יתכן שהגענו עד הסוף
הכוכבים מקסימים, הנוף מגדירה נוי מחדש
אבל הכל שממה
הרוח בין רגליך נשמע כאגרף דופק בדלת
ומה יבקש
ומה יצתרך
הרוה הזה בלי פה בלי בטן
הוא רוצה לפתוח גופנו
ולשרוק בעצמותנו
הוא תופס מעל התמר ומושך שעריה
והיא מלחישה ייסורה לדמדומים סגולים
היא פעם התאהבה ברוח
נטה ראשיה לשמוע אותו
ועכשיו
יתכן הסוף יבוא לבקר
אותה ואותנו
הוא יפתח פיו לדבר
אנחנו כולנו חרשים
ברוח כזה

inspired by dalia ravikovitch

When I was a young girl
I wanted to live in a hanging garden.
How strange, how fun
to live as a rose on top of a roof.
Now that I am older I want to know into every soul
I see, like I know a sentence
if I’ve touched the page to my lips.
But you see, knowing someone’s soul isn’t so different
than watching them from a roof,
seeing where their hair is thinnest,
watching the strangeness of their gait,
just me, fulsome rose,
sentinel with many spines.
I would still want to be this way
if only I could guarantee
that burning dress of petals
would stay on me.
So all night I watch the city
which is still as a city in a book.

August. The birds racket towards morning
a grey place the moon left in a one-man bucket plane—
was it the wind in the pines
or a propeller I heard
twinned with you in my bed?

To August’s husks and hot gusts
I speak an old language of prophets, shepherds,
a language in which cisterns were built, kingdoms splintered.
Hebrew envelops my tongue, throat up, like water
through pipes, and it sleeps
when I close my lips.
Like a bird, I keep song on my migrant tongue,
I am building a home of dense darkness
and I pick up a strand each night in my teeth.
So many songs of return jostle for my attentions,
a crowd on a day train with its curtains drawn
heading towards distant cities—
August, thirty-one days without a sleeping car
hungering over rails, between low-slung trees.

It is an ordinary February morning and I am writing in Hebrew. Beside me, two girls are speaking Russian, and the few words I remember float past my ears: ‘The sun goes… and the moon goes… I go too.’ February, and I pour out my heart in a foreign language.


בכמה חודשים, באמצע טירוף האביב, אעלם, אשב בפרחים, לא אדבר, ולא אקרא; לא אחלום; אף אחד לא אנשק, אפילו לא אאכול, ואשתות רק מי גשם שנופלים בפי... וככה אגור עד שאני שוכחת אהבתי, עד שהוא רחוק ממני כריח פרח אדום שאני זוכרת; חלמתי עליו באמצע ילדותי... אני עדיין זוכרת, גנבתי פת לחם חם מהשיש, אכלתי אותו בחושך הורוד מתחת לוילון תלוי בטרקלין... ובסופת שלגים קטנטן של פרורים נרדמתי. בחלומי צמח פרח אדום: צנוע, ספוג בטל, ורק, פתוח ורק כפה. הרגשתי פתוחה ורקה כפה, רקה חוץ מאפשרות של שירה שאף פעם לא תתממש.*



In a few months, in the midst of the madness of spring, I will disappear, I will sit in the flowers, I will not speak, I will not read; I will not dream; I will not kiss anyone, nor will I even eat, I will drink only rainwater that falls in my mouth. Thus I will dwell until I have forgotten my love, until it is as far from me as the smell of a red flower I remember; I dreamed about it in childhood... I still remember, I stole a loaf of bread from the counter, I ate it in the rosy darkness under the curtain hung in the parlor... in a small snowstorm of crumbs I fell asleep. In my dream a red flower grew: modest, soaked in dew, and empty, open and empty as a mouth. I felt open and empty as a mouth, empty but for a possibility of song that would never be fulfilled .

hebrew kick today.

obviously rough and unedited, so i apologize for my sins against this noble and ancient language.

