Copyright 2019 Rachel Neve-Midbar
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
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Huntington Beach, CA 92615-7887 or email: mifanwy@tebotbach.org
Cover design: Kayla Heimowitz, kaylaarts.com
Book design: Russel Davis, Gray Dog Press, Spokane, WA
ISBN-10: 1-939678-52-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-939678-52-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934856
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This book is made possible by a generous donation from Steven R. and Lera B. Smith.
www.tebotbach.org

​

iii

Contents

​

Drive................................................................................................ 3
Perhaps .......................................................................................... 4
Town Square................................................................................. 7
Ionized Air..................................................................................... 8
What the Light Reveals........................................................... 10
Casbah........................................................................................... 13
Baggage..........................................................................................15
Evening Walk Near Jericho......................................................16
Russian Poets at the Beach .................................................... 17
The Story Every One of Our Grandfathers Told Us..........19
On the Third Day ........................................................................ 22
The Scent of Salt ......................................................................... 23
Rise, Awake and Sing ................................................................ 25

§

Uncoupling..................................................................................... 31
Broken Shell................................................................................... 33
The Resonance............................................................................... 35
Finding Shelamzion .................................................................... 36
Desert Rain...................................................................................... 38
Mangoes .......................................................................................... 40
Boiled Carrots................................................................................. 41
Wayward Flier................................................................................. 42
Reading Bruno Schulz on Rosh Hashana ............................. 43

§

While Karen is Wheeled into the Operating Room
in Pittsburgh....................................................................................53
Last Rites .........................................................................................55
Glass in a Hailstorm.....................................................................57
Pure Water Poured .......................................................................58
Snow in the Desert........................................................................60
Life Lessons......................................................................................61

iv

Moonless Night...............................................................................62
After Dyce’s Jacob and Rachel ...................................................64
Mother Lament...............................................................................66
Refresh................................................................................................67
At a Bus Stop in the North...........................................................68
Searching For Our Stolen Sons...................................................69

§

Shabbat Radio...................................................................................75
Fourth Eden.......................................................................................77
Bleach ..................................................................................................81
Salvo .....................................................................................................83
Seventy Possible Ecstasies.............................................................85
Memorial .............................................................................................89
Eden Ripening Inside a Husk........................................................90
White Flesh, Yellow Dust................................................................91

Coda

Salaam of Birds ..................................................................................95
Acknowledgments............................................................................101
About the Author..............................................................................103

​

​

v

 

To my newest lights:
Zoharia, Sarai and Shalev

​

​

vi

 

What’s the name of the place
your footsteps tattooed on the ground,
a heavenly ground for the salaam of birds?
—Mahmoud Darwish (tr. Fady Joudah)

​

​

Salaam of Birds

​

​

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

3

​

Drive

​

We know nothing.
Only that the curtains fly
like sails, the earth keeps spinning,
tilts over and back, rains come, leaves
shrivel and die, the snow
gathers then melts away, and still
I smell the cigarette from the car in front of me,
and night blooming jasmine that holds me
like a woman I once loved, who sometimes
I still dream about. A cloud
of pewter smoke billows out
of Husan. The explosion
of a car or a house or a life.
The light changes from yellow to red.

Soldiers at the checkpoint stand death-
chill, wax statues, watch us go by with lifeless eyes.

A dog stands at attention next to the road,
his black ears point at the sky.

​

4

​

Perhaps
After Eduardo C. Corral’s poem, “Border Patrol Agent”

Reach
across a counter, over a wall, around
my back, the rustle of your arm, your hand,
casting off our clothes
like dried skin
shedding even our dried skin,
snakes made
moist, made new,
all we can offer is a dream,
tongue to tongue. Perhaps
all contact is too much.
*
A man might
reach across a counter,
over a wall.
There might be thirty years
between his life
and mine, perhaps
he slept
two blocks from me
for years, his head exactly
607 feet from my head

5

each night, every night
both of us dreaming
that same dream
*
A man reaches
across the counter,
across the bed,
his hand stretches
across a wall.
His arms around me. Warm.
His body has weight,
beating, alive.
His breath
moves my hair when he says
I’m sorry
For everything my nation
has done to your nation
My eyes near the stain
I’ve placed on him
a stone that carbon dates
back centuries
I am sorry for everything too.
*

