement, the Prime Minister Award, and the Amichai Award. Someck works as a counselor with street gangs and teaches literature and writing. The poems appearing here are from his 1996 collection Rice Paradise— Selected Poems 1976–1996.

Dog After Dog Tonight I enumerate silence after silence deep in the earth, traveling as if from one site of despair to the next and the wind kneads the earth into hill upon hill like in the bodies of the girls in my school-days when we sat like a family chair next to chair

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and their breasts gradually swelled on their chests their nipples pricking the air in class, and I locked my gaze on their stomachs trembling with shame. Tonight I enumerate silence after silence deep in the earth traveling as if from one site of despair to the next and there’s a dark green in the water forbidden to drink and rabies in dogs a couple of barks away and there’s light in their eyes and their feet bleed ice their hairs bristle and they flee from me dog after dog. Tonight I enumerate silence after silence deep in the earth traveling as if from one site of despair to the next and black hairs rip my face and hard barks sit in my throat an inoculation tag around my neck and the night is cold the night is cold

Greek Music The flying machines of nature can be launched with brandy, too. Safety belts are fastened to lost memories, and in the open air, between pulling the cork and the last swig, there aren’t many ways to pass the night. And tonight not one bird came back from the cold to the lands of warmth to my windowsill.43 Such a fading darkness, the odor of surgery runs through the words and on the spread wings of a sudden breeze Greek music is played softly.

43. Alludes to a famous line in a Bialik poem: “Welcome back, sweet bird, / from the lands of warmth to my window.”

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Solo In my alcohol-stream blood flows as well. My hands are weak and tonight across my face squats the sorrow of predators. In coffee houses people lose their skin, lose color, pavements generate currents and the trees have names which remained in nature class. In my alcohol-stream blood flows as well. He who loves is more loving than loving, he who strikes a match challenges the wind, and a soldier who came back from a base in northern Sinai left the oxygen of her lungs in the oxygen of mine. In my alcohol-stream blood flows as well. Words are devoured in the sorrow of predators, brandy’s diluted with ice and tap water, and longings are a light burning in the bedroom, an Elvis record, the clasp of a bra.

A Soldier in the Desert. A Romance in Photos The letter from her beau didn’t spray eau-de-cologne on her face. She wanted to weep as she changed from army fatigues into jeans and an Indian shirt. On her tape-recorder, on the wicker table, the tape of depression was already spinning. A woman sang, “You come to me like a flame then give me the cold shoulder.” You must break the bones, she thought, of he who does a thing like that. In the meantime, from the window, the desert seemed like a cross-breeding of a mound of sand and an electric wire in heat from a crow’s touch. And the crow? It is the gynecologist of this landscape.

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All summer she stalked it, in the dark, as it landed on the plot of grass, lascivious like a common concubine.

Johnny The news of Johnny Weissmuller’s death was broadcast in the military jeep on the way to Beit-Lid. The head that was turned to the jungles found the orchards of the Sharon. In January ‘84 even an orchard is an attraction, even a sprinkler or a pitchfork. Nothing to be done, the Land of Israel doesn’t live here anymore. From the fisted heart of Rabbi Yehudah Halevy remains the body and in a basement in a street bearing his name I can tell a girl: You turn me on. And she: If you’re turned on let me see your engine. What a great world with death leaps from branch to branch and wintry birds hiding in the horizon as if in women’s lingerie.

From a Distance the Tombstones Look Like a Flock of Storks For N, in memoriam From a distance the tombstones look like a flock of storks or a troupe of pigeons some Yemenite trained for the opening ceremony of the fifth or sixth Maccabiah. At night, when the pigeons flew home, N shot stones at them, bringing down

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two or three. The skies were clear of stars. They were named Lennon, Joplin or Hendrix, who then played along the watch-tower. In the south of Tel Aviv, a friend of N’s was dying, a jazz pianist. On the stereo Billie Holiday cut her skirt shorter by five centimeters. She was very photogenic in one of the streets near Levinsky. By the way, how do you translate “junk” into Hebrew? And why do I link this question to a cemetery? I could have just as easily asked it about somebody else, alive. No. Death in war drives the sick memory in an ambulance. Stretchers and sirens. If it’s a true alarm rising and falling sirens will howl. N’s sister came here for the eighth time wearing the same dress. Black satin in a cut that highlights her neck. If a silver platter is required at all let them, please, serve vodka as well, so we could drink to the memory of the piece of paper he had at fourteen, listing the names of girls who had begun to wear a bra. I was the only one who knew about this, now I’m the one who can remember it.

Handcuffs. Street Poem They put handcuffs on his hands because there’s no love in the world. He stole a sprinkler so that the cops would come and look for him under the bed and show him what it’s like to steal a sprinkler when you don’t even have a lawn. Neither does he have a father, and his mother is a line in the social worker’s log. What a pair of legs on that social worker, white as the cream cheese they served every morning at the home, the one who told him how nicely he drew a crow

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and on that same day he went to the Armenian in the Old City to get one tattooed on his muscle, as if his hand were a wall in an ancient cave. Great wings you could see in it and eyes and a head inclined toward the sky the ceiling of the penitentiary.

Poverty Line As if you could draw a line and say: Below it, poverty. Here’s the bread that with cheap make-up pencils turned dark as well as the olives in the small plate on the tablecloth. In the air, pigeons flew in a salute formation to the ringing bell of the paraffin vendor in his red wagon, to the sound of rubber boots treading mud. I was a boy in a house they called a hut, in a neighborhood they called Ma’abara.44 The only line I saw was the horizon under which it was all poverty.

Jasmine. A Poem on Sandpaper Fairuz lifts her lips to the sky let it shower jasmine on those who once met and didn’t know they were in love. I listen to her sing in the Fiat of Muhammad in the noon street of Ibn Gabirol. 44. Transitory camps built in the early 1950s by the government, housing mostly refugee Jews from Arab lands.

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A Lebanese singer singing in an Italian car driven by an Arab poet from Baqa-al-Garbiyye in a street named after a Hebrew poet in medieval Spain. And the jasmine? If it drops from the skies of Armageddon it will turn for a moment into a green light at the next intersection.

Autumn. A French Movie Autumn is a French invention written on a man’s face who comes into the neighborhood butcher saying he doesn’t have a title for the book he wrote. “Do you have trumpets in the book?” inquires the butcher. “No.” “Drums?” “No.” “So call it—No Drums No Trumpets.” Later, a yellow Prévert leaf drops on the gold chain around the neck of a dozing cat and first rain sits on its tail like the beginning of a bark.

Tear45 Comptroller Report In the school of weeping they teach the tear to sing a lullaby in the eyes of the toddlers. With a wet foot, the tear glides into the sandbox and hitches reins on the hollow horses. 45. In the Hebrew, “tear” and “state” rhyme.

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It is already quite clever to scribble on the walls to hide at the scary moments in a fairy tale. The teeth of lions scar its throat and the good fairies place a stamp of love on the envelope of its body. For a moment it is a target, stuck like a scarecrow in a shooting gallery. A bird of fire pokes holes in the cardboard of its heart and drips from its beak virgin blood.

Thirty Seconds to Charge the Nipple We had thirty seconds to charge the nipple it was a mound jutting at the edge of the obstacle course in basic training. Above it, the sky’s collar was ironed with the starch of clouds and the khaki of its dunes could be, in a different landscape, a line in a nature poem. But where is a poem and where is nature when two canteens bounce on your waist a Uzi in your hand and a shovel along your spine. All you could do was to feast in fantasy on the nipples of the squadron’s clerk who always lounged in the commander’s jeep and recall the painter Gauguin debating whether to eat the chicken he had or to paint it. There, facing the hill, we were very hungry.

Tractors The sons of Doctor Mengele sell tractors on the route between Munich and Stuttgart. He who buys them will plough the earth

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water a tree paint the roof tiles red and during the beer festival will watch how the bar’s band is positioned in the square like tin soldiers in a window. In history’s beauty-parlor they know how to comb a curl even in the hair of a monster.

Lions’ Milk My grandfather was born in the lands of arrack and on the labels of bottles lions were painted with combed manes and posing as lambs. “This is the king of the forest,” his finger would tremble and in his skinny mustache the wind would draft the longitude and latitude of the jungle I dreamed of. Lucky I got lost, or else Jack Daniels would have been my father and gin would have rocked the cradle of tonic in my throat. And only in the empty bottles I wanted to toss in the sea I hid in his memory a short note drunk with love.

Poem to a Girl Already Born On the day you were born the workers of joy warmed their hands against the fire lit with the match of your life. Night after night I am possessed with the sound of your breath as if it were the glimmer of a lighthouse for a sailor who was almost devoured by the ocean’s teeth.

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In Answer to a Question: When Did Your Peace Begin? On the wall in the café near the Ma’abara they had hung David Ben Gurion with his wind-challenging hair and next to him, in a similar frame, the doughy face of Umm Kulthoum. It was the year ‘55 or ‘56, and I thought that if they hang a man and a woman side by side they must be husband and wife.

A Pound of Child At the collection depot for orphans they weigh pounds of life remaining in store for a child in Rwanda. His hands grip the hook of the scale his feet up in the air as if he were an acrobat in the Olympics of shame.

Blues on the Life That Was Almost Mine I was born in Virginia. From my adoptive father, a judge whose rulings were blackened by payoffs, I learned to chew tobacco and reach for the point where the spine of girls ends. One night I stole the keys to the Chevrolet and drove it all the way to Atlanta. I lived in the car and nights I folded my clothes into a pillow on the back seat. Once, when they caught me pissing against the wheels and fined me fifty bucks I told the judge the sky is the ceiling, the bumper a toilet. One day, my lawful father arrived at the restaurant where I worked. He looked at me, and I stitched eyes with a magic needle I’d always kept in the pocket of longing.

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If this story weren’t true, it could have been planted in a song by Johnny Cash, but I, who brush my teeth five times a day to remove tobacco stains, disgorge all the Johnny Cashes into the same sink where I retched up Virginia. “Where will the bomb drop,” sings Roger Waters on the taperecorder and it dawns on me I can’t obliterate from my thoughts the gun my adoptive father kept in a drawer. Not a cloud darkened or dropped in this poem. I was then the philosopher of the moment when you pour coffee in a motel and the blond waitress wants to drown you in sugar. Why are you wearing a bra, I once asked someone like her, and she said her breasts, like my life, are a fist you must cover with a glove. P.S. Blues on the True Life I wasn’t born in Virginia. My father was a bar of silence across his lips. Since his death I stalk him from the back seats of bus number 61. Memory stops at the stations, opens the door, rings the bell, totters when it cannot find a seat. Under the wheels pounds a heart of asphalt and I on the pavements still beat my heels like a whip.

Rice Paradise My grandmother forbade leaving rice on the plate. Instead of telling about hunger in India and kids with distended bellies who would gobble every grain, with a scraping fork she gathered the remains

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to the center of the plate and with eyes practically tearing would recount how the uneaten rice would rise up to complain to God. Now she is dead and I imagine the happy encounter between her false teeth and the guardians of the sword at the gate of rice paradise. Under her feet they’ll unfold a red rice carpet, and a yellow rice sun will beat on the pale bodies of the beauties in the garden. My grandmother will rub olive oil onto their skin and slip them one by one into the cosmic pots in God’s kitchen. Grandma, I feel like telling her, rice is a seashell that contracted and you, like it, were ejected from the sea of my life.