מתחת לצפצפות אני מנסה ליצור דבר יפה כתמיד
וירח נח כתום ועצום מעלי
ממנו כרגע שמענו חדשות של מים
נרדמים הלומים בקר החלל
איך הייתי רוצה לישון דומם קפוא בלחיי הלבנה
ולא לשבת בשולחן עשוי מפורמיקה
שומעת סריטת כוסות
ושמה מחוץ לחלון המערפל
תיפות רכות דופקות בצמרות


rough translation i will polish tomorrow:

under the poplars I am trying to create something beautiful as always
and the moon rests orange and enormous above me
we've just heard news from it of waters
sleeping smitten with the cold of space
how I would have wished to sleep silent and frozen in the cheeks of the moon
instead of sitting at a Formica table
listening to the scratching of cups
and outside the foggy window
soft drops on the crowns of trees

poem to the leonid meteor shower

On a night filled with bells and starshowers
I am anointing myself with silence,
my blood a pool the black boatman ferries
Hebrew letters across,
to reach out their arms
and drip from my mouth like a musk;
I will go out under the sky,
a broad neck cowled in cloud;
at its center matter burns
in a breathless void;
I will beg for boundless stillness,
streaks of vavs and zayins
scattered supernal and rough
on the dull klaf.

two-poem thursday!

Hey guys, if you are reading/following this blog and have a Google account, could you put yourselves down as following the blog? This doesn't mean you have to check it every day or anything, it would just be nice for me to know who, if anyone, is reading what I put up here...

Anyway, sometimes when I get a "stuffy nose," writerly speaking - when I'm not happy with what I'm writing and think it sounds a little off, and everything I write seems to be slightly awry, I try writing in Hebrew... I'm 'bilingual,' which means that I've been learning Hebrew since I was six years old (and my mom spoke it at home a little, although we always made fun of her for it) and I spent a year in Israel with Israelis and I've been relentlessly exposed to it... which is to say I have an imperfect, not very refined vocabulary... one of the good things about writing in a second but comfortable language is that I expect a certain degree of stiltedness and so I paradoxically am much freer to express the concepts I want to. All of which is a very long prelude to saying: I wrote a (clusmy) poem in Hebrew today. Following it is a clumsy translation.


לא נעים לי עוד לשוט בחיי
כספינה קטנה מוטלת ברוחות
לבד במים ומשתוקקת לנגיעות החול.
קשה עלי לסבול חיים בלי פלא.
לאהבה ולשמחה אני כאיש יושב בפתח בית
ובתוך הבית הילולה נדירה וגדולה
עם יין ומדורות...
נמעס לי עוד להרטיב את שרווליי בבכי
ולחלום על עבר מזהיר שלא היה.

עוצמת העולם עבר ממלך לאצילים,
נפוץ והתפזר ויושב עכשיו איתנו...
גם בי קיים כח ההחלטה,
חלש וכמעת נרדם,
לא בטוח, כמו נשמה, בהיותו בי בכלל...
אהה, השעות יורדות בבטן השעון החול! --
בוא אלי, אהוב, ופה נוכיח
שלא נעלמו כל חום וזעם משטח העולם.


I'm no longer content to sail in my life
like a small ship cast about by winds,
alone in the water, dying for the touch of the sand.
It weighs on me to live a life without wonder.
To love and joy I am like a man who sits on the threshold
and in the house is a rare party filled
with wine and bonfires...
I want no longer to wet my sleeves with weeping
and to dream of a shining and fictious past.

Power in the world passed down from kings to lords,
spread and diffused, and sits now in us all.
I also hold the power of decision,
weak, near to sleep,
unsure, like a soul, of its own existence there...
O, the hours descend in the belly of the clock!
Come to me, love, and we will prove
that all heat and wrath have not dispelled
from the surface of the world.



ALSO
this is the poem I was writing and then got discouraged and then wrote a poem in Hebrew and then finished:



Two women passed me in the square
carrying black bowls in their hands.
Outside the all-night market the beggar shakes her cup.
And another woman roared a love song at a stopped car's wheel
and took off howling her rotten joyful rage
like a shout down the great asphalt tongue
of the boulevard into the night.

The numbers gentle on through the belly of the clock.
If I walk long enough,
if the air grows cold enough on my body,
will I shed my husk at last,
will I grow admirable and good?

My soul is busking its desires
on a worn guitar to an indifferent promenade..