6

All for the feel of you
that never leaves,
the small bite of your kiss, the gentle
sandpaper of your hands,
a pile of clothes strewn.
*
Perhaps some walls are higher than others.
Perhaps clothes can just be scratched off,
flaked away, perhaps memories too.
There are five seasons on your shoulders,
five cuts made to the pride of you.
We walk along this path
where our fathers walked,
yours, mine, both, together,
yesterday and
a thousand years ago,
pressed to oil, pressed to wine,
always somehow pressed.
The trees reveal their silver undersides,
the stones that once covered their roots,
the tears that watered both.
There are snakes amongst the thistles.
God is always hungry.

​

7

​

Town Square

​

In most towns you’ll find a woman
in the corner of the square propped
like a doll. She has no voice
unless someone’s hand is under her shirt.
If you choose to photograph her, you will see
she has no mouth, and
if you stare long enough, no arms either.
Though she is fed and dressed
by the good women,
who buzz and cluck,
put on her face, carefully cover her hair,
tie a wedding ring on a scarlet ribbon
around her neck, she sits alone,
smile tight; eyes bright—What else is there?

​

8

​

Ionized Air
“This solitude covered with iron” —Robert Bly

I kneel in my garden, hands
lost in sandy soil, urge each blossom
to launch into the long spring
that is a desert winter. I smell
every ancient who has passed
here before me. Days rise out
of empty hills, unleash into clear
light and white birds who glide
into this new winter-green,
their feet arrowed behind, sharp
and black. Or nights,
when a full moon brandishes the sand,
the thunder I hear isn’t a storm
ready to nourish the flowers, the hills, or me.
Each clap is a canon
burst in the transparent night,
a bloom attended by machine gun fire
that enters my body in a wingbeat
of panic, a battle echoed into ionized air
in a land where the hills are etched
in centuries, in battles,
in the trail that follows a Roman
aqueduct deep into the wadi, in
these lines on my hands

​

9

sunk into this soil that smells
of camel urine and copper,
the smell of old American
pennies, each ingrained
with the face of a proud Indian,
long dead and forgotten.

​

10

What the Light Reveals

Har Hazaytim, Jerusalem
Marble boxes cover this hill, graves
crumbled and aged, the color of teeth,
row after row facing east; buried
here are you who will rise
first, call back to the others, enter
the world of endless life. Your names
echo through generations,
like the lamplighter who walks,
torch in hand, moves
slowly from one grave to the next,
sending a glow into the darkening
night. Or perhaps just a match
set to a wick of pure olive oil,
the light clean and clear
as a summer day, sunlight
so bright we hide our eyes,
and fruit that ripens only
in the long heat of the summer sun,
fruit whose names define us:
Tamar, Te’ena, Rimon, Zayit,
whose shade shields us, whose
pips and stems compost back into the soil
on this eastern side of the hill,
where lights come on slowly with the dusk—

​

11

East Jerusalem with its cacophony of cars
and marquees, the green lights
of minarets kindled
one after the other, dotting the way
far into the folds of the desert.
Muezzins who call out,
one leading to the next—
voices, mournful, undulating—pleas
so like the shofar cries
that drift up these stone stairs, call us
back to where we come from—this umbilicus
that whispers a soul to a soul. Your names:
Keila, Pessel, Shaindela, Ruchel: you,
who loved to knead the dough: you,
who danced the hem
of her wedding dress to pieces: you,
who died in the Grodno Ghetto,
giving birth on a dirty floor,
and though we never knew your stories
our souls still told the truth, the death
was not easy. This is why we can’t sleep.
And the wind that once
blew cold in Belarus, now hot
and dry over this eastern hill.

​

12

​

No more lamplighters:
we are Nava, Odelyia, Yael,
and electricity now scrambles
the light between the words,
whispers rise like mist, a simple
wish that wherever we are
we can hearken back to the sweet pink
of a western sky, the last kiss of daylight
as traffic fades, the stars unveil
themselves, the muezzins now quiet. Wherever
you are, tell us why we need any answers,
tell us what any light will reveal.