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HAVA PINHAS-COHEN

(b. 1955)

Hava Pinhas-Cohen was born in Israel and lives in Jerusalem. She studied Hebrew literature and art history at Hebrew University and has published six volumes of poetry. A poet, translator, and literary critic, she also edits the periodical Dimui, which is devoted to literature, art, and Jewish culture. Her awards include the Prime Minister Award, the Kugel Award, and the Alterman Award. She has participated in several international poetry festivals, and her poems have been published in English, French, German, Spanish, Serbian-Croatian, and Chinese. The poems appearing here are from her collections The Passage of the Doe (1994) and A River and Forgetfulness (1998).

Explicitly Named46 All have already gone to the mountain, waiting, waiting to see, waiting very quietly, even the donkeys and camels are unusually calm, in this stillness not a bird chirped, nor children on their fathers’ shoulders, the silence unbearable as if before a great and terrible thing and I still wanted to hang the laundry to dry 46. The title also means “Ineffable Name,” alluding to the ineffable name of God.

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make time for myself to freshen up and I warmed the baby’s milk so it won’t starve won’t cry, God forbid, at the wrong moment how much longer until it is all over. Waiting for the laundry to dry and the baby, who knows. Nobody knew and I saw that a light breeze like the breath of a sleeping man went through the wash, swelling the belly of my nightgown and the Sabbath tablecloth became a white sail in the middle of the desert and we went from there upon the blue far away to a place where we’ll split pomegranates and suck their juice to a place where love is explicitly named.

On the Eve of the Holiday 1. Cracking the bones of her turreted crooked neck and down her spine I plunged a sharp black-bladed knife into the damp soft supple skin between her thighs. (A job well done.) I pulled her legs apart and then her folded wings (alongside her white body, paler than ever) and then I washed my hands off the chicken of my sins for the holiday soup. And the blessed aroma of carrots, onions, celery, potatoes, dill and spices and chicken feet filled the rooms.

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2. Six pomegranates in an Armenian porcelain bowl adorned in cobalt and Cabalistic blue. Six pomegranates with reddish cheeks soothe my eyes, my soul. My hands are scarlet with pomegranate juice, my hands are clean. I swear. In the yard someone fastens one log to another to create a temporary shade and someone else cuts into the foundation of my house. For, at night, between the slackening walls, there’s the clamor of columns of brown ants penetrating the cupboards and in the corners pale-legged spiders are building their homes, laying hairy eggs as if we’ve already left behind empty rooms.

Fear Each child emerged, a bag of fruit in its hand, one fruit of the land, one fruit of man, and he blessed. The rays of the sun and the moon and all the earth’s minerals went through the child, and while Sultanina raisins as translucent as citrus honey, and walnuts, ridged in a human puzzle, and almonds enfolded as a secret shell, and a dried fig whose seeds appear like golden coins, a honeyed treasure, made their way in a palm shut into a childish fist— a tectonic collapse took place in me hollow spaces and caves stalactites and stalagmites formed for a meeting of above and below such wondrous inconceivable colors, I swear,

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tumbled in a great din, like knights with the clamor of armor, and the cave’s ceiling tumbled with them. And when the door closed and the last step receded I vomited fears into a white baby tub. Fifteen of Shevat, 5753 (1993)47

Variable Texture Just when we believed He was generous to us allowing us free nights for love— I’m pure pure from my toes and up much water poured over my face—48 (all the while we were very busy erecting protective walls to safeguard a dream against any potential gusts writing contracts signed by a notary entangling each other all the more) and for many days no person burst out of me, and I’m utterly limp like a Rubens female. Back then we didn’t have the sense to sniff one another to rest the tongue on the skin of the other console the variable texture of our lives. And I wept for the wisdom He imparted the body to set seasons in a world enclosed within. 47. Jewish Arbor Day, a festive day for young schoolchildren. 48. Alludes to the mikveh, a ritual bath each bride must submit to by Jewish and state law.

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Boundaries And you said that my boundaries have narrowed that my eyes which were wide open their slats squeak their gaze shut behind glass And you said with derision that my tongue had sunk to lick dirt And I rose and folded the four corners of the earth to place under my head for if I can no longer walk the earth I’ll lie49 with her And nights letters will rise from me and soar like angels from my raging body and never again will you say to me something I can’t bear to hear

Time It’s time to enter50 pregnancy dive with bent knees into the belly into the amniotic fluid eyes shut observe as time is set apart 49. In idiomatic (and biblical) Hebrew, to “lie” with someone has strong sexual connotations. 50. In Hebrew, the idiom for “getting pregnant” can be literally translated as “go into pregnancy.” With the addition of the preposition “inside,” the poet changes the meaning to “enter (inside) pregnancy.”

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in slow motion like the cloudy pungent odor which lingers after the skin is torn from the orange the woman from her fetus as it slides in slow motion into the world from an accretion of pain like an image from its God a gaze from His eyes

Pietà For Ruth Carton-Blum There was a moment when she held me on her knees and her knees were my home and her knees were a table and her knees were an altar and her knees were a place to be small in what I saw beyond her shoulder what she saw beyond mine— that precise moment I can’t recollect But I shut my eyes to see myself supporting her on my knees and her arms drop at my sides my mother’s eyes looking into mine my eyes looking into hers and she tells me to cover myself at night and I tell her to go on and on and on as calcium escapes her bones her flesh dwindles on my knees and I reach my hand to raise her upward

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The Way to the River At the same time we arrived under the three trees on the riverbank. One woman after another arrived, a kerchief over her head, white garments in her basket, churned butter and garlic bread just baked. One woman after another we came from the streets, the windows, the backyards, and arrived on the appointed day the day of the end of menstruation. We coordinated with each other the day, the hour, using herb tea, sage and nettles, brewed in beet juice extracted from the clods. Three days after Sukkoth we probed each other like a blind watchmaker familiar with the mechanism. We immersed then sat for a while on the bank with shining eyes women through whom age navigates like thread through beads like a simple stitch. We sat, reddish brown or dark mud on our heads and the murmur of water like the murmur of speech already bespoke the following year.

A Hand Empty of Body Red stains on the palm of the right hand the red henna stained us in the same spot where they mark you with a cross for good luck, to betroth the girls, to bear a male child.

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And while I shake out the bedclothes very fine feathers float in the light streaming in through the slats I pull cases off pillows haul a flowery blanket from the warmth of children’s bodies and a taciturn cat goes through the rooms toward the milk we gave it while— a hand empty of body struck the glass pane of the Lepidus family on Sarei Israel Street, or King George Street, or Queen Shlomzion Street. Listen, lend an ear, here’s an ear, severed from the head, poised to listen, and a leg with a gaping knee landed in the sandbox. A shoe of an infantryman, worn and tightly laced, split right from left, and a solitary eye left its place, like in a Picasso painting— here it is, hovering above, watching over the House of Israel. The objects are identifiable horrifyingly familiar a small distance between the sanctification of the Name (in Magenza or Kishinev) and Its desecration in His holy city made in His image. I searched the words to bring me into chambers with an anxious motion

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to touch and feel the living flesh of my children give thanks for the respite the lull give thanks for my life sprouting like a small consolation from the tilled stifled soil of the window-box. And here’s a string of horribly lame words casting a shadow against a bright sun and an almond-tree in full bloom51 (what else).

51. Alludes to a popular children’s song.

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AMIR OR

(b. 1956)

Amir Or was born in Tel Aviv. A poet, translator, and editor, he studied philosophy and comparative religion at Hebrew University, where he later lectured on ancient Greek religion. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, and his volume, The Song of Tahira (2001), is a fictional epic in metered prose. His poems have been published in more than thirty languages, as well as in volumes in Ireland, France, Poland, Romania, and Macedonia. His collection, Day, was published by Dedalus (2006), and his collection, The Museum of Time, is forthcoming in Israel and in the United Kingdom. He has published articles on poetry, classic studies, and religious studies, has taught poetry in universities in Israel, in the United Kingdom, and in Japan, and has published several books of translations into Hebrew, including The Gospel of Thomas and an anthology, Erotic Greek Poetry. In 1990, he founded the Helicon Society and has been editor in chief of Helicon’s journal and of a series of poetry books. In 1993, he set up the Arabic-Hebrew Helicon Poetry School. He founded and directed the Sha’ar International Poetry Festival and is the national coordinator of the UN-sponsored Poets for Peace. His awards include the Prime Minister Award, the Bernstein Award, and a Fulbright Award, as well as fellowships at the University of Iowa, the University of Oxford, and the Heinrich Boll Foundation, among others. He received for his translations the honorary prize of the Israeli minister of culture. The poems appearing here are from his collections Face (1991), Ransoming the Dead (1994), and Poem (1996).

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A Pint of Beer The perfect murder has no cause, he said, the perfect murder requires only a perfect object, as it was then, in Auschwitz, not the crematories, of course, but as it was later, after hours, he said, falling silent, gazing at the froth, sipping. The perfect murder is love, he said. The perfect murder doesn’t wish for perfection, only to give as much as you can. Even in the memory of gripping the throat, life is still an eternity. Even the cries that cradled my hand, even the piss that fell like grace on cold flesh, even the heel of the boot that stirred yet another infinity, even the stillness, he said. Gazing at the froth. True, a decent arbeit macht frei, but a perfect murder wastes not even one drop. Like the lips of a child, he explained, like froth and sand, like you listening sipping, listening.

From the White Dictionary It never began, you know, the sea was like the sea, the waves clamored for the devouring sand, the sea was rough, some drowned

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and, after a week, time was garbled, nights shuffled like cards, at the beach-café, coffee was billed in the sand, he said. I come from the rain forests, that’s where I wanted to begin, but in the night a storm in the oak trees bore me until a dull tree trunk advanced on me, I couldn’t turn, its spikes tore my face, I flapped over like a trapped bird, my hair, then my hands, entangled like snakes. That night, birds nested in my palms. Blinded, I embraced a dark trunk, spread my arms, my fingers turned into wood against the wind, I was Dryad, and he smiled, uncomprehending, yet his teeth bloomed a painful white. Perhaps there was still time to halt, perhaps, but forests spilled from mountains and stars burned, shimmering on the road, inconspicuously, his hand slipped under my shirt and the air stiffened, near cracking, near scalding when he touched, trees took fire from wind, bright billboards warned fire, tongues of fire licked my groin, my foot trembled on the accelerator, stars sparked from the wheels, the car, it seems, knew the way, until all at once it stopped between houses of stone. The garden gate stood open, the sky hung low and blue, resting on top of poplar branches, the wind ceased, stars approached yet closer, trembled among the leaves, we craved slowly like the ocean swells on island shores, and monkeys climb to treetops to taste the ripened moon. We joined tails in a last-gasp effort, nuts shattered on the bed. He smiled like a sore, licking salt and staring, his eyes burned holes of bullets, his skin long tongues, his cock boiled and howled, have you ever heard a howling cock? While every cell in my body danced overjoyed, neighbors screamed this music is too loud, he did not stop even when the walls jerked and twisted and waves

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overflowed from mirrors onto the bed, I pleaded please, enough, I’m dying, he took no pity, deep inside I’m dying, the walls collapsed like sinking cotton, neighbors leaped from windows, their pockets bulging with peanuts, and hung like monkeys from oak branches, some woman still attempted to salvage the laundry, but already the building tilted on its side, plants, brushes, chicken parts kept crashing, hitting some and, of course, there was a commotion, he bled and smiled at me, dimming among the soft ruins, and a moment before the oak tree was on the room I saw him leap, all green, too late for me to stop dying.

