Drunk with the Gamut April 2010

On the stereo the song asks me to push it real good
Its true that for weeks I've been aping the songs of the flowers
All stem and need, all saffron that fleed
From the scene, demanding a little rest.
But the light unfolds into little deaths,
Winds strips the petals like unwelcome guests.
Hoe long have I stayed on this earth
Bleary and spitting in the jam?
Sire of unwelcome desires
I am I am I am

It’s April
I pluck the last toke from the ashes
and listen to Ray Charles singing about America the Beautiful
there’s something poetic about a blind man singing this way
what does purple mean when you can’t see it?
what does a poem mean when you’re too drunk to see straight?
are we done?
I hope we’ll never be done
like the blossoms turned to princes
by the flowering of April
I hope we never get used to all this

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.

poem for passover

My country of many things
was carved out of a book, a bomb.
Here I am, up north, in its fervid army of blossoms.
My sister’s boyfriend balances his Uzi on his lap
and sticks his tongue out fiercely when he peels an egg.
He is just twenty, and ties his boots around his neck
by their laces sometimes, to store them.
I have spent so many hours in houses
of prayer that turn eastward, here
where the light begins, and burns away answers.
All along the road up here,
metal silhouettes of tractors
burned ochre in the highway lamps,
and three scripts, still as three rows
of seeds, lit up green highway signs.
Tonight we’ll sing the story of a book,
a river of blood.
And the moon will peer like a peeled egg
over a hundred cypresses.

I step into the dense air of Ben Gurion Airport.
Stunted trees lean down into the concrete,
guttering, undone, between the baggage carts.
And the Jewish year which burns like a candle
with wicks all down its length
is lighting me all the way up Highway Six.
This earth is gathering its wretched in like a kerchief
folded in at the corners
and a woman is singing through radio static
a ululating song of hunger and praise.