​

13

​

Casbah
Hebron, 1987

A carnival souk tucked in a tight
and crooked labyrinth, leading the way
to a secret cave that still contains
the smell of the world to come.
I take these two I raised with one long arm,
fed from the same jar
with the same rubber-coated spoon.
We are delighted by fabric from Damascus,
pots and pans from Amman,
rain boots and watermelons, even
the red and blue RC Cola,
underlined and crowned. We
pass a butcher shop where goat
carcasses hang like ghost soldiers
of an ancient nation. One
suspended just outside the door,
her hind feet bound,
her head intact, the smell
of the grass she ate, the milk she gave
swells in the tepid air, her teats once
velvet and warm, now gone,
her eyes a creamy white
like the blind eyes of the holy men
smoking shisha nearby, men
who wanted Mecca
to be the last thing they saw.
We turn and our narrow path opens
into a little square. There

​

14

stands an oracle, tattered
as a straw bird, his long dress torn
as if he slept in sand,
his prayer beads worn to a soft lament
in his hand, his keffiyeh dull,
wrapped twice around his head. His voice
unfurls and falls, face creasing as he calls.
I push the stroller very close
as the oracle looks down, silenced
in the face of my daughters’ calm,
smiles at the baby as she raises her hand
to him, stretches her arm,
opens her tiny palm.

​

15

​

Baggage

​

I know the storm is coming when the hills are bathed in a yellow light
and I carry a perfume of each memory, their heat and heavy eyes,
like walking barefoot in snow—
the smell of my soul matching the smell of all souls,
and the bare trees spread like coral stretch marks
against a fallow sky, and I know all women
carry everything they own in the dark bags under their eyes.

​

16

Evening Walk Near Jericho

​

A shofar-shaped moon and stars that sparkle
like teeth, slit-exposed from deep between your darknesses.
Seven bats can dance, can swirl seven circles around security
lights, can fly seven times towards blindness,
the forward explorer, the rearward failure and peace,
that silent light between raised wings that transforms
each leathery body into a phosphorescent butterfly.
Why not? In this oasis anything is possible.
Though seven bats might cry, locked
in moonlight, and though my voice carries no echo,
and this sickle moon may never sever the dark
space between our nations, still
we seek that single sound
loud enough to force these walls to dust.

​

17

Russian Poets at the Beach

​

On this Tel Aviv beach, I watch them
from across the sand as their hands
tap, their fingers writing
invisible ‘z’s against the music
of their tongue, a language
of slipping through snow,
block after block of government high-
rise flats, cliffs in a dark dawn.
These women cough their way past
cigarettes and vodka, their hands
on dry, dyed hair in orange and brutal
black, washed in water sucked from stones,
eyes filled with years
of cold and coal heat,
shared bathrooms and two hour lines
to buy potatoes. They hold each
other gratefully, not
minding heated cheeks or grey
teeth, cough into each other’s mouths
or phlegm hacked hard
into a proffered cloth, they push
enormous chests against each other, bosoms
like toddlers carried high and proud—
I just want to settle my head
in their confidences,
travel their navels as an escape
route from my life to theirs,

​

18

​

muffle myself away
from this daily job of filling bag
after canvas bag with sand, sand
that crawls into my eyes
and under my fingernails,
sand that will swallow a bullet,
withstand an explosion, sand as passive
as Tel Aviv’s occluded air.
Each bag I mark with the letters, ג“ג
gimmel gimmel. Gvool Gizrah.
Set Boundaries.
A military symbol: Don’t cross this line.
Don’t come too close
to where the Russian poets
sit together in this land
of beige heat and heaviness,
of sandstorms and uzis
and New Israeli Shekels,
watch as the sun
stretches its athletic strength
deep into a mediterranean sea.

​

19

​

The Story Every One of Our Grandfathers Told Us

​

A day muffled in swampy air,
the curtains remain at ease.
Job offers arrive on onion paper,
fingerprinted in sweat.
It’s a half day from Bnei Brak
to Jerusalem. Half a day after weeks
aboard ships, some diving for shore
at night, dodging the British
with their machine-guns and their prison
in Acco. For some it’s after months
in a Cypress internment camp,
or after years
in death camps,
or after days across a barefoot desert
from Egypt, from Yemen.
Bnei Brak is a leaky faucet,
beds shared with cousins
and a toilet down the hall. These men
have become soles held
tight with bits of string
and the one grush perhaps
consorting with the nothing in a pocket.