No Trail Markers No trail markers. Mother will never come back. Weeping inward, into the blood. Independence Day in the land of lost children. “No-flow-ers here, no-flow-ers here,” a steam engine goes up my spine. One lone car bounds behind, I hop inside, shutting doors, load a last bullet. Shrieking Indians charge and I wipe them out, one by one, with turpentine-soaked cotton. The car plunges off the collapsing bridge. At the sides of my throat I quickly sprout trembling gills, carefully tread among the water lilies. Kelp and seaweed spring in my hair; I have no reason to go outside.

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A girl in a red dress rises from her grave. She captures my wings in her hula-hoop, my long, flashy, fluttering wings. She draws the hoop around my waist, pulls me into the night. On the castle’s turrets owls howl bitterly. Someone chuckles, lights a pipe. “Obvious technique. A cluster of spider-webs and primed nightmares.” But palpable fears of plastic, from the day before he knew how to speak, tear the corners of his mouth and the northern fort crashes on him in a sea-roar. On my knees snails awake with first rain and crawl up, toward my groin, cold and damp. An old Chinese monk crumbles into wise dust. The astrologer whose back gave out long ago is content observing the reflections of stars in the pond. The corrugated water confounds his divinations yet he doesn’t stop shouting them. He’s afraid of the silence of the fish. I toss the stick and papyrus into the Nile and my finger keeps writing upon the water. Hatshepsut puts on the mask of spite, quaintly steps down to bathe in the river. Behind her a procession of temple maidens, bearing their song to the man sleeping in the dark. The torches in their hands cast their shadows on my flesh hidden in the bulrush, and the fear collects green grass on my back. With the staff in her hand Hatshepsut reaches for the diamond between my shoulder blades 280

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and I—Oh, please, let me have my name back!— drift from dream to dream. A slender boy unfastens the chains on my chilled limbs. He paints my eyes blue, anoints my arms with cinnabar. With translucent hands he wraps around my loins a gold-etched belt: A sharp whistle rips through the porch and it crushes forever. Four medics in white get hold of me; but I find myself in the rain, shaking, only an unbuttoned coat on my bare skin.

Synopsis You put on your gorgeous fornicating body wear it like a tiger wears its pounce. I dig in your wound toward the capsule of morphine splash in the gorgeous plague squirt meta-pain sparks into the inflamed frame, bounce from trampoline of skies taut to the limit— shoot a last rain definitely last. Now a long shot roams the nebulas of flesh; now it is permissible to fold the skies break the frame A M IR OR

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edit memories pay. Like a tiger its pounce I take off your gorgeous fornicating body.

Immortal Three chefs labored flushing out the innards, stuffing shrimps, mushrooms. It took a dozen egg yolks a bottle of dry sherry twenty cloves of garlic salt, pepper, herbs, a pound of butter and despite the precise recipe he’d left some flair and improvisation. Three hours in the oven, a white tablecloth, red candles, a green salad, champagne. What can I say? He released the tongue but forbade the eulogy. As in his life, he was flesh and blood; dead, delectable and loved.

Poem52 Seed sown in sand awaits the rain for years 1. This poem will be the poem of another century no different from this one to be secreted safely beneath the ruins of words until 52. Six sections from the book-length cycle Poem.

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among the last grains of sand in the hourglass like a ship in a bottle, it is beheld, this poem that speaks of innocence; and mere people, supposedly wrought by time, like tarrying gods will listen to it for no reason that hasn’t been there before, rousing their backs like snakes from the rubble. It will no longer have a place to bolt from other than its beginning. Not poor, not affluent, it no longer deigns to make promises nor keep them, nor carry out its own word, nor economize, nor sail away from here to there. This poem, if it speak to you, woman, won’t call out, Muse, honey, and won’t lie with you as did its forebears. And if it speak to you, man, it won’t subdue, crush, won’t make up its face, won’t disrobe its words its flesh, for it has no has no whys. Maybe now I’ll call for it, this wicked poem of the century; here, sick in health it hardly walks, drags its feet in the viscid tide of trendy thoughts, or pauses to review the paperwork, taking stock of its baubles in rhymed arithmetic. The inventory: flowers, paperclips, corpses (yes, not to worry), tall glasses. After the clips, butterflies, too, numerous footprints and other hooks and shelves to counter learned critical claims, and just for the hell of it: tooth to tooth, with the abandon of a grinning chameleon, unaware that her colors have long since turned fable. Or, with unfathomable calm A M IR OR

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try someone else’s luck, with endless games of back and forth, meaningless, except, let’s say, for a bit of fun, lasting a line. Smear orange on blue of evening skies: now whitewash a little cloud, mount it, look down: sea of sea, sand of sand. Or fingers: ten worms, disjointed, move with untold grace. Now they surround a ball whose roundness is flawed, wondrous, fleshy. Furthermore, you’re allowed to speak (This is a fruit, they call it peach). These words are full of flavor, a flavor of being, of sound accompanying sight with wonder, not with the sound of a slamming thought. And that’s the poem: it sings, let’s say, to tar, stuck to a foot on the beach, to plastic bottles, to its own words. It sees only: black on white, translucent or grainy. It is no less naked than you, not more; with just that precision, immeasurable, but against the curves of a mutt, a potted cyclamen, a hair on the rim of the tub. The creatures here don’t want to know. The creatures over there who do, could, for now, be the creatures here, could become this antiquity that has nothing to say but, Me, me, without limit, without you. A native dog squats on a step in the afternoon sun and doesn’t distinguish itself from the flies. Its inside gropes for things, turns outward 3. Come, take a seat, watch: homes come back and resettle slowly. The frost ignites on the window pane. Another day. 284

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Come, have a seat. Coffee or tea? Sugar, milk? That’s how it goes: hard-boiled or over-easy. Yogurt or sour cream. Jam or honey. This life, you can’t do with, you can’t do without: morning or evening, man or woman, hot or cold—come, sit, what’s up? The sea and sand drown in one another, no lifeguard, no intruders, and I look at you, gripping broken planks, not even a boat, the situation is uncertain, the both of us pasted into the same phrase, carrying it further, each to oneself. Come, have a seat, tell me: Single or plural. Slavery or liberty. I or you. Love or. How can you tell. Fear. Only absently, as we have no shore no footprints, and the words have a ring and don’t, nor do they signify the images but that which gapes between them and is gone or never was. Come, have a seat. Tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions, cream cheese, seeded rye bread, margarine, salt. Even if you say: Wait, you’re dreaming—even if I examine my place and deeds, what will change? In fact, I sit facing the computer now. In fact. I do it—from the beginning, all of it. In fact, you’re seated before the page now, you long to reach the— like me. In fact, right this minute, you reach from inside out, devour the world that never stops pouring out of you: orange on blue morning skies, a frost A M IR OR

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burns on the window pane, a cup of tea—all that you’ve chosen now and was. So just like that, choose again: me, for instance, one breakfast, another day. Here.

When it knows that it crawls, the sloughing happens on its own 5. Hold a world. Cigarette, glass, lips, the weight of your bulk on the seat of the chair, my face, your face, autumn leaves on the sidewalk, a lunch box, a warm smell and fingers that cover you before the day is out. Now, for a moment, don’t hold. Let go. Let them peel and inhabit what’s in you without being so much of a world, without putting the green on the leaves or on the memory of palm trees on the beach (next to that body, boyish, bent over the notebook) let the leaves scatter on the pavement, rest, and not be “leaves” at all, nor “cigarette” “glass” “lips.” To spread in you like delirium, like a sea at the beach. And while they’re in you, switch them off, switch them on again. Off, on, off, on, and again. Now do the same with the universe where you are “you,” a thing among things. Watch it glide in the regions of a body, on-off-on and see what you are. The rest of it is but a parable. We—we’ll keep flickering, and in a binary pulse 286

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will resume saying nothing to all and sundry— I, you, etc. Why not create a new allegory: here, we’ve created this outside. The orange on blue, the “affront,” the “hope,” that which trembles between us, between being and nothing, between between and between. Let’s call it. In water, it is a sea-rose. Extends a flower’s arms, devours 10. And still we’re here, well equipped. Feet, back, biceps, eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin; we’re here— faces, interiors, neighbors, towns, nations. We’re here, breathing, alive. And what do we learn? Some say life is its continuity in face of another option, others say—conquest; some position the equal sign between life and its absence, and some say life was given us to serve those whose life isn’t life. I say: You. And it can be easily explained: night again shrouds the sights. Bulbs burn in the house. Even in the light there’s no gaze but the one from the mirror, nothing but that which watches me watching it; and it contains no release only longing, no death but life. I take from the warm and the cold, the night enfolds, and I long for one who sees me through touch, and I remember nothing. Only this. More 15. Therefore, I don’t even look at you, and prefer the window. And the eye, ruling in blacks and grays, pulls back now A M IR OR

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to discover here some broken outlines of growth of one heart not clearly visible. Like a dry elephant hide, etched with isles, ancient, the olive tree collects its wrinkles into the hollow of old curves submerged in shadow, to stretch again in arcs coarsened by the sun’s touch. Over there above the hump of a rind, a baby bends to a nipple, a rusty nail. Beyond that I neither look, nor think. How can I think about leaves turning gray outside in the twilight, the skies above them, above the glance. How can I think about the infinite and the void now that you’re about to die. And as you’re about to die, how can I not think of you. How to imagine lovers who have not been, or perhaps lovers who exist. To think that in this, too, there is thought of you, and believe in it. Can I be so strong only because of what you’ve done to me now. That you’re dead. Tomorrow I’ll write you a few words, an epitaph or at least a note— something poetic, as for example, “Here lies a dancer.” And if this is not enough to bury you, of course I’ll elaborate: “Water me,” I’ll write on the marble. “Water me, I’m thirsty. Water me and not with water. Water me and not with clear logic. Water me and not with a name. Water me and not with wine. Water me and no more, water me. Beauty is not enough, love won’t do, nor God—

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nor this life, nor any life. Water me, I’m thirsty.” Drowning, he breathes spring water 16. My Narcissus, at last you’ve adjusted. You’ve grown gills at the side of your neck, and sliding downward you’ve sprawled yourself among stalks and water. And the echo became wave, the reflection a place, and you’ve looked and looked and looked at the sky of the water and again you jumped—out, to me. And the thunder became silence again, the water—a curtain, the eye—marble. You became me again. And the echo was voice, the reflection face, and you were relieved. Come sit.

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TAMIR GREENBERG

(b. 1959)

Tamir Greenberg was born in Tel Aviv. An architect, lecturer, playwright, and poet, he also dabbles in physics. His work as a poet and playwright has received many awards, including the Prime Minister Award, the Luria Award, and the Tel Aviv Foundation Award. His poems have been translated and published in Arabic, English, French, Spanish, German, and Russian. His new play, Hebron, was staged in 2007 by Habima—Israel’s national theater—and will be staged by the Schauspielhaus, in Hamburg, Germany. The poems appearing here are from his collections Self-Portrait with Quantum and a Dead Cat (1993) and The Thirsty Soul (2002).

