a poem by Neruda, to whom I resort when I’m left wordless.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

 

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

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.

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.

.

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.

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