20
The sun marches across an afternoon
near a central station. The scent
of orange blossoms cloud
the street. A donkey
tied to a wooden cart,
his ears jitter in the insect buzz
and from the cart a quarter loaf
and an orange can be purchased.
The bus rumbles. Switchback
and turn. The bread disappears
to a few leftover crumbs caught
like flies in the web of a beard.
Downshift and turn. The orange
is a small globe of freshness, the peel
yields as easily
as a remembered wife’s brassiere,
falls from palms
out the window of the bus.
Each petal of orange flesh
then drawn off, laid upon
the tongue, a sacrament.
The juice gathers

21

at the ends of ten fingers,
pools there to be licked
slowly, one after the other.
The bus rolls on, up
toward the possibility
of a monthly income, up
into stone-striped hills
bathed in orange peel, gilded
as the sun surrenders
its stronghold
and the cool breath of a holy city
spreads to the back of the bus.

22

On the Third Day

​

Were the Junipers Syrian then? Who knows. But they curled their heavy
limbs over the pond exactly when we needed them. We were white and
cream without our clothes to protect us and the rocks sprouted green,
ivy falling from every impenetrable place—stone, mold or even the rank
breath of middle age, and the birds called as they flew away from the
tangles of our hair and we dipped our heads under, every barrier removed,
even earrings, even chains, and the water was as soft as dawn. It was
dawn. The green had creeped into the spring, into the budding Junipers
who ruled below the sky as we seeped into the deep of it. I slipped past
fish and frogs and melted into a flash of algae. I photosynthesized. I
kissed my mouth open to the green and I sprouted.

23

The Scent of Salt

​

Outside a cottage at the edge
of a silver desert, a camel dreams to breathe
the salt, the sea. He twists
his head around to view the woman
he carries and where he came from,
over the hot, pitted hills and the many
varieties of salt, the ones that stink
of sulfur, their crystal layers mixed with silt,
the ones that comfort his burning
feet in talc, the ones that sit like ice
floes on briny water. The variety that forms
a woman, her arms
outstretched, waiting
for her stolen sons, those who melted
in the Land of Og,
burned and buried
in a shallow grave. In her
dreams she rides the camel.
When he walks
she knows the stormy waves have overtaken her.
When he runs she whispers
the seventy secret names of God
from her peeling lips
and walks on water
to where her sons play in the desert salt.
Their feet are oars, their hands
braid the camel’s hair to baskets
painted gold. She crouches there
in the blistered sand, spitting the husks
of sunflower seeds over

24

the fences men erect in fear.
Salt coats their tongues.
The camel opens his dry mouth.
Like a woman lost, his cry
stretches over the desert.

25

​

Rise, Awake and Sing

“Your dead shall live; their corpses shall rise, awake and sing,
you who lie in the dust.” (Isaiah 26:19)
A medieval town where nothing stands straight,
where Kafka sat, slept, ate; where time
reads backwards on a Hebrew clock and a Golem
waits in an attic for the electric shock of life.
Eight hundred years, a thriving ghetto:
yellow hats, yellow circles, yellow stars;
a child’s cut-out of betrayal.
אֱֹלהַי נְשָ ׁמָ ה שֶ ׁנָּתַ תָ ּ בִ ּי טְ הֹורָ ה הִ יא
A shul, a great gravestone, vacant,
unused; the winter sun reflects
off the ceiling’s vault. The wall’s hue
up close becomes something new,
letters, black and red: names:
in Moravia, listed by town,
in Bohemia, by province,
dates of birth and death, a wallpaper
tattoo, back to back, names stacked—
a ladder of names—
eighty thousand dead.
אַ תָ ּה בְ רָ אתָ ּה, אַ תָ ּה יְצַרְ תָ ּּה, אַ תָ ּה נְפַחְ תָ ּּה בִ ּי
On the eastern wall:
Emil (b. 1868-d.1942) straightens
his tie. Berta (b.1874-d.1942) turns,
lights the flame, knowing
warmth fills the house night and day.
On the west:
Hedvika (b. 1914-d.1942) steps
into her pumps, sets her hat,
makes her way to the train.