Ode More than anything I hated death. No, not death. The dead. I mean, just one dead. I mean, a dark-haired boy. I mean—I didn’t hate. I loved. Please, you who travel north along the shore, driving past dark fish farms, your headlights bright: press down the accelerator and fly, turn on the radio and cheerfully listen to the power coursing through the electric wires— for he was alive my friend, he walked among you,

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and his love of life was fiercer than the destructive might of the dead. For a time I awaited his return, then I stopped. His face, which meant the essence of my life, was brushed with oblivion. I was lonely without him. No, not lonely. Puzzled. I mean— my love for him grew stronger. Yet, as I step barefoot across the decaying earth confounded by the craftiness of the material world, as I see a run-over dog lying at the curb a family of worms nourishing on his liver, as I listen to the drone of life swarming in lawns, pubs, department stores and soccer fields where each individual is carved in a skillful pattern, as I try to imagine a colossal chain where there’s room for the conqueror, the creator, the clown and the one eager to be born in a plentiful stream of easy vitality— then I no longer wish to know if there’s a name to the pattern, its meaning, and what is grander: the living or its end. Please, you who quiver at this moment at the heart of nothingness anxious to charge the threshold of the third millennium thirsting to experience the pleasure of breathing, you, who anticipate with a fluttering heart journeys to worlds the eye hasn’t seen, you, who would impart reason to matter, would freeze fragile tissue, would quantify spirit in equations, you, who would work for a living, would mourn your dead, would drown your sorrows in drugs— fuse all the elements. Fuse iron, please. Fuse lead. Fuse carbon. Fuse sulfur.

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Fuse the solitary as well. The transient. The praised. The heavenly. Fuse your names. Your homes. Your money. Fuse with your hands. Your passion. Your great power of the imagination. Aim brilliant rays to where lust burns. Turn dust in your palms. Listen to the rap of rain-drops. For he was alive, my friend, and long before you arrived in the world he was forgotten, yet, even if his beautiful eyes had dried and his dear frame consumed in dust, the joy he wished to grant me hasn’t died. They will yet erupt in a flare of emotion those who are tuned to the ever vibrant note, they will yet be prized those keen on pondering the subtle, and in them, their spirit, their wealth, their beauty, will echo the love of life he possessed.

Son I ask nothing that Nature, in its grace, can’t yield, and even in that I wish for a commonplace thing. In my ignorance, I imagined poetry was an end. I thought: From the lines of the poem I’ll build a house where I could abide when my heart felt bitter. A great loneliness was my lot until I grew to understand that words, as beautiful and vital

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as they may be—how could I comfort them in sorrow, or share their joy? How could I cradle them gently in my arms and bury my face in their warmth? A son! If only I was granted a son! The miracle of an innocent gaze, his tiny palm supported in mine. For, his sheerest eyelash would be purer than any rhyme! My son. Mine. A dark toddler. A complete human, with his own reason and will. My finest love I will devote to him! We’ll sit together in the park, listen to the hum of grasses striving to rise. Look, I’ll whisper. Here we are and all things are beautiful and deserving. I won’t contemplate the days yet to come, which of time’s perils or riches will be his share. I won’t venture to guess which trains he will take in which country he will find his peace if he will fight with the blood of his heart for lofty principles of justice and beauty or if he’ll be infected with a crude lust for possessions if his fate will grant him true love, a home, or if he will be killed in a war. I’ll wait until he falls asleep, put my ear to his crib, and if it happens that from his sleep he utters some prosaic word, I’ll then heave my chest with the pride of a young father, boasting: See how lovely is my offspring, my proxy upon the earth. Is there something finer than this bridge that Nature has unfolded for me to delude, if only momentarily, the void?

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Dusk If a moth comes through the window of my room and sheds from its wings yellow dust on my notebook— is this a sign? If I wake at night from a troubled sleep and at the foot of my bed stands a dark silhouette— is it my friend? Please, lie to me. Tell me how pretty is the rotting vine. Tell me that the lengthening shadows at dusk are warm. If a cold morning rises, and a dense fog enshrouds homes, trees and people I love to watch— is there something else beyond? If a crooked crack in the wall pulls my gaze and the beauty of line reveals an artist’s skill, softness and intent, is this a comfort? Please, lie to me. Tell me that the foundation of the house is solid. Tell me that beyond the oceans great lively cities wait.

Elegy 1. In John Donne’s poem about the second anniversary of the Progress of the Soul I found written: “. . . think that they close thine eyes that they confess much in the world amiss who dare not trust a dead man’s eye with that which they from God and angels cover not.” Despite the bone-chilling cold. Despite the fact that it is the last night of November and I’m unable to imagine a candle’s flame casting quivering shadows across the white drape, 294

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nor the bright mercury light of surgery. I sit in my room and gaze ahead. With deliberate and clear thought I focus the white square of light on the face and wait: I concede that my naked body is but the total sum of thirty-one-year-old Democritus’s tiny creatures. Part of my body evaporates as water, another transforms into something which is meant to be but is not—particularly during sleeping hours—and part of it forms the one who looks fearfully into the small mirror in the bathroom. I also concede that soon I’ll be dead. I’ll be but the imprint of my teeth on a plastic blue pen, a scratch on the desk, the injury I suffered in my knee when I was four and a single recording of the persistent voice: “one two three testing one two three testing.” And what if I weep? Over whom? In one moment the body will convex the checkered blanket, and later—the featureless absence; the one who embroiders with a fine thread of pain the gods of physics and the bite of love balancing vacant hours with faceless days. I’ll fade and become nothing. I won’t walk blindly in the rooms of my lover, now three years dead. The branches of the pine tree won’t stir and the chords of the cold air stretching from the ridge of Mount Carmel up into the clouds won’t shudder with surprise as if rushing to the gap left by the body’s emptiness: I’m not Linus, my love. My flesh as yours discharges sweat, and my hand touches names only if the blade of time strikes. 2. The pen will dry up. The book will rot in the trash can. The kid on his bicycle TA M IR GR EEN BER G

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driving past my balcony every morning like a ghost is a reflection of the dead lover; one day he’ll grow into a smiling man, imprisoned in black-and-white snapshots, an artistic copy of longing exchanged for silvery coins of one shekel and one hundred-dollar bills. Blood molecules will become molecules of asphalt, and on both winter will descend. Rains will flood Herzl Street, will be drawn to the post-office square and dry up in the air with a thin wail: There’s no comfort in love. No comfort in machines. No comfort in angels. (An angel is a biological drea(m)ry mutation of a thirty-one-year-old man whose vain torments grew wings and his poem turned into a silver B.M.W. bike to ride into the guardian’s arms.) 3. (Not across the asphalt, but in the sea. In the still, heavenly, almost anachronistic sea, on a warm, wintry afternoon of a Tuesday) 4. As for the black-and-white snapshot— I concede, and even dreamed, that time is finite. I mean, the time that is a spherical ring. A ring that diminishes to zero at the soft touch of a lamp-light. I also dreamed that finite is the distance to where a hidden beauty can drift when the sky above the city is blind. For a moment only the seam came undone. For an instant the bridge spanned between the abyss of nothing and the abyss of nothing and atoms, as abstract as love but immortal, hurried and gathered from the ends of a universe forever expanding,

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from points that even the telescope on Mount Palomar hasn’t sighted, to become a gentle, dark body on which my fingers played a mute quartet on a January night. For more than a billion years your body, broken down to its tiny parts, roamed among cold and aloof stars until it dared to form against the waves of chaos into a delicate, fragile architectural structure. For another billion years it will yet roam, doomed to infinite drifting, like that clear persistent recording transmitted on radio waves to empty space, granting the reciting voice lovely lines of poetry by T. S. Eliot, immortal life devoid of human touch. The yellow light of stars blends with the yellow light of the reading-lamp. Traversing together through two memory slits the weight of the blue light refracted from the arm will wane. How miserable we will be on the third anniversary of the soul’s progress in soul: the body is immortal but the memory of its warmth is transient. 5. The pressure of wind on a billboard, the small wet stones on which the bare foot rests, and the small round stones moving in a circular motion in the inner ear: This is the life of the everyday. Evening, as I return from the office, I’ll recline, weary, on the armchair and imagine: you’ve written a poem. “The Twentieth Century is dying, my love, and so are we.” I’ve forgotten who of the two of us, crossing Hanevi’im Street every night, stopped to investigate the exact compounds of an aftershave scent “Aqua-blue.” The chemist? The dejected lover? Certainly not the artist. The artist—

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his name is poetic, but his life is selfish and remote, lacking the sweetness of time and place. On a filthy shard of glass he inscribes reflections of mathematical equations and gives them names: Birth. Serpent. Neon. Year. (Names whose end is sorrow, ignorance and deception.) “The Twentieth Century is dying, my love, and so are we.” New names fill the room: The uncertainty principle. The wave’s function. The moment’s alteration in the warm body. The alteration of the body in the open sea. The alteration of the open sea in its salt. In the bubbles of air released from the mouth of the drowned; in his wet curls; the nothing in the space-less void threatening to flee the bounds of the household ball of light; the nothing in the void in which a fragile ball of light floats—. . . 6. Who will remember how on the second week of February, nineteeneighty-seven, a camera flashed on your dark face, and you, silent and somber, looked past the shoulder of the anonymous photographer toward some hidden point in space? In your right hand you held a small book, blue-green. With a magnifying glass I read the tiny letters on its cover: “The Second Law of Thermodynamics.” Your open mouth suggested: in the middle of a word the moment had been severed from time to be buried in my wallet. For another year or two the word will float in the space of the black-and-white snapshot (measuring two and a half centimeters over three and a half centimeters) and then will be tossed to the garbage with unpaid electric bills and my notebooks. Blue-green will be the color of the last experiment, desperate, pathetic, to hold on to the simple harmonies and the pre-Le-Corbusier proportions - - - - - - - 298

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7. The first experiment: Impulse. The infinite digital line. A green screen. A green sheet. A green face. A green angel. Beep beep. A wave of zero amplitude. A green Michelangelo. Pietà: E — M = C 2 M = the mass of the thin lifeless body. C2 = the square of sharp light falling on the face, on the pallid cheekbones and on a frail shoulder. E =the faint energy of memory, weeping, trying to challenge the laws of nature fastening with diminishing strength the remnants of a green magnetic tape: 2 = 2 2 – 1 = 1 1 = 1 1 = 1 1 = 1 1 – 1 = 0 0 = 0 0 In the other experiment, based on what’s written on page seven of the blue-green booklet, perhaps comfort is hidden. In thin, pale letters, I found: Auyler, thirsting for love, proves the existence of a divine father in a simple mathematical configuration: love, weakness, sorrow and deception. And immediately after— ei␲ + 1 = 0 all the connections are given: the crease in the page, the height of the wave, the glow of light and its absence.

My Grandma Rachel Age Fifteen Today my grandma Rachel turned fifteen and the saliva drooling from her mouth is but a wondrous, diaphanous thread, TA M IR GR EEN BER G

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a path of light, a boat for inebriated angels to sail through into her body. And these are the names of God’s emissaries who came to anoint her feet in oil at her bed in the general ward at “Laniado” hospital in Netanya: The angel of the excreting sheets. The angel of bed sores. The angel of the breathing machine. What’s to my grandma Anne Sexton’s delicate wrist? What’s to my grandma the long curls of Arthur Rimbaud? “I’m happy,” says grandma in French. “I’m happy.” Grandma hugs the angel of the breathing machine that emits into her lungs air purified of germs. “Soon, my shadow will strike a small pile of snow, and then I’ll turn fifteen.” “Sheets,” says the nurse impatiently. “A pile of sheets.” “Marius, my love, will come to meet me near the fence of the high-school for girls in Bucharest.” Grandma laughs. “I was there already years ago. It was before my shadow refused to freeze on a small pile of snow, and when my love kissed me, his sweet kiss blossomed into my body like a rose petal, and later, in my father’s wine cellar, in the dim wine cellar, Marius threw me to the floor, and when he tore my virginity my right hand struck the tap of a barrel and wine oozed onto the filthy floor.” Grandma weeps. The angel of the breathing machine industriously drones a rhythmic song. In the hallway the nurses shout. Beyond the window I see roofs of ugly buildings gnawing at the sun until it is no more.

