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 march 30th anxiety attack

This evening in March
fear is lighting itself in my belly.
It gutters there
sending up a spined shadow on the wall.
That hungry expanse
dulls the walls of my belly.
A sleepless darkness, mother
of subterranean tremor,
a dessicate mouth
open as if in speech
but black in its silence.

All along the path today
the first flowers cried their lives,
each petal bright
as a sung word.
Now darkness fills each over
and March trembles at its center
like a snapped cord.

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.

I am Henryetta. I store everything in my girlhood room. I tape my sisters laughing and I keep the tapes in the trunk of my car
which is smooth as a pill. And there are the tape spools. Half melted, all various, like a hundred black hands.
I follow Sam he’s my love. I’ve been following him for years. I say, don’t you know
your Henryetta? I met him in a patch of peach trees. We ground the blossoms to dust. Then we smelled great. Like the best dust. I’ll tell you what I love about Sam. It’s his ankles. I cup them. His pulse is feeble as a moth’s. I follow, follow. I wring his shirts like I would wring my hands. He is a man. Even the sunblacked turtles would come out with illiads and odysseys if they knew Sam. Truthly a man, a whole man. With scooped-white shoulders and an acre of body like a moon. His voice is ten pitches higher on tape but every sentence is a whole song of several paragraphs. Sam is all groomed. His hair is like a cobweb in a shaft of light
and where he is it’s always morning
and Henryetta follows him down the spine of the earth.

when spring comes, my poems get longer and longer.

Henryetta is trying to pay attention on the 12:15 train

approaching afternoon in the firstclass car I speed through humped willows
and sagged tennis nets used cars slumped barns and busted windows
security cameras and stunted elms and parishioners filing churchward
and a whole field of jersey cows sleeping in the sun
on hills that urge wheels on and catch them again
shale dyed electric blue raised pools and filth-caked barbeques
and buds beginning red as lipstick tubes
we blunder through lumberyards and past a house I saw
on an island in the middle of the sea
which is mirror-flat and white on this fat
afternoon…the polarized rainbow of the train
window and the pocked up highway barrier
that guides the trucks along even when they can’t
see it and the hum of the powerplants with their two ton pipes thicker than the span of a man or ten
men the river again shopfronts
and crabgrass and willowvines dry wires
waiting for leaves to bust out and I’m waiting
too—for you and your dull root that catches me even when it ought
not—Sam when I think of you my heart pays attention –
someone astroturfed their roof someone laid out a plot of earth waiting for it to sprout someone knocked over a highway sign someone left out a lobster trap
at which a few swans laugh and Klaff’s Decorative Hardware is framed by
a decorative software of blossoms
who who who who who who is speaking so loudly about their
lost dollars when every minute new trees are supplanting the last ones and new
roofs slope down at me each leading to its own neat
chimney and everywhere mounds of dust
and someday the vines will reach
up to the tracks and my books will revert to pulp
a dam lets the water down uniform as hair
on a schoolgirl’s forehead—power is rising up out of this black river power is rising up out of these black
branches power is opening opening
opening itself
there is a man walking by a river I see him for a moment between two wires
and hungry stretches of road and yellow gossamer
flowers and stationsigns we flash
past express, and everywhere lumber ossifiying in the sun and fedex
warehouses and wrecked baseball diamonds
Sam will you forgive me if I only want to write poems
will you forgive me if I could follow the stream I see deep in the woods and not
come out and write poems as I go in the mud with my hands and my knees
Sam will you forgive me if all I desire is to sit in that deserted
boat and peer into the windows of darkened houses
counting the threads in their carpets and the books on their shelves
I want to write with my body and thrill in my soul
If only I can pay
attention a raised pool filled with lilies if only I can pay
attention a damp holly a sea of ground pines a store
selling signs I am trying to pay attention
I am ending my poem as the train ends moving into the heart of the city
for miles hungry silver roofs drink up the sun and burn
baby if you help me I swear I will pay attention
and filling my mouth with praise I will write til I die

look out for more parts of this poem!!!! i'm diggin the idea. we'll see.