26

On the southern wall
with the sun’s glance upon them:
Karolina (b. 1932-d.1942) skipping rope.
Oskar (b. 1930-d.1943), a stick, an old wheel,
a downward slope—
וְ אַ תָ ּה מְ שַ ׁמְ ּרָ ּה בְ ּקִ רְ בִ ּי, וְ אַ תָ ּה עָתִ יד לִטְ ּלָּה מִ מֶ ּנִּי
Trying to be Hapsburgs; German impeccable.
Heads high past the guard, one thousand
at a time, boarding trains with favorite dolls,
candlesticks, a bedroll. Delivered
to Terezin, where no one was allowed
to outgrow their shoes. Through
the Schleuse, on the other side
everything removed but a ration card.
Later, on Auschwitz trains, their prayer
is for a bite of bread when they arrive.
Instead stripped, shaved, showers
of foul air. No survivors—only ashes
at the bottom of the Vistula River.
ּולְהַחֲזִירָ ּה בִ ּי לֶעָתִ יד לָבֹוא
You, who line these walls, you are the dry bones,
the flesh formed around the original egg,
the porous souls,
the pure water poured that swept us home,
the bridge between the grave
and the land, ashes fused into rocky
soil, hills that ascend
like milkfat breasts. Your arms, the towns

27

that hold us; your smiles the rivers
that spring forth, spill over, fall with laughter.
You are the kibbutz fence at night;
your hearts the iron that guards us.
Karolina, Oskar, you fill the schools and parks
while Hedvika sips coffee at the café.
Emil is on his way to shul, as thousands
of Bertas cover their hair at the siren’s sound,
strike the match, draw in the holy
flame and bless the Shabbat candles.
בָּרּוְך אַ תָ ּה ה‘, הַמַ ּחֲזִיר נְשָ ׁמֹות לִפְ גָרִ ים מֵ תִ ים

31

​

Uncoupling

​

Two train cars releasing
each other—one arm lifted,
the other dropped into the clang
and black stench of the yard,
a barbed hook unclasped
from a fish’s lip before
he’s cast back into the river,
the latch raised on a gate,
the front entryway lock
disengaging bolt from metal bolt,
a tire hoisted from its hub,
a chain fence marking
a closed military zone unlinked,
Velcro ripped from a flak jacket,
the clatter of a clip set free
from an M-16, soldiers transferring
people out of a Gush Katif
synagogue as they bear the weight
of their own tears. The thread
pulled from a needle’s eye,
pencil marks
erased from a letter,

32

the slash in arithmetic
that makes everything less.
The unbuckling of a belt,
a hook unfastened,
the buttons on a blouse,
unfixed from their stitched
eyes, a zipper slowly unzipped
down a long and naked back, the shift
of his hips that pulls him out of me
and over to his own side of the bed,
the large expanse of his back
that faces me each night.

33

​

Broken Shell

​

Some days I want my poems to come
complete, to pull them whole
and oval from my mouth,
like eggs, their plaster
of paris shells delicately
enclosing a life within.
Seeds that develop in a sac,
a pomegranate deep inside me,
filled with red roe, each
spore carrying a new
potency, climbing
my insides like a vine. Pine
cones whose kernels
are only released in heat,
fire that rises, fills, explodes,
an orange force I understand.
Sometimes there is just this:
the whole open sky, the orange
leavings of the day,
the blue deepening
to the place where stars start
their life in darkness.

34

Tonight can be a fistful of pills
or a dream held in a sculpted bowl,
can be a man who uncovers himself,
lays his manhood in my palm.
Tonight can be a broken shell.
Tonight can be a poem.

35

​

The Resonance

​

Gathered heat in my left hand, happiness
in my right. Clap the time of it.
Bodies flagged and
vibrating in the wind. If only
I could see time as timeless,
like God or the birds—here
I only ever meet my sons at funerals,
where we all stand silent
and marked, the children I once knew, now
men in uniform, the men, now
bearded and gray— The known is so small,
bubbles inside a glass, a bit of cheese on a cracker, you
calling me from inside the rain,
your voice chocolated between raindrops,
car wipers a backbeat of your hands clapping—
the hands that hold my feet chaliced to the page,
lead the shape of the dance, and
the raindrops that baptize
us into a borderless dream,
my forehead resting against yours, connected
as blood, opening your hand
in mine where I can smell the flower
of you, there, in your palm,
your fingers tuning forks
set against my ear, your lips
on my forehead. I feel it still,
this hard process of coming into my body,
to see the yes of it, the resonance of it.