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Annabel Lee It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by a mountain shrouded in mist. I loved there an innocent dark boy but his beautiful name and his gentle body were never ever made known to me. Years ago he languished and passed away. Two years passed since he went. Like a bird’s brief and muted twitter. Like the drop of a pine leaf into a sweaty hand. Under the ceiling the angels hovered whose names were like his and like mine and a cold wind blew from my eyes and killed Annabel Lee. Later, the soft light in the clouds drew back, and time, too, turned its face to the wall. I recall a black-and-white snapshot I wanted to steal from his desk but never found the nerve

Poetics 1 I can’t write about love. I’ll write words. Here, I’ve written: “Love.” I could become absorbed describing the warmth in the pores of the skin. In all of them. The pores in the shoulder’s socket. The pores in the lips. I won’t drop intoxicated onto the couch. I’ll keep on writing, but will ignore the much harder syllables, such as “longing” which is but a double touch: the one who has left a burn in the palm, and the deeper one— its echo resounding in memory. The poem is the sanctioned lie between a crass desire for clarity and memory. Correction: The sanctioned lie between the blood and the imagination.

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Poetics 2 Poetry is the tongue of the stutterers. I mean, I think so. For, if there were no stutterers, what would be the use of rhythm. Clock. Ocean. Wind. Whistle.

Poetics 3 Having written so much poetry I learn the true way of love, in particular, all that concerns white doors whose edges are gold, their weight ivory, and nights their hinges groan with shameless bliss

Journey 1 I sailed north. Maybe west. I can’t remember. Beyond the cliff boys landed on my shoulder, intimating a gray secret. I laughed a lot. I plunged in cool waters. Alone. Then the carpet was thicker than ever and a quiet breeze reveled in the curtain. I heard terrible words. I was made to sing coarsely. I cried. I recalled a couple of names. Later I awoke and a quiet breeze reveled in the curtain

Journey 2 I’ve touched the asphalt but didn’t pray. I uttered words and let the wind come in through my shirt.

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My fingers felt a white pebble and its touch was sweet and cold. I rejoiced and sang: Air. I almost remembered all the words! Later I wished to go into town but a boy delayed me. His palm was warm and therefore I said nothing. He asked that I draw his portrait in gray watercolors. I refused against my will and watched the sky. I said: The song birds of the Twentieth Century are a flock of F-16s but he laughed in my face and took off on a CC 750 bike

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SHARRON HASS

(b. 1966)

Sharron Hass was born in Israel. A poet and an essayist, she holds a BA in classics and an MA in religious studies from Tel Aviv University. She has published three volumes of poems and has participated in several international poetry festivals. Her awards include the Hezy Leskly Award, the Ministry of Education and Culture Award, and the Prime Minister Award. She teaches literature and philosophy and lives in Tel Aviv. The poems appearing here are from her 1997 collection The Mountain Mother Is Gone, and from her 2001 collection, The Stranger and the Everyday Woman.

Our Life Is the Life of Beasts Pharaoh sails from Noh-Ammon across a green-eyed Nile. A dark music echoes in the chimes of his blood. Sorrow and the tumult of parting stir the body, like a leaf, across the night. Only dough and candy I put in my mouth: food for the reckless dying.

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With the same breath we consider fleeing and meeting: I become a howling wolf and he a white bird. Round and round I pace in the yard within towering walls of gold and fire summer has erected. Twisted and cold like a crocodile he goes up the river (to the outer calm?) With time, the words ebb between us. We’re ashamed to admit we haven’t died. Find it hard to admit that passion suddenly looms, again and again robbing us of oblivion. Only the motion of being is consistent. Not hell. Not happiness. Like laden vats of wine we are filled with mistrust and longing. Our life is the life of beasts. A bare and desperate life of failed love. Now only the singular gathers strength. Now weariness, too, is drunkenness: the ease with which the thread leaps from the hand, memory from pain.

To the Fox Very still under leaves, under shut eyes, I tremble. You light a fire around me, and I’m cold. Your arms pin me to the ground. A hardy, twining vine wraps around us. I don’t breathe. Grapes upon grapes my body scatters on black soil.

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It is not me you touch. Not into me you enter. Into the fox in me. A wild beast and a night of no features. A terrible softness. Depths that yield no reflection close on me. In the absolute parting of a day or two, spans the white stillness of plains— like prey, the open vastness numbs me. In it, I burn motionless. My life becomes dear to me: it belongs to the distant hunter and his limpid eye. And then, along the body travels the memory of love—a low voice, sweet . . . I know already, the voice that bid the sun, the grasses, the blood to rise, won’t allow me to run

The Stranger Summer, the stranger stands at the gate. Behind him stretch the dark robes of the sea and the scent of salt and damp wood emanates from his flesh. His depths call out to mine and seagulls shriek. The homeless wind churns and from my body drop black fruit and the ash of love. He summons my great nakedness to cross his vastness, a hollow ship on blue lips not betraying the rage or despair of the drowned. Destitute as I am he takes me and, out of ignorance

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bred of forgetfulness, I strain to speak the tongue of the deep. The tongue of that which glows in the dark. Beneath the hunger clouding my mind I hear how the fish convulse with laughter in his hands—I’m about to die in the brightest season when the light reveals and murders desire. He drives a sea through my hair and exposes my arms graying with lust and shame. Across the great waters the light deciphers my fervent wish for speech my horror of silence. Round and still the glaring light of the sultry season reveals how the salt of pirates produces black honey in his body and gnaws mine around the bones. My dear brother, lust gently held my face as I listened to time rise over the deck flooding the bed with cold despair. My dear brother, I’m afraid to utter your entire name. On the beach, at the top of a tower, a golden bell—for hundreds of years no one strikes the gentle chill. The tree-people extend green hands mumbling in myriad tongues of light and I wish to forget a gray pond— a deep impenetrable thought buried under its skin where time leaves no marks. The sound of harried steps echoes between the city walls—a war is declared between you and me.

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Ducks coated with thin wax don’t flee the blades of frost and the aroma of hot coffee engenders hope in us, we of the sheerest wings, of the shortest memory. In your great nakedness you refuse to approach, your eyes smooth with white ash of love. Beyond dark drapes the face of day is flattened. The eternity of the present is not more not less than the awareness of destruction and laughter that holds us at the edge of a chilling abyss of passion. Beyond the fog of alcohol we quiver warmth near warmth, like lost ships every steady light confounds us, simulating a home: the whims of kinship of black blood. Dear brother, are you not my dear brother? In the puzzle of estrangement your eyes two beads of light—whose face is it above me, beside me, a tiger, a star, or a flower? The sob whipping in the body is everything and nothing—and time undoes the heart into resignation into surrendering the name. Tomorrow, in the light, on the street, every boy, brother, is you. And I? I want to embrace anyone who could cast a shadow inside, breathe the wind. To seize the sun that time imperviously navigates from the land of the living to the dead to seize by the hand the great fire

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through which your face is smiling no longer visible

The Great Illusion The angel opens his eye, doubled like a crocodile’s, his stare, a frozen crystal, stirs the broad back of summer: there will be no escape. No mystery. Salt burns the fishermen’s palms and the fish frolic at length below before deep dark fingers haul them, soundlessly, to a shore of stone and forgetfulness. Scarce. Black bitter honey and the scent of cold fruit under the white lids of the angel of time— under the blades of his gaze despair grips the throat: in another land, more distant than any bottom, the stranger we’ve lost throws back his head inhales the fragrant blue robes of the heavenly choir. Strings of stars stretch across the time gap between continents: he has no longing for another place.

The Flutist I’m embarrassed to say it— if you don’t call, I’ll die. I’m embarrassed to say what is true and untrue. That which doesn’t move mountains. I don’t move myself anywhere. Some fool sits down to play the flute at the edge

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of the roof—I fall asleep. You don’t call. No one dies. Except for Mr. Present.

I Stand in the Circle and Look Around Me53 Garlands of flowers are laid on the bed. A white and yellow profusion conceals the horror of the sick. A total refutation of love, Ophelia finds harmony among yellow weeds and orchids. When desire breaks down to despair the body is allowed any interpretation. Under the frigid skin of the sheet I understand this perfectly. Wealth rages in waste, too hard to bear. Perhaps flowers will shut their lopped off mouths, desist from their unremitting wish to burn in one contained beauty. When desire breaks down to despair I understand this perfectly. One must silence a thousand tongues in the body (mine?) that was your body—odd . . . Before my dazed eyes my clothes burn without a sound, and inside the buds of fire destruction mocks a brief, embittered beauty. When desire breaks down to despair I understand this perfectly and sink below the river’s frigid skin to pick yellow and white flowers of oblivion.

53. From a popular children’s song.

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Afternoon Slumber An afternoon slumber takes us to the ferry, children fleeing the giants of heat and boredom to a blue shore at whose edge walk the dead. In their faces moving like cats they ask what we left behind did someone already betray us. Choking with longing we turn bold try to grab their hand, have them bend into us and see how tall is the love of their withdrawal. They slink, sly as the shadow that from a distance takes the shape of water, and turn to dust in the face of our craving A wave hurls us back to wakefulness. Pale and poor we know that someone has fed us from his palm not having seen his face not having satisfied our hunger

Smooth Boys The smooth boys that would cross our lives with their song, hadn’t been made yet. The earth hadn’t pulled them out of her like slender rain daffodils. All night we stood on the terrace observing the hill our faces open like the jaws of stony lions to hail the instant when matter is transformed to deliver us from ancient lords. We fell asleep. While still trusting ourselves the changes came leaving no trace on the dew-glinting pavements wresting our nicknames pouring wild monkey blood into us. In the morning, dim and arrogant, we yanked the rain daffodils, a moment before the singing faces

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split open within them. A moment before the wondrous stranger would change our lives.

The Sun’s Mooring From here, the port of the end-of-seas, only the sun knows the way out. But the sun doesn’t stir. Anchored in water it is a heavy light waiting. In the village of the dead there’s no lane and you don’t know in which bed you will lie during the day— the night of the living. You meet your lover by chance. You let go of him fast. Passion here has no memory, no anticipation. Going round and round water propels you to stagger into a bed where you don’t recognize the face sleeping beside you. In the retreating light you awake. At the edge of water you briefly weigh whether to follow the face that watched you, pale— oblivion singes eye-lashes, lids, brows. How to stretch a sail of might? Elicit sound from a sleeping face? Here the seer is unseen— with an eye perpetually agape

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the world dives in reverse like a soundless stone.

The Girl Fumbles The girl fumbles along dark walls the mother lingers above the open well. The dog’s ears quiver—where there’s no light the distance grows, the voices flee. The master of the dead simulates love, shows the girl red fruit. As if from the bottom of a murky river, a swarm of fish soars and shines. The girl tastes a red transparency containing a dark, salty ring. The mother settles upon the fields like wind. The master delivers the girl to the light. Behind her back he smiles: the spells of patterns in the dark are etched deeper than pain. Sweetness rages within approaching sounds. In the line of light the girl lingers— the threshold splits her.

