the song of oscar rosenberg.

I am Oscar Rosenberg. And when I sink into white sleep it is like falling through a waste of sand. I am not like you, though I have cast my God into the putrid rivers of this city. I am a newly modern man, stripped and base, naked of head, but pure of heart. I will stand as I am under awnings and linden trees. I will seek love as spontaneously as sunlight. In a Laundromat, or in the belly of a train, I, Oscar Rosenberg, with five new liver-spots between my neck and elbow, who forgets the words to songs and whistles them with a flat metallic tone, a bundle of limbs in perpetual motion, will love and die in the streets of this city like a rook that cries out in constant, crystal syllables.

It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them again. The stems of the tulips look like bones to me. A field of unbearable bones. Spring, a violent dream, a shudder through all growing things. I feel like one of those waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into the bellies of many countries; where the drops of my blood fall a flower with a new name will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust, will grow lurid as a painted bust, will continue its dense chorus, adding day after overbloomed day like a handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling, trembling.

Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads: Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open doorways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her. You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, slimming the kern of each line, you could make your unruly self disappear. Limb by limb, like a rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl, drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water. The days pass like geese driven backwards by a gale. You want to build your life like an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, black lines of ongoing predictions.

I remember the first time I heard the story of Orion, and the first time I created him, pointing my finger, out of seven stars. The first time I saw him over the lake, over the hill, between the naked branches of the yew in winter. My first visit to Jerusalem—through the Dung Gate, in rain. Some memories are stories I tell myself and add words each time: the first time I crossed the George Washington Bridge, all the pylons were wreathed in fog, and Manhattan wore puffs of cloud all down its glassy nape. Or: And I cried for an hour, and I soaked the final pages of the book. I couldn’t believe how it ended! It still looks like I left it cooking in steam. Or: We got chocolate ice cream at the diner, and he drove me to school at seven in the morning. And some are remembered impressions - as if looked at through a sheet of doubled glass: the first taste of hot chard, the first wood I watched burn to ember; the first peacock I saw, sidling and crooning toward the hen; the first pains of divided love; the first time I saw a model of an atom, its smooth, bulbous joints; the first time I looked into the face of a supine, dying animal. If I list endlessly, forgive me my lists. My memories click against each other in my palms, like white marbles, and I am trying to play for keeps. Still they contend. They enjoin and pardon each other, but I am hedging my bets, I am filling my pockets: the first song composed, the first watched sunrise, the first rasping wood-frog I caught and let free again, and the way it took off, with a queer, sawing, angular motion, up over the mossy rock.

I’ve worn glasses since I could remember sight. I stare at screens behind glass cups thick as a lemur’s palm. I scuttle about toting a heart the size of a citron, the color of a tomato, my favorite machine; in the cold I seize up, and my teeth begin to tap out their secret language. But I'm talking about an afternoon in February, and yes, I confess I was going to seize up. I sat at a blondwood table. You brought me a cup of soda water. I felt my sorrow settle down slowly, like the agitated air in the cup. You hurt your knee sitting down at the blondwood table and the snow began to tumble past the windows. I took off my glasses and stepped into the welcoming fog. February finishes itself like a glass of soda water, leaving a salty taste on my tongue.

is this a poem?

"During the Communist era, parents needed a special permission form to give a child a name that does not have a name day on the Czech calendar. Since 1989, parents have had the right to give their child any name they wish, provided it is used somewhere in the world and is not insulting or demeaning. However, the common practice is that the most birth-record offices look for the name in the book "Jak se bude vaše dítě jmenovat?" (What is your child going to be called?), ISBN 80-200-1349-0, the semi-official list of "allowed" names. If the name is not found there, offices are extremely unwilling to register the child's name."


For three weeks Marketa thought she was going to have a baby. Under her print dress, it was working as avidly on assembling itself as she worked on her sums, or at cleaning house. Marketa didn’t tell anyone. After all, words disappeared from her lips as soon as she said them, but the hollow bowl of her belly was filling up to the top. She had devised a secret name for the baby that wasn’t in the name-day calendar. There was no saint behind it and perhaps no history at all. If anyone had ever been named thus, she imagined it was a devil made all of glass, who capered about, quick as a greased whip, and glittered in the light. For three weeks, each motion of her hand—to straighten the shelves, to mark bought bolts in the books with her pencil-stub—recalled to her the pretty motion of the hand of the daughter of Pharaoh, catching up the baby from his reed basket. In her own walk she found a new consciousness, a heavy prettiness of gait, between the beeches, themselves heavy with light. But soon enough she found she was only a reed basket: shedding its pitch lining. Down it came, a thick, blackish tar. Of this, Marketa, too, said nothing: only watched the beeches part, then bend again, into a fragrant lattice, covering the continuous slow progress of the river.

I got up to watch the sun rise this morning.

My legs felt like heavy putty or molten glass, but I wanted to know the sun rose because I had seen it myself. I perched on the highway bridge. Hidden under a maze of roofs, the sun turned the steam billowing out of the boot factory to a rosy haze. I watched the cars shoot one by one into the open jaw of the bridge and disappear. I remembered: the moment I realized that the words ‘car accident’ meant a moving car hit the body of a man and he died; the moment I realized clouds could move. The febrile sky pulsed with color over heavy ice. For years I have been appealing to the teachers of my childhood, in the hope that they can tell me who I was, who I am. But if once they could recall the first spidery and comical shapes I made, my first letters, these since have fallen to the musty grave of cursive-books, marble composition books, scratch paper, tumbled over each other like leaves in a gutter; the seventh word, the fifteenth step, a customary gesture of the hand.