36

Finding Shelamzion

​

Even on days like this
when the desert is couched in daylight, inside
what is left of your ruined house, scarred
as a nail-torn palm —here,
where the mistle pecks at a Christ’s thorn,
edible now—in fall, and you sleep
inside the sound of moving water,
the start and stop of mayim poemim, mayim lifamim, or
a winter rain that drowns itself
into a desert flow, growth
rough as a husband’s unshaven cheek, and
I sit beside you here
on stones worn soft as skin—
here, right here—
within the chirp and settled seed, you,
fifteen hundred years older
than me—and your hair still
glossy under a white scarf.
We eat from the same pitted pear; we marry
within the smell of this pool
where your poems are born
alongside mine, river over rocks,
eddy through the reeds, sun
on our faces and the crowded clumps
of newly grown watercress, the common caper,
varthemia, even the golden drop
that peeks between the creases of stone.

37

Your fingers on my lips, light as wings,
—here, right here—
where the desert rests,
occupied still
in this scarred daylight.

38

​

Desert Rain

​

Your tongue in my hair,
in my mouth, your mouth—the circle,
the complete meaning of round, an egg
held for the length of a prayer.
Your skin, your skin—let me touch
the soft pouch of your belly,
smell the smell of your fir
trees, rusty and fragrant with fire—
we are nothing
more than what we cherish,
a night jar left to beat in the canyon
of my palms. I am ready
now to sleep
with your braid in my mouth,
for you to be the wife of my wife,
or even my wife. You
warm against me, your breath
deep on my neck. That I would hold you
when the desert rain wakes us,
that we could talk quietly together
about the melded meanings
of rain: its dams,

39

its flows. What it gives.
What it takes away. Then
I could lift the covers for you,
tuck you close into my lap,
my arms around you, each of your breasts
an eye open wide under my hand,
my nose in your hair and
behind your ears, your most human
smell, crushed mushrooms and old apples. Let me
lick you, lick you, there.

40

​

Mangoes

​

Hands that feel first the firmness of flesh, the skin. Yes,
the skin, sweet-scented, rainbowed or green, peeled away
by hands that can pat the ground around new growth, remove
an eyelash from a cheek, reveal flesh flamed the color of daybreak
or end, my knife following the skin around the fruit, its essence
exposed, bright with sun, with green and rain-pumped roots,
a stretched canopy near the Kinneret—once dense with banana leaves
now planted in open rows of mangoes. Mangoes in my desert kitchen,
the color of the Flaming Belles outside. Two hummingbirds at my window:
the female, dun and quiet, the male, buzzed in blue-black silk.
She watches as he dips his beak deep into each tangerine blossom,
lost in his wet, orange world. There was an evening I burned
into a resin sunset, evaporated into a blue-black night,
watched as the people of Chengdu set a candle’s flare
inside the carcass of a paper flower and glided these lights
out onto the River Jin. The water, thus gloved, glowed
in hundreds of burning flowers—a memorial
to a poet. So, ask me, how do I know the mango is delicious?
I spear a bit with my knife, set it on my tongue. The taste
is waves before me, liquid air and the music
inside it, wasps and hibiscus, flowers alive, lustrous, petals
pulled back to reveal the pistil, the stamen erect and embraced
in the taste of rain, green leaves and pungent fruit,
sweet, but also acrid—Yes, just that touch of tart.