Love poem for Janice March 25

1
I built you up Janice out of outrage
out of kindness
The drooping crepe of eyelids
The sugar-white of spun bones
Hungry Janice in the field of
stars—lying on her spine in pink
taffeta
and with a whole plate of jasmine rice
and macadamia
there she is, her whole tongue is an edible flower
and her tremulous heart shivers and sings and trembles
Janice, I love you to humble excess
and would take apart my body for you: a headless
doll with a hollow
neck, a pocked
torso, I will cry out for you from out the whirled circle of my limbs
gentle Janice precarious goddess of
glass I will carry you to the other side of the earth
where held from the void by suckers on our feet
we will tremble and sing
and tremble again
open your mouth Janice but don’t be furious with
me—I will fall in on myself like a gutted cottage
murdered warden of a hundred grainfields bowed with seed
Janice come to me I will sing you applesong
and dappledpeachsong
in the myrrh garden
in the fountain
in the imagined country of my life
Janice is queen

2
spring rips the air open
and breathes it full like a paper bag
I took Janice to a house carved out of a blossom and down
at the bottom we sang to each other in Russian in English in
Hebrew the languages lay touching their feet
together like children bathing
in the water of the strand that runs down to the sea
unraveling perpetually naked thread of my imagining
I rode a train with Janice into the heart
of this country up the ridge of its breasts
where the birds are ululating orbs of
blood and I follow Janice through the sleeping cars
up and down the tremulous lip of the sea
rain starts again and again
stuttering like cats’ feet
and the illumined mouths of gentlemen’s
umbrellas are open
and the station waits barren as a smoothed-out
key while Janice small as a pearl onion
moves ceaselessly between the drops

love poem for the river and for you janice

I am thinking about: you, how much more of your scalp is showing than last year. The leaves are opening quickly as if preparing for departure. I want: aspirin, coffee, marijuana, alcohol, a magic mushroom, a protective amulet inscribed with the name of god, a letter of protection, a golden book, a balm, a pool of blossoms in which to bury my head; an arm, a filigree chain, your promise, your constancy. I hear: the hoarse cry of a goose alighting on the river. I remember the river I visited when I was younger. I looked for the bottom but I could never see it. Now when I dream about it there you are. Covered in mud. Stepping out. Weary and cold. Assembling yourself under the elms. I want to build myself into you like the underside of a staircase. Rivets, planesaws, beechwood, bolts. I want to sleep in your hunger. I want to weave your hairs into a net and cast it over me. I want to build myself out of your body, there, under the sodden elms, under the wings of geese, under the yellow lip of cloud that hangs, open, sallow, lowing, over the whole sky, over the river, over the pretty mouths of the willowbuds poised to moan their little song.

poem for the ten plagues and for you, janice

In the rain dye runs out of an old flyer
a car battery sizzles and spits
the shopping cart on the bank shows its rusted
teeth: we are turning the river red
a kind of alchemy
and I wear the path to your door flat as unleavened bread
coming to you hungry
mortar in my mouth
each drop of rain lands like a black
locust on the step: April is hungry as I am
licking at your lintel
with an armful of red blossoms
i am coming to take you down to the river
where god came to do the washing
and hum his old songs in your ear

I sit here in Kirov
like a bird mouthing sedge from a window-pane.
Twilight—young
night gone pale with hunger—drags
its bony fingers on the slate
roof, the clouds are writing the story
of my future comforts, and the hour
of my death, in spiked Cyrillic, a tattoo
down the spine of the sky.
The birds have woken but the trees haven’t,
yet. A bud or two, a frost-seared
crocus, the dead tulips I got you
from a florist’s, murmuring
my penitence. You sit on the couch
with your feet up, watching a woman dance
on TV, trailing her long sleeves behind her.
That spring portentuous wind
is blowing under the door.
April spills light
like a sack of sugar,
while I grow sere
and black as a cigar.

A plateau
With a very large box on it
Or many large boxes. More boxes
Warm boxes. Boxes full of the glut
of udders.

