a poem by Neruda, to whom I resort when I’m left wordless.
January 31, 2014 § Leave a comment
If You Forget Me:
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
anger and burnt challah.
January 31, 2014 § Leave a comment
black spinach
is all I have to say to you.
on the death of the Florentine nonleft:
because stolen paintings are of more importance than those lives beyond indigenous-ness.
G-d take this material nothingness from our midst, and I’ll rebuild the mishkan with my own bare hands.
black spinach and burnt challah.
anger serves no purpose beyond perpetuating the illusionary chance of change when there is only
blindness.
from one exile to another.
January 27, 2014 § Leave a comment
frustration is the painting without the painter.
for I belong to narrative, I breathe it.
without it, I cannot lend meaning to passing
paintings, which remain markings
in galleries of errant homelessness.
the story, or I dissolve: this is my demand.
I am unable to make sense of what has happened to us,
between illustration and narration.
without one, the other necessitates my removal from
relatedness to the fact.
and my unwillingness to stay related to the word: encapsulation
marks my timing, my coming, as solely self-interested.
I don’t need to know, know, internment as war-rape-postwar-perpetuation;
not-talked-about-internment, disremembered-internment, no-honour-in-incarceration-internment
and narrative, and illustration. nothing lends meaning to the zones d’attente
but the act of remaining open, while closing
our story is not intended for expression, but internalism
remembrance, internalized resistance, forced forgetness
and all the other ways of perpetuating oneself beyond that which is taking
place.
p’tach libi.
January 26, 2014 § Leave a comment
for Imah, I’m unfree.
tell me my state of being, redefine my freedom.
tell me I don’t know freedom, tell me I don’t know it.
tell me it can be bought as surely as modernity and her sisters, three.
if land is the child we punish and protect
when it will not bow to our seasons
why are you punishing us for inhabiting it?
why do you come between hands and land, that are as
salt and sea?
for Imah, I’m unfree.
visibility, vulnerability (fear of).
January 26, 2014 § Leave a comment
we had best open the wound, and let it bleed
than let it fester, then, as old devouring new
.
Djerba. I’m a scar on you.
.
look, a sickness on the landscape of my skin-
see safety’s stranglehold enslave my mind. Open
the wound, then, and let it bleed, freely, but
.
Djerba, don’t you bleed on me.
to my mother, migrant bird.
January 26, 2014 § Leave a comment
belonging to nothing, nowhere, and no one-
how can I call this freedom?
your gift to me is my search for belonging;
to exist as exiles in our own land.
צידון
January 26, 2014 § Leave a comment
Sidon:
come home and put your shoulder beside mine
before I make a mural of myself in overflowing
beyond
Sidon my yeshiva.
Sidon my survival.
you are the colophon of my conscious amnesia,
insouciance, deadly indifference: teach me to revolt.
teach me to remember beyond
Sidon
my inertia
Sidon
my yeshiva.
need.
January 26, 2014 § 1 Comment
silence is
the ghettoization of voices.
love is fever, fear is the only contagious emotion and forgetting
is illusion.
hunger, however, has the power to lift a hand to my forehead and feel
thirty-eight centigrade.
el humor sefardí.
January 22, 2014 § Leave a comment
.
and if a ghost should touch you while you sleep
take care to sing the Shema in a whisper
and if a ghost should kiss you while you weep
take care to keep your tzniut in midwinter
kam/conditionality.
January 22, 2014 § Leave a comment
bed root dream-
down tree orange
.
the man who sacrifices skin to sleep in the other room
is a man aware of the incompatibility of promise-keeping, and our time
.
know, acceptance without that promise is a cry to be loved wildly
.
in a dreamless
loveless age