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Boiled Carrots

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Standing in my housecoat at the kitchen counter,
steel knife in hand, and a full pot of carrots
boiled in their weary skin. I wind the knife
around and around, peels falling away, revealing
bright orange life within. I put one in my mouth and feel
it warm and hard and pliant and suddenly I am plugged
in, switched on and open, remember running my tongue
down the back seam of the shaft, straight into a musk
of hair and sweet-meat, then up again to take in the whole
deep into some oral g-spot fullness, and I am a pornographer’s
wet dream, the woman who loves to give head—sex goddess
dressed like Wonder Woman, hauling steel boobs
and ballet slipper boots, bullet-proof stockings, bouffant hair
and a waist cinched tight enough to suggest abduction;
arms crossed, raised wrists as if ready to deflect any advance,
I twirl and twirl, and each twirl pops
with power, each rubs like the thumb wheel of a BIC,
flint against stone, ready to ignite, ready to burn.

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Wayward Flier

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October nights and a flock of cranes,
the clutter and murmur of their travel
with nowhere to settle,
not sand, not pebble, not the petal
of wings folded around a young one—
the worry of foxes who already
are darkening to match the hills’
deep decay of rain, a dun shade
of dusk almost unseen. Where is grace
then, leaden, unknown—and why?
You say maybe you weren’t ready,
but neither was I, and I,
like all abandoned and wayward fliers,
can only look back
at the way your body held me
to the earth, sure that fear wasn’t enough
to know in which direction the sun set,
the quiver of a bird lost on your palm,
or to see how they swoop in and out
of my poems where they perch sometimes,
just long enough to catch their breath.
Watch as I fly away from every compass,
toward the sun’s sweet heat
and a world blurred from brown to blue,
unleashed to the question: what
became of me without you,
deflocked and spread, as lost as a faded star
or a moon still uneven and crouched
somewhere in the sun’s backdrop?

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Reading Bruno Schulz on Rosh Hashana

I must first return to dust, before I can say I am dust.
I must first rise into the air, before I can say I’m flying. —Yang Jian
I. Tekiah
In one blast a man answers with all he has,
his barrel chest outlined against
an everlasting light, a kiss to a ram’s horn
and we are called by that guttural song
—who shall live by fire or sword,
mountains that still dance,
and us, our feet together, bowing,
chanting, churning hearing a voice
that calls us to our desert roots,
fire to ashes, and ashes to earth—
a man standing alone on a corner with nothing
but a small loaf of sawdust in his pocket,
asks himself, do we all live
to burn the things we love most?
A question formed in this scratched language, this sand
in my cupped hands, trickling through my fingers—
I wash my face in its gravel-sound, let
it skim me over the desert where we were born
in forty years of walking, born and reborn,
subdividing and creating, gathering sparks
that flicker, fly, ignite, a wind
that spins me into a funnel dance,
a new mind found in this long day, a new life
inside me, and this sound of sand,
pushed by wind, pushed by song,
a shofar cry that rises like a single shot echoes,
like a flock of cranes formed in the heart
of a peace sign and grazing the tops of trees,
spiraling into an open sky, tilting me
towards the face of God
with the smallest prayer:

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next year, next year,
always
next year.
II. Shvarim
Later the Thursday was always called Black,
so many yellow starred and starved bodies
cluttering the streets, hunted then abandoned.
Schulz walking through the ghetto
in the town where he was born,
the town that held him like a cradle,
the bread in his pocket
more mud than food, sawdust
and water, pasty as molding clay.
Schulz, the property of SS Hauptscharführer
Felix Landau, a man whose sneer
covered Drohobycz like a blackout curtain.
Schulz, who held false papers stuffed
in a dresser drawer like the key
to a brothel, tempting, but never touched.
Schulz, who turned his face that morning
to the November mist the way a bloom
faces the sun, blind to bodies or puddles,
because God laid His hand
on Schulz while he slept,
while flickers flared across his eyelids,
and he thought only of the Messiah:
the pulpy sweetness
of a fresh apricot, cracked in half

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and rising over a city.
Sparks that fly through his mind
with the strength of a summer storm—
a golden childhood,
which is, of course,
the Messiah.
So, who cares that SS Officer
Karl Gunther always had bad teeth,
or that he found comfort
in the hands of a Jew,
a dentist. No one cares. It only matters
that the dentist was Gunther’s Jew. His.
And it matters
that when Landau broke a tooth
he went to Gunther’s Jewish dentist
and when for the third time
Landau flinched and the Jew uttered
a soft curse under his breath,
Landau unholstered his gun
and shot that dentist cleanly
through the eye.
In the end
it only ever matters
that when Gunther heard his Jew was dead
he found Schulz on the corner
of this street or that and raised
his Luger like a helmeted hawk.
Landau kills my Jew
I will kill his Jew,