On the beach (in New York City)
There’s a lot of plastic there
In the sand
ground down smooth

How a little plastic jar
gouged out by the mouths of the waves
hangs in the tide!
Ariel is coming
to take it away
if we wait a little while.

Medusa looks over her newest stone lover and shrugs. She sighs. Picks her teeth with a talon. Even a Gorgon can’t always be alone. Even in her superb statue garden. Sometimes she gives Jacob (granite) a shoe-shine. Once she kissed Oleg (obsidian) on the head, but it left a lip-print. She paces. Ahmed (quartz) eroding at the knees, Randall (a cheap, loose shale) at the elbows. There was Eugene, forever melancholy, all in turquoise. Terrible things happen when you look your lover in the eyes, eh, boys? she says. Sometimes she eats a sandwich in Marco’s brindled lap. He took everything sitting down, even the end. Morning breaks on a garden of lovers that don’t have a hair out of place (and have nothing further to add) and slithers on towards noon (her hair appointment).

Wednesday is quiet as a blurry photo.
I gather up armfuls of soiled bedclothes.
How many bedsheets dumped in the water
Does the harbor have room for?
Morning and evening greet each other
like blind men; they shake hands
uncertainly, and light passes through their palms.
I am limping through Wednesday,
the lame knee of the week:
a hunter without a map,
a singer without a mouth.

Late at night you put your ear to my belly,
seeking out its unsettled music.
It’s still there, and so am I,
translating thunder.
All January we sat
like a twinned mollusk in this house,
thigh to thigh. We glued the mattress to the ground
and set the bedframe on the street:
friend, you and I are so much children of the air
we don’t need to hang high.
Like the wind, we often smell of trash.
If we could, we would hover above the country
and prod at the apples, groaning down flues
and up skirts—we are an untranquil music.
Friend, I fear my soul is like my belly,
A round ship without rudder or prow.

I am a house of verse.
Twenty years of hunger built me up.
I sleep on a rag under an arch
on which two thousand verses are written
in two thousand languages.
In each language I am a daughter
and a sister. In all of them my cells split
and my head hammers when I drink too much wine.
A hundred sorrows sit at my side
and croon like old women then.
I cry out: but ‘the Muses
love deep silence’: and I
am like the child Solomon would split:
two feet, one head, a silence
that severs my belly:
each eave I lay down in silence,
I lay each tile, shingle,
I lay down the lintel in silence.
I am a house of verse
and in hunger I built myself up.

From the battle song of Thorlinda Haraldsdottir

‘I held at my side the glitterer.
Scratcher of men, daughter of fire
and the hammer, sister of tempering winds.
In my belly I held a piece of rage
thin as the moon, and it rolled there,
guttering. Then I took it up
and I opened my mouth. My tongue:
a coiled dragon
born on a windless sea.
I will call you to your grave with it.
Your soul is in your body like a boiled yolk
in a stuck egg, I will pierce it.
Your brow, a cliff’s cave, shelters you: I will shatter it
and I will not stain
my golden armlet.
Though your blood scald it,
my sword, raven-beak, burning
hair of a god, will not falter or cease.’

and now for something completely different... PICK A CURTAIN!

PICK A CURTAIN
a poem/play

AUDIO RECORDING HERE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khnZfDMKwv0



GUIDE
Ladies and gentlemen, this way! Please ignore the howls of thunder to your right, and the writhing mass of spiders at your left! Enter please, I’m not taking questions at this time, this way, downstairs, and down this black passage, step sharp, thank you! I ask every gentleman presently to pinch a handful of dust from the ground and cast it over your shoulder, and every lady please to spit on the stones, just a little formality, a little libation, ladies and gentlemen, this way, no questions, thank you.

A MAN (peevish)
Were we supposed to bring pajamas? You never told us if we were supposed to bring pajamas.

GUIDE
No questions, thank you.

(Mentholated smoke begins to fill the passage. Snifters of brandy fall softly from the ceiling, into waiting hands.)