Beyond the Forest Beyond the forest the woman I left waits. I haven’t touched her body as I touched the men in whose bodies I slept. I drove a black eye through her soft hair, and the careless lipstick, smeared like ice cream across her lips, was the flaw which promised warmth and hunger. I didn’t touch her but gave her the eye

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and she chased after me delirious with hope to duplicate herself. The sweep of her loneliness began to burn—a star disengaging from its frozen, protective orbit. She chased after me to let the words that drop from my mouth fill her lap with sweets to convert me into vassals to break me into kingdoms, summer homes, to make me the beheaded chicken she’ll tie around her waist while cooking

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AFTERWORD: The Poems of Irit Katzir In 1999, Professor Ephraim Katzir asked me to translate a selection of poems by his late daughter, Irit Katzir (1953–1995). He sent me her four books (Poems, 1993, Threads of Light, 1994, Sea Shell, 1995, and True Life, 1996), I read them and was captivated by Katzir’s distinct voice. Included here are a few of her poems.

Sylvia, Sylvia for Sylvia Plath Sylvia, Sylvia, people raise a brow. Sylvia, why? And I who came from the other side of the world, who was suckled by a barren moon and ever since became a gypsy of love, I do understand. There are voids that even a husband and kids, poems, and all the prizes cannot fill.

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You’d be surprised how well I understand. In the meantime I grow a black lily.

In the Darkness In the darkness of my door a knock on my heart. Outside, a poem. Naked and trembling sad and alone. I invited him in to be his mom. And so, many days have passed, my poem and I were good to one another. The poem grew like a palm tree. His face lit up like a wild flower. And I knew at once the time had come.

My Fancy Is an Island My fancy is an island. When an abyss opens at my feet, when the wind in its fury slams doors, I sail to my island. There I meet my sister who years before went to be with angels. We’re both barefoot, laughing, telling

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each other secrets, follow our whim. I rhyme poems for her, she flower-braids my hair. My fancy is an island, and I’m as pretty as a nymph. All love poems were written for me, and all men succumbed to my charms. In my fancy, my hair is golden, the sky clear of clouds. In my fancy there’s no room for worry, no one was ever scolded and no one ever shed a tear. In my fancy you touch my shoulder one soft gesture my body a poem.

Hell and Back I was in hell and back I loved a man I loved a woman but now the time has come. Forgive me for not having learned the rules.

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I was born without protective skin and the hearts of men are made of steel. And you child so near so far. Accept me with love like a mother. I’m so scared.

If I Were a Poet If I were a poet like Baudelaire to describe your beauty. But I’ll just say this: Your lips a love potion. More than once you insulted me, embarrassed me in front of strangers, but how beautiful you were in my eyes, a feral, royal mare. I’ve heard the musings of sages but your fickleness pleased me seventy times over. Today in the store I saw a flowery dress it would have suited you immeasurably I dream you.

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Let’s begin child from the beginning. Let’s play back the film, erase the hurt, the mad result of a moment. But in vain. What is the power of love if I can’t rouse you from sleep with a kiss as they do in fairy tales.

Do You Know Do you know who I am. That I was once a beautiful girl. That I had a love yellow like the moon. Do you know who it is I think about before sleep. What is the most beautiful thing I ever saw. And what is the last thought that will flash in my mind. Do you know who I am. And who are you.

* Yes, it is true, my poems repeat themselves.

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Innumerable times to utter the perfect moment. In fact, the only one existing with abandon, pain, madness, but why get involved. Any garment will only reduce. Better just with the purity of her body. To mold love with silence.

Captive of the Image Captive of her own image not knowing what is real what is reflection. A damsel in distress still waiting for the knight to come and rescue her from the chains the longing the blade the animals in the forest. Yes, there are sophisticated computers light planes and conditioned people. But in the twentieth century there are no princes. And as for the damsel only she perhaps is able to revive herself.

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I Saw You I saw you as an island child resting on the warm sand the shells in your palm invaluable gems. You and the sun like two mirrors reflect one another. I saw you like a femme fatale satin and pearls myrrh and resin. The softness of your lips the light in your eyes yet your heart so dark like a tigress you tear the hearts of your lovers. So why your lips all at once are bereft of kisses, your face, the object of dreams, so white. Why is it that your body destined for pleasure is frozen forever.

I Bemoan I bemoan the velvet of your lips, the pearl between your thighs. All the treasures I could never possess.

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Now in mists not mine not others’ and yet you’re in the bud, the stem, the shade, the light, in the sweetness of the moon, the pulse of the earth, elusive and palpable, beautiful and maddening. Therefore in secret I name you my love.

* “Only what I have lost—is mine forever.” —Rachel For who is to say what is real what is dream. Since you’ve gone day after day I recreate you in the regions of the imagination. Finally succeed to grasp the violence the softness the vagaries of your heart the gold of your laugh— in the cage of my heart to accompany me till I die

Why Did You Come Why did you come to take me

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from the clouds and I’ve already given up on communing with people. Why softly while I’m determined to die. Why flood with light my dark heart. I who said that all are deceitful why now a lover’s benefaction. Is it good or bad. Am I brave. Deserving. Like a newborn I must learn everything from the beginning.

Ailing But Not Ill Ailing but not ill in her grand bed my mother—a proud queen. Maids tiptoe around her to fill her wishes. A red revolutionary in a world without a Tzar a flame of fire in alien space. You opened your arms to embrace all, they bound you with borders, replies. We needed you as a completing puzzle piece to realize our delusion. But you—who noticed invisible colors— scorned the pretense wanted the truth behind the scenes. Dauntless you fought for innocence defended the dream

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refused payoffs resignations substitutions for you wished for the sun you wished for the stars therefore you kept quiet you vowed silence. Days, hiding in your bed, building from the inside secret worlds. Rooms within rooms within rooms and yet I don’t understand. I call to you now beyond the years to break the silence. Is it the kisses of froth the nights of sadness? Poetry becoming routine? Is it because it is not like in the movies with a tough, and yet gentle, Humphrey Bogart? You my mother who was a poet not of words— I would like just once to know and understand if I who waver between and between could have found comfort in your arms.

I Wanted 1. I wanted to make you like a poem to wear your robes sleep in your bed laugh with your voice so I could suck your fragrance from its body divert myself with your fancy.

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2. How to draw the sea changing mood and form endlessly in one day? How to freeze a bird in its flight—with a love song? 3. The treasures you granted with such ease the nerve to be outlandish guileless insane the wound you chiseled in the wall of indifference— all slink away from between the lines of my poems. In my bed I enumerate your merits like prayer-beads without the thread shadows of no image.

When You Spread Your Hands When you spread your hands you let go of your life like a spoiled girl leaving behind a doll she no longer likes. When you spread your hands you knew you were not a bird. My love, you went. A good old world remained which you wrapped as a gift for me. Tired sensations were revived with dew the shadow recovered its shades to the echo of its sounds. If it’s impossible to weep perhaps only the poems meant to stroke pain will be able to embellish your ripped body for the soul— the soul reveals what the heart conceals.

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* Winter, when the man of light left, I stumbled along corridors, knocked on all doors, trying to silence loud desires, knowing there are no answers. Even when they told me nice and wise things about impossible expectations, about necessary resignations, absence was reflected in every leaf, in every vision, in the walls. When the man of light left me he took with him all the keys.

Every Sleep Every sleep is a dress rehearsal for the great sleep. Every parting is preparation for the great parting. But, in fact, when I think about this, I don’t need rehearsals. Even he who knows not how to live, knows, like all else, how to die.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS TSIPI KELLER holds a graduate degree in English from New York University. Her translations have appeared in reviews and anthologies in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Her translation of Dan Pagis’s posthumous collection Last Poems was published by The Quarterly Review of Literature (1993), and her translation of Irit Katzir’s posthumous collection And I Wrote Poems was published by Carmel (2000). Her novels The Prophet of Tenth Street (1995) and Leverage (1997) were translated into Hebrew and published by Sifriat Poalim. Her novels Jackpot (2004) and Retelling (2006) were published by Spuyten Duyvil. Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, an Armand G. Erpf award from the Translation Center at Columbia University, and a NYFA award in fiction. Forthcoming from BOA Editions is her translation of Maya Bejerano’s The Hymns of Job and Other Poems. AMINADAV DYKMAN, a translator and critic, studied at the University of Geneva, where he worked with George Steiner, and at Tel Aviv University. His books of translation (into Hebrew) include The Chant of Stars, an anthology of French Renaissance poetry (1996), First and Last Poems by Joseph Brodsky (1997), and The Shield of Achilles and Other Poems by W. H. Auden (1998). He also edited with George Steiner Homer in English (Penguin, 1996). His latest book, My Generation, My Beast: Russian Poetry of the 20th Century, was published by Schocken Tel Aviv (2003). He has taught at Penn State University and now teaches at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

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INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES A Beetle’s Life, 94 A Belated Poem, 32 A black beetle slowly makes her way . . . , 94 A bus cuts through the illumined darkness . . . , 201 A calm sea. The end of September . . . , 18 A candle in the room . . . , 232 A chameleon crossing the road . . . , 229 A charred field . . . , 231 A Childish Farewell Song to a Prime Minister, 141 A Concealed Passenger, 177 A Cradle Story, 58 A dark backyard . . . , 231 A Different Sensation, 105 A Galilean Landscape, Important to Note, 251 A Hand Empty of Body, 273 A heavy light floods drowns the room, soft . . . , 237 A Linguistic Problem, 28 A man goes out to the dark . . . , 239 A man sits on the ground . . . , 61 A Mother Goes About, 88 A mother goes about with a dead child in her belly . . . , 88 A Moving Electric Message, 132

A Naive Painting, 130 A neighbor, her face creased with lines . . . , 195 A Note, 236 A Pint of Beer, 277 A Pound of Child, 264 A Private History, 94 A rectangle that is a doorframe in a hotel room . . . , 251 A Recurring Memory, 104 A Small Error in the Machine, 41 A smelly Mediterranean city . . . , 84 A Soldier in the Desert. A Romance in Photos, 257 A Sour Pickle the Angel of Death, 60 A Stranger, 47 A stranger was smiling . . . , 47 A Time for Everything, 12 A Very Cheerful Girl, 113 A winter-haunted sky . . . , 98 A Woman Who Practices How to Live, 53 A world is created in the shape . . . , 130 Abused Neighbor, 195 Additional Dimensions, 152 Afternoon Nap, 211 Afternoon Slumber, 311 Again the husband bones the wife . . . , 220

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Ailing But Not Ill, 323 Ailing but not ill in her grand bed . . . , 323 All At Once Everything Seems Dear, 164 All have already gone to the mountain, waiting . . . , 267 All that I saw were but flitting shadows . . . , 185 All the Trees, 156 Almost Flowers, 197 Already Night, Already Day, 116 An acquaintanceship that began in mid-winter . . . , 85 An afternoon slumber takes us . . . , 311 An Attempt to Express an Opinion, 80 An Exceptional Autumn, 79 An Explosion in Jerusalem, 18 And each beast had a white garden of its own . . . , 118 And I wanted to tell Batya this . . . , 109 And so, quietly . . . , 122 And the last shot . . . , 139 And the Whiteness Grew Stark, 175 And Then We Had, 43 And then we had a quiet evening and we were quiet . . . , 43 And Tomorrow I Too to Die Like This, 64 And Until When, 9 And you said that my boundaries . . . , 271 Anecdote, 29 Annabel Lee, 301 Antiques, 143 Apple the Cucumber and the Plum, The, 224 Arithmetic, 204 As Agreed, 36