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and as easy as breaking an apricot in two
or merely dispatching a bird into an open sky
he shot Schulz just above his left ear,
and the myth was shattered and the world was shattered
and the sparks that slipped from Schulz’s wounds
fell like glass left to glisten in the lingering light,
which is to say, scattered
from the age of genius, poured from his ruptured skull
spilling into the muddy puddles near his head.
How they glistened there
with no one to notice
not the hunters nor the hunted,
not the child who reached for the bread
before he kissed his teacher’s lips
or the friend who came in darkness
to gather the body and return it to the dust.
No one to notice how the body later softened,
liquefied, dissolved back into the earth.
III. Truah
Hold me, hold me—
hold my legs together, staunch
each surge, every secretion,
this current that grips me
as the petals of my body open
and close over hers. Please God. Please.
What is this language, this thread

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of red, this leak of life imprinted
on my thigh, a scarlet tattoo? Please.
My head fills with ink, my body
with the dredges of the night;
they swim in me still.
Are you listening?
Lay with me. Moon your hand across
my dreams, go ahead—dance,
dance the stars out of the sky. Let
it be tomorrow and she
still inside me.
*
Where am I? Has night become day?
I touch the cruelty of a new sun, here,
curled on a bathroom floor, a broken
ring around the life
that has slipped from me.
She
is perfect—a simple gift
in this pool
of blood, no bigger
than my palm, toes and fingers,
translucent but ten,
intact. Daughter

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of a thousand fragments
their rainbow shards
filling me, falling
into my womb. In this moment I am
Mother. Please. Breathe
into her. Set your lips over hers and breathe:
breathe her your honey, breathe her your milk,
set yourself under her tongue. Please.
*
Where am I? Hardtack and water, empty
day, a broken ring—
I’ll count to ten, but
still, this bathroom is empty,
breathless, moments
move by on heavy feet, God,
I am the bride, waiting;
I am under a dark canopy;
bundled myrrh between my breasts,
hands henna’ed but, truth: I did not pray
for us; I didn’t pray at all.
I lay here on linoleum, fasted,
even as my body filled
with burn. Please.
I’ll sing now the hymns
no one has ever heard. God,

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I will offer you up her
translucent toes, her teeth buds,
the cascade of her future curls. I ache
to catch your flames,
their energy and their rage,
drop some of those burning
worlds on my tongue—
(Those too I can smother on a cold floor.)
Make room for us and our animal
existence. I will
kneel here on the pitted
earth, fit every shard
back together,
but tell me, God—
where do I put the small shoes
of my unborn chilren?
IV. Tekiah Gedola
Here a shul bathroom, like another room remembered—
water now cupped in two hands, held to my face,
melting the salt and sand finally from my eyes.
At the shofar blast I lift my head, a deer in darkness
startled alive. Today, even the keruvim
have given up androgyny, turned themselves to two
sexes, entwined, wings circled forward to shield and comfort
each other, for you are beloved before Hashem—
Yes, you—the woman, and it was today
He told Sara she will have a son, nurse him
well from a wrinkled tit, Hannah mumbling on the stairs,

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and Rachel weeping, kneeling, forehead to dust,
alenu li’shabei-ach l’adon hakol,
all gone and she’s alone in a tomb. The womb
prepares. The candles are lit. We hold all that is sacred
in a palm of air, strike our own thigh,
then buck and slap together, nothing on our minds
but the pleasure that hides behind the walls, scratching,
scratching us into a moment of sparks,
where new worlds are really born. Cells
divide as someone soft and sacred
grows round. This is where we start over.
Schulz telling stories in a classroom, late nights
writing, tossing embers on a page with abandon,
or later in a library deciding which beloved books to burn.
My body here, heavy, preparing to start again.
The Messiah handed to a stranger and lost forever
in one moment on a street corner. We all begin
and we all end, we murmur over the desert,
like the sand itself whispers before the arrival
of dew, of the smallest prayer: maybe
next year, next year
in Jerusalem.

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