Ladies and gentlemen, brandy’s on the house, and inhale deeply, trust me, you’ll thank me. No questions at this time, ladies and gentlemen, but one more request: if you could write down the names of your children or other earthly heirs on the slip of paper at the bottom of each cup, if you could write them down and swallow them, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. And now we come to the curtained chamber, and here I’ll leave you, ladies and gentlemen. Here’s my brother.

(ANOTHER GUIDE emerges who is identical to the first.)

GUIDE
Gentlemen, may I ask you to please step forward! Ladies, you may remain behind or step forward as you like, but keep your skirts smooth and your noses clean. And now, for your delight and delectation, the game of PICK A CURTAIN! The game where you ab-so-lutely HAVE to pick a curtain!

Behind curtain number one… a lifetime of imperturbable beauty fueled by boatloads of cocaine!

Behind curtain number two… thousands of green plantains with portraits burned into their skins!

Behind curtain number three… a small village explodes in an effulgence of light!

Behind curtain number four … a bottle of wine so big you could almost drown in it!

Behind curtain number five … a fifteen-year-old girl on her knees!

Behind curtain number six… 11:45am at a Chinese food buffet … forever!

Behind curtain number seven… no more war!

Behind curtain number eight … perpetual war!

Behind curtain number nine … tasteful and discounted furnishings!

Behind curtain number ten… all the admonishments you’ll ever receive, given to you now, now, now!

Ladies and gentlemen, the universe awaits your selection in total silence! The time has come to PICK A CURTAIN!

(The sound of heavy breathing begins all around. The loud, bass, cartoonish ticking of a clock begins, thudding time. It gets louder, then crescendos.)

(The curtain falls. Silence.)

What the earth can’t hold the river takes
And bears away in its black arms.
The trees bent under it, or broke
in numbers, severed at the nape,
and bore down on the street with broken joints…

I remember when we sat by the lake
in Georgia, stunned by light,
gorged on sun and wax-papered croquettes--and murmuring vignettes--
Like my mother, I whipped yolks into a froth,
and earnest as a cake-dish, I sat where the waves
lapped at the waves, sanguine,
and fed you from a deep tureen.

Now nothing is as it was,
Even the oaks turned out to grasp feebly
at the earth, and swooned on their bellies,
bled too black even to protest;
wind opens the doors of the old house
forcing a cry out;
turning the dishes up like silver crabs,
turning the kewpie dolls in solo waltz,
turning our letters loose into the air
like a set of dice that will never come down again.

apologies for the missed day!!!

the storm that ravaged the northeast knocked out the power in my house, so I was sadly internetless. Here's the backlogged poem I wrote in the midst of the storm!



1.
Cats and men caught in their hide-holes under the brow of the storm.
2.
Its brow. Its wrinkled palm. Its sheets of teeth.
3.
Flattened trees gird the street.
4.
Ruins of mailboxes.
5.
Ruins of houses: one slate roof gapes like a toothless mouth.
6.
Making light for hours, we watch the flames rise with gutless avarice.
7.
We fear hunger like a drunk fears the light.
8.
Like a jailor fears an open door.

9. The storm sets its jaw over our house. Swallowed, we light a fire in its belly, so we can see our fingers, our bread.

10. And everyone squabbles over a precious pebble. The catch on a purse (fumbled). A stream of babble.
11.
Later on (or in our dreams) we’ll pray (time to pray then).

I return to the house of my childhood and anger welters up to the seams of my body. I say: who are you, faded posters, to witness my body changing shape—getting bigger, looser? The same mother still offers her wallops upside the head, her Sabbath dishes scraping the roof of the oven’s mouth, but the elms are older, I am more dissolute, my bed is strange, the paintings I made at fifteen watch me with warped grins, my sisters are weary, my lover awaits me, the secret things and the colored glass I kept bundled in a cabinet are dusty; I see everything through my old glasses, they pinch at my ears, I seem to see my name written in a childish hand everywhere: on the windows, the doors, the belly of my sisters, there it is hidden in the hairs under the navel, five letters leering a half-moon leer on doorknobs, on forks, on the veins of the elm leaves.