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As As As As

I lock the car door . . . , 199 I say . . . , 113 I sit before you . . . , 126 if you could draw a line and say: Below it, poverty . . . , 260 As the heat reaches the innards . . . , 230 As usual, as in the beginning, it all began with water . . . , 97 At the airport a man . . . , 53 At the collection depot for orphans they weigh pounds of life . . . , 264 At the edge of the paper the pen . . . , 31 At the end of Independence Day 1972 . . . , 132 At the first moment . . . , 246 At the same time we arrived under the three trees . . . , 273 Aunt Miriam and Uncle Yerocham loved . . . , 51 Australian Story, 63 Autumn. A French Movie, 261 Autumn is a French invention . . . , 261 Baby Blues, 122 Back then she was like a binging preying beast . . . , 111 Baking, 230 Barks rise from the valley . . . , 233 Because I loved you so much I couldn’t tell you . . . , 74 Beyond the Forest, 313 Beyond the forest the woman I left . . . , 313 Bible in Pictures II, The, 136 Blue Prince, 198 Blue prince, mine, in a robe . . . , 198 Blues in a Jar, 177

I ND E X O F TI TLE S AND FIR ST L IN ES

Blues on the Life That Was Almost Mine, 264 Boundaries, 271 Breaks, 146 Brown deposits in the coffee cup . . . , 153 Browsing through the Album, 30 Burning Holy Books, 137 But one day a great Bible sailed . . . , 136 But She Had a Son, 85 Candle, 232 Captive of the Image, 320 Captive of her own . . . , 320 Cat, The, 83 Chances, 145 Cheese, 135 Chess at the Seashore, 18 Combination, The, 144 Come to Me Like a Capitalist, 158 Come to Me Like a Jew, 163 Comrade Poet, 40 Conceit, 47 Conceited and shortsighted people have restored . . . , 141 Condolences, 132 Confession: Gentle, 42 Convincing Herself She’s a Picture, 125 Cracking the bones of her turreted crooked neck . . . , 268 Dance Music, 75 Data Processing #10, 245 Data Processing #12, 246 Data Processing #14, 247 Day and night this shrieking in the ears . . . , 28 December. An arctic wind, new . . . , 25

Departure from the Garden of Eden, The, 146 Destined for greatness, he’s sprawled on his belly . . . , 30 Diagnosis, 28 Dog After Dog, 255 Dolinger, 191 Don’t Stop the Motion, 249 Do You Know, 319 Do you know who I am . . . , 319 Dove, 51 Dry thorns . . . , 49 During the breaks between burning and burning in hell . . . , 146 Dusk, 294 Dust Instead of Glory, 61 Each child emerged, a bag of fruit in its hand . . . , 269 Eats . . . , 52 Ecclesiastes, 50 Eight Short Ones, 229 Ein Leben, 25 Elegy, 294 Elegy for a Friend Who Lost Her Mind, 176 End of Winter, The, 26 Entropy, 145 Estate, 216 Even in sleep, you fill the rooms . . . , 11 Even now as she is locked . . . , 210 Even though the labia, usually . . . , 187 Every Sleep, 326 Every sleep is a dress rehearsal . . . , 326 Experiments in Hysterics, 77 Explicitly Named, 267 Fairuz lifts her lips . . . , 260 Father, 47

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331

Fear, 269 February twelfth nineteen ninety two . . . , 64 Fence, 104 Find myself in Café Marsand . . . , 177 Fire, 231 Flower of Anarchy, The, 140 Flutist, The, 309 For a long winter I watched . . . , 104 For Ruth, 118 For they are at the center of my life . . . , 120 For who is to say . . . , 322 For whom was intended the new sign . . . , 190 Forget me . . . , 76 Forgive my outburst, Sir . . . , 122 Fowl of the Air, The, 139 Fragments, 96 Friendly Dragon, 185 From a Distance the Tombstones Look Like a Flock of Storks, 258 From here, the port of the end-ofseas, only the sun . . . , 312 From the dark room in my brain . . . , 105 From the Depth I Called Hey, 214 From the Diary of a Divorcé, 21 From the White Dictionary, 277 Garlands of flowers are laid on the bed . . . , 310 German Boot, 178 Girl Fumbles, The, 313 Goat, 50 Go, Go Wherever You Go, But Go, 115 Goodbye Berlin, 41 Gouging, 239 Grand Days Have Gone By Her, 86

332

Grave in the Sun, 57 Great Illusion, The, 309 Greek Music, 256 Greenness of Leaves, The, 93 Hair of Night, 170 Handcuffs. Street Poem, 259 Hands of Autumn, The, 250 Having written so much poetry . . . , 302 Hayuta, 39 Hayuta remembers better days . . . , 39 He forgot to play . . . , 227 He went . . . , 175 Hell and Back, 317 Hello Berlin, said the wooden leg . . . , 41 Here . . . , 211 Here Everything, 118 History of My Heart, The, 95 Hogs in the muddy . . . , 99 Holy books, my friend said in anger . . . , 137 Holy Ground, 190 Hot in the Corner Café, 203 Hot in the corner café in Trastevera . . . , 203 Hottentot Venus (Porno 7), The, 188 House Said the House, 157 Houses, 31 Housing, 69 How deep pain breaks . . . , 129 How did it go... 86 How foolish you are . . . , 47 I almost brought flowers, you said . . . , 197 I ask nothing . . . , 292 I Bemoan, 321 I bemoan the velvet . . . , 321 I bought a Turkish perfume . . . , 38

I ND E X O F TI TLE S AND FIR ST L IN ES

I can hold in my belly all . . . , 174 I can’t write about love . . . , 301 I could have cut the veins in my wrist . . . , 145 I Drew My End Near, 173 I’ll leave you in writing this version in Hebrew . . . , 236 I’ll tell you the truth . . . , 83 I leave, taking with me . . . , 199 I’m embarrassed to say it . . . , 309 I’m no good at arithmetic . . . , 204 I remember a short speech . . . , 209 I sailed north. Maybe west . . . , 302 I Saw You, 321 I saw you as an island child . . . , 321 I Stand in the Circle and Look Around Me, 310 I’ve touched the asphalt, but didn’t pray . . . , 302 I Wanted, 324 I wanted to make you like a poem . . . , 324 I was a little reckless . . . , 172 I was born in Virginia. From my adoptive father, a judge . . . , 264 I was born to be gentle . . . , 42 I was in hell and back . . . , 317 I Was Not One of the Six Million, 1 I went past the cemetery where my parents are buried . . . , 5 I who was present down to the airy triangles between my fingers . . . , 214 I Won’t Travel This Summer, 193 I worked hard. I planted a bush . . . , 63 I wrote greetings for a friend’s wedding . . . , 36 Ido said to me: Men work outside . . . , 83 If a moth comes through the window of my room . . . , 294

If If If If

I Were a Poet, 318 It So Pleases, 10 things were tailored . . . , 49 we compared this century to a Ferris wheel . . . , 142 Imagine, Carving the Sky, 109 Immortal, 282 In a desolate hour I smell something burning behind my back . . . , 245 In a gesture of argument . . . , 228 In a night wailing winter . . . , 104 In a temporary shelter . . . , 226 In an incidental train, at night, at Long-Island Intersection . . . , 29 In Answer to a Question: When Did Your Peace Begin, 264 In Her Bed, 212 In John Donne’s poem about . . . , 294 In Memory of Dan Pagis (1930-1986), 13 In my alcohol-stream blood flows as well . . . , 257 In my garden I saw jasmine blossoms swept . . . , 4 In the Darkness, 316 In the darkness of my door . . . , 316 In the Garden of Independence . . . , 18 In the house . . . , 218 In the hour between wolf and dog the sacred cow of hardship . . . , 213 In the month of her death she stands . . . , 25 In the school of weeping . . . , 261 In the Soft Curve, 200 In the very early morning . . . , 212 In This Split Second, 48 In Time, 144 In time, when the sign is given, you will find . . . , 144

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333

In what chains they had brought her to Paris . . . , 188 Incident, 71 Interim Summation, 72 Interior Plain, The, 211 Irritating Manner in Which I Exist in Your Fancy, The, 214 is a complicated matter. Only one bird . . . , 33 It is the year nineteen-ninety . . . , 93 It never began, you know, the sea was like the sea, the waves . . . , 277 It’s time to enter . . . , 271 It Seems Miraculous to Her, 210 It was far, as usual, a few drops that night . . . , 32 It was many and many a year ago . . . , 301 Jasmine. A Poem on Sandpaper, 260 Jerusalem, Bus #18, 1986, 147 Jerusalem, the holy city, is cold in winter . . . , 178 Jewish Time Bomb, The, 7 Johnny, 258 Journey 1, 302 Journey 2, 302 Just as I sit with complementary nipples . . . , 217 Just when we believed He was generous to us . . . , 270 Last-Last, 77 Later is too late . . . , 132 Layered in flowers on bedclothes . . . , 248 Let there be in the house a troop . . . , 48 Let’s Make a Little Philosophy, 164 Letter, 150 Lie, 47

334

Lightly, 128 Lightly, like painted fish . . . , 128 Like a Binging Preying Beast, 112 Like a Bird Tagged, 212 Like a bird tagged on the foot . . . , 212 Like a buoy your breath was left . . . , 237 Like Back Then, When I Was Escorted, 111 Like in the Passing Year, 111 Like light I travel . . . , 95 Like you . . . , 101 Lions’ Milk, 263 Lonely Woman’s Monologue, 17 Look, as we promised each other . . . , 36 Lost in the Alleys of the Flat, 153 Lost Uncles, The, 139 Love Song, 205 Lullaby, 89 Lust, 248 Lying Upon the Water, 84 Marked Ship, The, 124 Matter, where do we go . . . , 234 Meantime, 35 Meantime, in my dream, she returns to me . . . , 35 Memorial Night, 27 Metamorphosis, 152 Midas of Sugar, 224 Monologue in the Twilight of His Life, 16 Monologue of the Deserted (II), 13 Monologue of the Witch Impregnated by the Devil, 174 Moonstruck, 51 More than anything I hated death . . . , 290 Morning, 153 Morning and She Pees, 215

I ND E X O F TI TLE S AND FIR ST L IN ES

Morning in a Foreign Place, 56 Mornings, 101 Mortification of the Soul, 19 Most of the time I doze . . . , 154 Mouth, The, 20 Move away from this blue . . . , 56 Mud, 99 Music of the Cosmos, The, 103 My bulging cat . . . , 211 My desk kept shrinking until the tiles underneath were exposed . . . , 21 My Fancy Is an Island, 316 My father passed away . . . , 60 My grandfather was born in the lands of arrack . . . , 263 My Grandma Rachel Age Fifteen, 299 My grandmother forbade leaving rice on the plate . . . , 265 My mother is a hooker without a dagger . . . , 116 My nails grow deep into my flesh, into death . . . , 40 My Parents’ Motel, 5 My Wisdom, 134 Narrator’s Death, The, 240 New York: First Swim, 97 New York: Second Swim, 97 Nights, 100 Nights, 126 Nights he’d get drunk . . . , 81 Nights when she goes out alone . . . , 109 Nightwatch, 11 Nine words I said to you . . . , 94 19th Century: Nohant, June ’76, The, 138 No, no, they were definitely . . . , 29 No peacocks will strut in my yard . . . , 216

