Poems

Returning from Here

Yesterday morning:

The remains of the plane piloted by Saint-Exupéry

were positively identified.

Draw me a sheep, he asked again,

I shall keep what is hidden from sight

under a glass bell

not on the lapel.

Draw me a sheep so I can slip away again

to between the pages of my book for ever more,

as if between my white bed sheets –

He said and vanished

like a broken vessel hastily cleared

from the public domain.

In a mischievous game, I still ponder how

to bring him back to me

like light from a broken piece of mirror.

Transfigured

Forty days later

I would like to have been the dove

who flew

from the ark

sent off to olive-branch distances

never to return again –

Her difficulty was in coming back

not because she lost her way or was ungrateful,

but because the moment her foot touched the earth

the dove became a bird transfigured,

nameless in the hidden clefts of the rocks.

She was a dove-bird refusing to see

what was expected of her,

since in the new world outside

a green leaf is no more than a sign of limited time

like the one that drowned before it –                                                

Another Identity

A woman split, exposed like the barkless spots

in the tree of knowledge

and the tree of life

singing with a thirst to disappear.

If only he had spoken another word to her

the world’s din would have kept on flowing.

When her voice slipped with the carelessness

of a scarf, she brought out a secondhand dress

from a different Genesis

to cover the nakedness of her flesh.

A secondhand dress to take out and throw

take out and throw – 

that once was an amulet for love.

Panta Rei

All that time I was busy

searching for the fitting pseudonym,

appropriate,

through which I shall slip like a thread

in the eye of a needle.

I must find time for myself

even as I must find myself

in time. What I see from the corner of my eye

does not necessarily exist.

Everything flows – an ancient proverb

sits within me, silent.

What will come is what will truly be.

The Time of Chocolate Squares

I recognize my mother’s handwriting

in the address book and in the old letters,

and that time, the time of squares of chocolate

under the tongue,

like words that were once thrown into the space

of the room and were never taken back.

Bel Canto

At last, at the end of times,

a man emerged from between parked cars

to meet eyes whose warmth was a shot

bird. There I commanded the world to stop.

And it stopped and rolled back to the beginning.

On nerve-tips a violin bow slipped

from a body

to a body.

Fermata

Something rotted in me and ripened to be said.

He who knew love from the roots of his hair

comes, slices body-bread, stripping a gown of skin,

not comprehending how it is that he

and I are two syllables in a word.

Metamorphosis

The span of time depends on the birds

comfortable along the high-voltage power lines.

And with a coo-filled flap of wings they patter 

the roof of my house

as if returning to a lost kingdom

where I paint a window and leave

empty space before it

and empty space behind it

to make room for them

where perspective allows to see

what I cannot see with the eyes of the flesh.

A Fortiori

Used books on the sidewalk

like a stubborn being –

they do not come from nowhere.

A wind leaned in to leaf through the pages,

a dog stopped, licking. Someone touched

smelled caressed wove a passing thought folded a corner,

left –

Books. A fortiori people.

In any case books

always return in the opposite direction

like from a funeral march, minus one.                                              

Forth Poem from Cycle “The Refugee”

A refugee and his moving shadow.

A trailing trace of smoke

from a weeping land has remained stuck in the flax stalks

in his clothes in his hair in his hammered breath in the cold air.

His face – flaming flowers. The pads of his feet a gray wolf.

A fleeing mountains’ shadow, and after that the deluge.

By the fences, a sliced man

will retrace his steps no more