THE ENEMY OF COMPLACENCY IS KNOWLEDGE OF THE INFINITE.

THE ENEMY OF COMPLACENCY IS KNOWLEDGE OF THE INFINITE.

The instant love first manifests itself is incalculable: it can appear in words as they are first spoken, or hidden, smothered in ink, in the barrel of the pen; in blood under fingernails, bruised knuckles, a pocket filled with coins that tremble and knock sides. I myself have fallen in love over and over with the sun, with perfumed chalk, a stuffed oriole, a field, sidewalks pocked with mica and tar. Then the earth in all its extremities seems a blue bell to me, ringing and trembling. In these moments the outcropping of a wall pricks me and I am outraged; I am stunned by the smell of flowers, drugged; I turn a cigarette like a perfumed chalk between my fingers; the earth, a pellucid bell, an open mouth, urges me on, and I am insensate with ardor.

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 .

I sit at my writing-desk like a dreamer who knows if he makes a sound he will wake, and is silent, content in a dreamed room filled with rain and red-beaked birds. Yesterday I tried to read the work of a famous poet aloud, but the meter barbed my mouth, piercing my tongue clean through. The words of the poet were composed at sea. At dusk, a diffuse and sluggish light, as if filtered through a heavy surf, settles over my desk. The willow branches that brush my window, my half-lit neighbor’s house, seem to me foreign, as if I stared out the window of an inn in Malaga, where drowsy rushroses drug the air. The last light hovers like a woman’s lip the clouds run their fingers over continually. I am caught between sleep and waking, as the window-pane is caught between the warm house, where children sleep, dreaming of cruelty and riches, and the rain that streams, dolorous, into tin gutters.

Walking between dense banks of purple heather, I am suddenly terribly afraid. The sun round as a cockle, fetid brush pooled at the roadbank. I am trying to remember the name of an old friend’s husband, a barbed mess with many c’s and z’s. What if I have lost this strange, Polish name, of a boozy person with a coarse nose? Will I then lose the extraordinary purple of the heather here, the corrugations on the first pale birches, the felt-soft snouts of dogs I have known? So much depends on one coarse-haired person. I remember he liked to cook pierogies in lard. The light on Sasha’s forehead, the relentless sound of dice in his cupped palm, the path I am standing on which is tamped and black – all this seems to fade away even as I step. I pinch yew berries until they bleed their glassy juice onto my thumbs. I resolve to be a warrior until death, wielding my memories, scythes made of light. They’ll send me off in a black ship with a broken neck.

The June I was eight I sat under a kumquat tree. Unsettled evening swept a big, unfamiliar sky. I was far from home, white house, perpetually extinguished lamppost, frost-gutted bricks, windows specked with soot. Here the little vans seemed to cave in under the force of the night heat. And during the day, molten plastic seats fierce against my browning calves. This far from home, I felt my wrist often, watched the little blue bead of vein, and my sisters' lips as they bickered and sang. A black bird whooped and sank its beak into a kumquat. Out in the blue salt night paws speeded up, stilled.

In every patch of bitumen on the long road from here to Bethlehem on every photon every slat in the blinds every pane of warped glass every ruddy sweating pear every grain in the floursacks drop of saliva on the long pink tongue bitter seed in an orange wedge stomachpain Bible hero in every worn sneaker ill-designed star-chart plumstone pumice stone teardrop cigarette every outmoded children's classic worn filament new nylon jacket hole where a plug should have been I am loving you unbearably and entirely

this is a real item in the skymall catalog

A Box of Laughter And Applause

will greet you if you buy it from the inflight magazine. 4 ½”w x 3 ½”h. Craving a little recognition? A three-dollar apple rots in the seat pocket. Coffee creamer swirling less than 2% acid esters. The wing light blinks in a waste of mist. 2 AAA batteries (included). You can see through the camisole of a stern-faced woman in the bathroom line. You recall flying over the sea as a child but dimly. The propeller round as a pupil. The plane impelling itself through dark air. Desktop day-brighter MDF. Magnetic closure. Light through the exit window makes the jump seat blaze. 4 ½”d. Open the Box of Applause. Open the Box of Laughter. Close your eyes and imagine a crowd less hoarse with want and ire. Dark cherry finish. Uproarious guffaws.

what?

The startling red leaves block the whole sky out. We wanted to gather them in our hands. We had seen the night in our mirrors, but it meant nothing to us, the moon idling in the window and never earning its keep. The dirty stoops surged over with steam that belled from the manholes and slipped, softly as sleep, without sorrow or ire, to the hills. But it wasn't so long ago we stood out there ourselves with sorry fistfuls of branches. We wanted to look up at the night, surprised at the moon, which would wash over us like slaked lime. Or go to Goa where it comes down to lap at blue ledges. But carelessly and cast aside, scraped clean, the moon sits in the square like a melon rind tossed in the street.

"An obscure darkness passes over me..."

An obscure darkness passes over me...
I feel death is my sister and friend, and I might clasp it to my breast, as I have clasped my sister and counted her breaths. The light presses on me like an insistent lover, dulls me, moves me to a hapless indolence. Death inures itself to me, protesting my life, which seems suddenly to be a stern figure in an ill-lit painting. Murmuring to me and with my sister's pale hands, death moves through a square arrested by snow, and I appalled by light am silent, am, in the opulent light, still.