No Trail Markers, 279 No trail markers. Mother will never come back . . . , 279 Nocturnal I, 218 Nocturnal II, 220 Noon: a man in acrid clothing . . . , 57 Not a Poem, 141 Now it’s better . . . , 177 Now that her face is clean and pricked like a sieve . . . , 244 Now that theory has split from physical reality . . . , 152 Nuns, 206 Ode, 290 Odors, 106 Of course all that you’ve written/ thought/ wanted to say . . . , 150 Omens, 82 On Life and on Death, 81 On my desk stands a stone the word amen engraved in it . . . , 7 On Rain, 46 On that memorial night for what’shis-name . . . , 27 On the day you were born the workers of joy . . . , 263 On the Eve of the Holiday, 268 On the roof of the house . . . , 100 On the wall in the café near the Ma’abara . . . , 264 One measures his trembling with a shaky hand . . . , 76 Only in Hebrew, 134 Only in Hebrew beautiful . . . , 134 Our goat was going to die . . . , 50 Our Life Is the Life of Beasts, 304 Painting, 201 Passion-Dress, 249

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335

Pauper’s Talk, 63 Pecan Leaves, 252 People who smoke calm me . . . , 205 Personal Problems, 74 Pharaoh sails from NohAmmon . . . , 304 Photograph, 105 Pietà, 272 Play in the Kitchen, 227 Poem, 282 Poem to a Girl Already Born, 263 Poetics 1, 301 Poetics 2, 302 Poetics 3, 302 Poetry, 238 Poetry, 244 Poetry is the tongue of stutterers . . . , 302 Poetry will steer me to another recollection . . . , 105 Porno 2, 187 Porno 3, 188 Poverty Line, 260 Power of Attorney, 73 Precision of Pain, The, 4 Preparations for your death began . . . , 240 Quiet and an evening breeze . . . , 200 Rain on the square . . . , 80 Ready Alert, 83 Reckless Love, 172 Red stains on the palm of the right hand . . . , 273 Requiem to a Dog in the Rain, 98 Revelation, 212 Rice Paradise, 265 Rina Slavin, 91

336

Rina Slavin lies in bed all day . . . , 91 Rings of blossoms opened orange brown and red . . . , 249 Room Number Forty, 205 Run . . . , 247 Sabbath Prayer, 48 Sacred Cow of Hardship, The, 213 Safe Distance, 76 Scent of Wind, The, 201 Seed sown in sand awaits the rain for years . . . , 282 Self-Portrait at Night, 34 Shame, 53 Shaheeda, 221 She coiled with pain . . . , 138 She waits for me . . . , 106 Sights, 99 Silent Film, 150 Silhouette, 237 Sits on the balcony reading a crime book . . . , 224 Sitting in the field watching . . . , 223 Sitting in the Wall, 174 Sleep with Me Like a Journalist, 161 Sleeping in Another Place, 237 Slowly slowly I see it vividly . . . , 79 Smooth Boys, 311 So Overbearing Had Become, 208 So overbearing had become the body’s crust . . . , 208 Solo, 257 Solomon’s Egyptian . . . , 12 Someone tried to scrub the stain off the wall . . . , 68 Somewhat warm in the bus, an overcast day . . . , 147

I ND E X O F TI TLE S AND FIR ST L IN ES

Son, 292 Song of the Valley, 233 Spider of Sin, The, 46 Squash Watchman, The, 223 Stain Remained on the Wall, The, 68 Stairwell, 225 Stone, 129 Stranger, The, 306 Such homely nuns I saw . . . , 206 Suddenly - at his age . . . , 58 Summer, 49 Summer, the stranger stands at the gate . . . , 306 Sun’s Mooring, The, 312 Sweat, 239 Sylvia, Sylvia, 315 Synopsis, 281 Tale About the Arab Who Died in the Fire, The, 88 Talking to you is like walking on eggshells, you said . . . , 150 Tear Comptroller Report, 261 Tempt the Devil, 24 Testimony, 29 That Made Me Woman, 45 The anarchic flower gave off a wonderful fragrance . . . , 140 The angel opens his eye, doubled . . . , 309 The bulldozer turned up a gleaming marble hand . . . , 143 The combination to the safe . . . , 144 The dead died in summer and the poem . . . , 238 The deluding seducing warmth of autumn . . . , 250 The departure from the Garden of Eden was swifter . . . , 146

The flying machines of nature can be launched with brandy, too . . . , 256 The frog originated in a movie . . . , 196 The fruit is done. Now it has . . . , 224 “The future,” Dan said on the telephone, about two weeks after surgery . . . , 13 The gentle demons that followed me . . . , 152 The girl fumbles along dark walls . . . , 313 The greater the bond—the greater the distance . . . , 10 The houses shook as if chilled. Facing them . . . , 71 The key to room number forty . . . , 205 The letter from her beau didn’t spray eau-de-cologne on her face . . . , 257 The light above my door proclaims . . . , 17 The light in the room grew bleak . . . , 112 The maiden we call Hebrew . . . , 28 The moon doesn’t fit here . . . , 202 The mouth that enthralled . . . , 20 The news of Johnny Weissmuller’s death was broadcast . . . , 258 The paper dinghy was tossed into the puddle . . . , 139 The pecan leaves were just . . . , 252 The people we wanted, wanted badly . . . , 225 The perfect murder has no cause, he said . . . , 277 The point of lucidity floats like a feather . . . , 111

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337

The rain reveals the hidden names of leaves . . . , 121 The skull is reflected in the window pane . . . , 34 The smooth boys that would cross our lives . . . , 311 The sons of Doctor Mengele sell tractors . . . , 262 The sparrow that collected a piece of cellophane . . . , 196 The sun every day like a groom . . . , 50 The wagon of Johann the neighbor . . . , 99 The wall has a mouse the mouse has ears . . . , 174 The war is the extension of the policy . . . , 131 The whole of my wisdom contracts to the bulk . . . , 134 The wind that blew in our region . . . , 145 The window travels the clouds travel I . . . , 169 The winter outlasted the priest . . . , 103 The wondrous wilting of a flower . . . , 232 There are people who’ve got nothing to lose, there are people . . . , 77 There was a moment when she held me on her knees . . . , 272 There was a scar across his thigh . . . , 188 They Assault Me the Flowers, 199 They’ll sing to you . . . , 89 They put handcuffs on his hands because there’s no love . . . , 259 They say it is good to be . . . , 45 They’ve always waited for just this moment. Since then . . . , 77

338

They’ve plucked the feathers off the goose . . . , 124 Thirty Seconds to Charge the Nipple, 262 This Evening, 49 Three chefs labored . . . , 282 Three Poems That Weren’t Written, 36 Time, 271 Time paints . . . , 201 Time-Saturated, 204 Time-saturated I am and the sorrow . . . , 204 To Be Continued, 131 To Rise from Ashes, 33 To the Fox, 305 To weave the locks of darkness . . . , 170 Today my grandma Rachel turned fifteen . . . , 299 Tonight I enumerate silence after silence deep in the ground . . . , 255 Tonight I Saw, 108 Tonight I saw her fragments . . . , 108 Tonight I Yield, 193 Tonight I yield to a gaze . . . , 193 Tonight suddenly . . . , 47 Toward Evening, 202 Tractors, 262 Train of Thought, 90 Travel, 234 Travelling to Jerusalem on a Moon Night, 169 Through a lit tunnel, under the river . . . , 97 Turning to Rest in Sappho’s Poems, 210 Tuvia, 159 Two in the morning . . . , 153

I ND E X O F TI TLE S AND FIR ST L IN ES

Uncle Yerocham was so worried . . . , 51 Variable Texture, 270 Vegetarian, 52 Very still under leaves, under shut eyes . . . , 305 Wall Calendar, 25 Water Queen of Jerusalem, The, 171 Waves of Love, 149 Waves of love are logged in geology . . . , 149 Way to the River, The, 273 We had thirty seconds to charge the nipple . . . , 262 We live in a difficult time when . . . , 135 We’re sprawled across the cool stone . . . , 210 We reflected at length. Light flooded . . . , 75 We’ve stabilized the emotion . . . , 234 We will lie in the mud . . . , 46 What justifies most of all . . . , 73 Wheel of the Century, The, 142 When he faced the guillotine . . . , 24 When he was thirty-five . . . , 69 When She Goes Out Alone, 109 When Soft Angel Plumage, 215 When soft angel plumage sprouted in my flesh . . . , 215 When the blaze caught his body it didn’t happen gradually . . . , 88 When the day comes, father of my child . . . , 13 When the glass drops . . . , 82 When the Music Subsided, 111 When the music subsided and next to me longings . . . , 111

When the Nazis came they were quite polite . . . , 41 When the neighbors opened their front door . . . , 191 When You Come Lie with Me Come Like My Father, 167 When You Spread Your Hands, 325 Who is she to talk . . . , 90 Why a Frog, 196 Why Did You Come, 322 Widow, 38 Will Power, 76 Winter, when the man of light left . . . , 326 With a wooden spoon I scrape . . . , 63 With your charcoal eyes . . . , 26 Without a shirt she waited . . . , 239 Without my noticing . . . , 16 Woman Becomes Tree, 165 Woman with Pitchfork, 217 Words of darkness, hot as wax . . . , 9 Yes, 196 Yes, it is true . . . , 319 Yes, the night was full and crammed. At least . . . , 72 Yesterday, when I sat in the café . . . , 207 Yom Kippur on the Sabbath . . . , 19 You and I and a brook . . . , 96 You arrive slightly late—a green felt hat, an elegant jacket . . . , 27 You put on your gorgeous . . . , 281 You’re after a man who doesn’t exist . . . , 115 You’re only twenty . . . , 221 You rose from the sea . . . , 47 You were a field of breaking poppies . . . , 176

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POETRY

P OE T S O N T H E E D G E

An Anthology of Cont emporary Hebrew Poetry #

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introduces four decades of Israel’s most vigorous poetic voices. Selected and translated by author Tsipi Keller, the collection showcases a generous sampling of work from twenty-seven established and emerging poets, bringing many to readers of English for the first time. Thematically and stylistically innovative, the poems chart the evolution of new currents in Hebrew poetry that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and, in breaking from traditional structures of line, rhyme, and meter, have become as liberated as any contemporary American verse. Writing on politics, sexual identity, skepticism, intellectualism, community, country, love, fear, and death, these poets are daring, original, and direct, and their poems are matched by the freshness and precision of Keller’s translations. “This comprehensive and amazing anthology is a great read best taken slowly, savoring each page of outstanding poetry. Tsipi Keller has had the patience and intelligence to select a stimulating and powerful group of poems, with accurate and very readable translations.” —Shirley Kaufman “ #"

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is a true masterpiece. The translations are sensitive, wise, graceful, and insightful; the selection is rich and inviting. What a brilliant achievement!” —Miriyam Glazer, American Jewish University “Keller’s breathtaking anthology, some twenty years in the making, shows that voices of contemporary Israeli poetry can be compellingly narrative, elegantly lyrical, elegiac, passionate, eccentric, and even phantasmagoric. Her translations convey the skepticism, wit, and energy of these poets who speak of loves and breakups, query their places in Jewish history, contemplate metaphysical questions, and paint pictures of everyday life in Israel.” —Lynn Levin, Drexel University and The University of Pennsylvania

TSIPI KELLER was born in Prague, raised in Israel, and has been living in the United States since 1974. Her short fiction and her poetry translations have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her novels include  #; #; and 
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" She lives in West Palm Beach, Florida. A volume in the SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture Sarah Blacher Cohen, editor Cover art by Michael Sgan-Cohen (1944–1999),  
  acrylic on canvas, 40x40 cm.

SUNY

P R E S S State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu