If There is Something to Desire Read online

  of my best dreams.

  When I caress him, I know:

  a kiss is preverbal,

  a word is a kiss’s junior.

  22

  Enough painkilling, heal.

  Enough cajoling, command,

  even if your fiery joys

  mean endless inequality

  and melt our vessels

  that are dispensable.

  Enough rehashing, create.

  Enough lying to the sick:

  they will not get well.

  23

  Mom was an axiom.

  Dad was a theorem.

  I was a sleeping beauty

  in the cradle of home.

  The cradle has capsized.

  Now the end is the means.

  Cradlewrecked beauty, keep an eye

  on your mother who is an infant again.

  24

  Why do I recite my poems by heart?

  Because I write them by heart,

  because I know that kind of spleen

  by heart. But I lie to the pen,

  not daring to describe how I ambled

  along the distant ramparts of love,

  barefoot, wearing a birthday suit:

  the placental slime and blood.

  25

  I ought to remember: I was four,

  she was two months and twenty days.

  My sister-death is still in her grave.

  I know nothing of her.

  Maybe that is why in each moment of joy

  an immense grief lurks,

  as if I were sitting at an empty crib,

  my gown wet with milk.

  26

  Those who are asleep in the earth

  have an avian sense of the way.

  Gone, they sleep with shoes on,

  ready to rise and go

  to the pink, dispensable,

  barefooted insomniacs

  who had laced up for them

  the last pair of shoes.

  27

  Immortal: neither dead nor alive.

  Immortality is fatal.

  Let us embrace. Your arms are

  the sleeves of a straitjacket,

  a life vest to stay afloat.

  Lyrical poets are cursed:

  a caress is always firsthand,

  a word rarely.

  28

  He gave me life as a gift.

  What can I give in return?

  My poems.

  I have nothing else.

  But then, are they mine?

  This is the way, as a child,

  I would give birthday cards

  to my mother: I chose them,

  and paid with my father’s money.

  29

  The two are in love and happy.

  He:

  “When you are not here,

  it feels as though you

  had just stepped out

  and are in a room next door.”

  She:

  “When you step out

  and are in a room next door,

  it feels as though

  you do not exist anymore.”

  30

  Sprawling

  after love:

  “Look,

  the ceiling is

  all covered with stars!”

  “And maybe

  on one of them

  there is life …”

  31

  Begged him: do not fall asleep!

  But he did, and in the dark of the night

  loneliness took hold of me, like an incubus.

  Furious and rough was the onslaught

  of unchaste hands: this is the way

  a slave ravishes his master’s wife,

  a soldier rapes a schoolgirl.

  —I’ll tell my husband!

  —You’re lying.

  —I’ll call to him right now!

  —You’re raving.

  You will call to no one.

  You have no one to call.

  32

  The hush of the combat zone.

  On my back, alone,

  I feel your seed dying in me,

  feel its fear, its wish to live on …

  I wonder if I can carry

  so many deaths inside me,

  as I nurture

  my own?

  33

  Lay down.

  Embraced.

  Could not decide: would I rather

  sleep or sleep with him?

  Afterward could not decide

  what it was:

  was I sleeping?

  Were we?

  Or the one and the other?

  34

  Perhaps when our bodies throb and rub

  against each other, they produce a sound

  inaudible to us but heard up there, in the clouds and higher,

  by those who can no longer hear common sounds …

  Or, maybe, this is how He wants to check by ear: are we still intact?

  No cracks in mortal vessels? And to this end He bangs

  men against women?

  35

  I do not mind being away from you.

  That is not what the problem is.

  You will step out to get cigarettes,

  will come back, and realize I have aged.

  Lord, what a pitiful,

  tedious pantomime!

  A click of a lighter in the dark,

  one puff, and I am no longer loved.

  36

  To converse with the greats

  by trying their blindfolds on;

  to correspond with books

  by rewriting them;

  to edit holy edicts,

  and at the midnight hour

  to talk with the clock by tapping a wall

  in the solitary confinement of the universe.

  37

  An opaque, gentle, vulnerable day,

  as if it had been making love all night,

  a day when the past has no bitter taste,

  when the future retreats without a fight:

  the seventh day after a thousand-and-one nights.

  … In the morning Scheherazade opened the door,

  and three sons stood before the King’s eyes.

  But to me this tale is the least credible of all.

  38

  Good-bye, my dear!

  The bugles call.

  I will kiss on the lips

  the mirror in your hall.

  And on the cheek. And lest I

  not survive

  this vicious minute, also

  the handle of the closing door.

  39

  I have wasted such a love

  that surely I am bound for hell.

  With my new, proxy love

  no gate in hell will let me pass.

  I have ripped so many pillows,

  and now, for some winters to come,

  will be filling the caverns of flesh

  with your body. Love, a failure all around,

  a flaw in the shroud of days.

  … will be filling the howling caverns of mind

  with your heavenly flesh.

  40

  Sex, the sign language of the deaf and mute,

  a confession of love by the mute to the blind.

  Do we not know the word love?

  Love. But the mouth is sealed,

  the eyes shut. My forearm is touching

  the childlike back of your head.

  The blind is tender. The mute is ardent.

  And the sign of accord, in unison: a cloudburst!

  41

  If only I knew from what tongue

  your I love you has been translated,

  if I could find the original,

  consult the dictionary

  to be sure the rendition is exact:

  the translator is not at fault!

  42

  I am in love, hence free to live

  by heart, to ad-lib as I caress.

  A soul is light
when full,

  heavy when vacuous.

  My soul is light. She is not afraid

  to dance the agony alone,

  for I was born wearing your shirt,

  will come from the dead with that shirt on.

  43

  Multiplying in a column M by F

  do we get one or two as a result?

  May the body stay glued to the soul,

  may the soul fear the body.

  Do I ask too much? I only wish

  the crucible of tenderness would melt

  memories, and I would sleep, my cheek

  pressed against your back, as on a motorbike …

  44

  The journey will be long.

  Let us lie down, old friend.

  First loves come by the dozen,

  the last love is but one.

  May the summer last

  as a prison term

  of farewell delights,

  caresses on the doorstep.

  45

  We are rich: we have nothing to lose.

  We are old: we have nowhere to rush.

  We shall fluff the pillows of the past,

  poke the embers of the days to come,

  talk about what means the most

  as the indolent daylight fades;

  we shall lay to rest our undying dead:

  I shall bury you, you will bury me.

  46

  When the very last grief

  deadens all our pain,

  I will follow you there

  on the very next train,

  not because I lack strength

  to ponder the end result,

  but maybe you forgot to bring

  pills, a necktie, razor blades …

  47

  Should not regard, but I do:

  a beggar rummaging in the dump,

  two gays smooching on the bench,

  a wino with blood on his shirt,

  the drooping penis of an old man waiting for a trickle …

  Should not regard. But I do.

  48

  Love, a Sisyphus laboring

  to silence anxieties.

  Let me wear your last name,

  I promise not to soil it.

  Not for the sake of decency,

  not for any fringe benefits,

  but to be more graceful and prettier

  on holidays, at balls, going out.

  49

  Any housecoat would do,

  but the seamstress cuts

  the wedding gown

  out of sea foam.

  Come, undo my braid.

  No sister’s foot can fit

  Cinderella’s sandals

  of cinders made.

  50

  I have brushed my teeth.

  This day and I are even.

  51

  A Draft of a Marriage Contract

  … if necessary, the books shall be divided as follows:

  you get the odd, I get the even pages;

  “the books” are understood to mean the ones we used to read aloud

  together, when we would interrupt our reading for a kiss,

  and would get back to the book after half an hour …

  52

  A weight on my back,

  a light in my womb.

  Stay longer in me,

  take root.

  When you are on top of me,

  I feel triumphant and proud,

  as if I were carrying you

  out of a city under siege.

  53

  Armpits smell of linden blossom,

  lilacs give a whiff of ink.

  If we could only wage lovemaking

  all day long without end,

  love so detailed and elastic

  that when nightfall came,

  we would exchange each other

  like prisoners of war, five times, no less!

  54

  Man to woman is homeland.

  Woman to man is a way.

  How much way have you covered!

  Dear, get some rest:

  here is a chest, lean your head;

  here is a heart, camp out;

  and we shall evenly share

  the dry residue of griefs.

  55

  Memory keeps nothing unnecessary

  or superfluous.

  How much of your past

  am I still to go through?

  Taking dreams for memories,

  I stroke the sleeper’s head.

  A secret poll. The future

  comes in last.

  56

  Envy not singers and mimes,

  do not ravish the ailing words.

  The adjective beloved

  embraces all other adjectives,

  verbs, nouns,

  pronouns …

  Poor Logos, naked and starved,

  pining in admiration!

  57

  Inseparable: the parrot and its mirror,

  Narcissus and his stream.

  Here, I have made duplicate keys

  to Eden, had the white dress altered.

  Inseparable: Robinson Crusoe and Friday,

  the dots in the umlaut,

  me and you, my Sunday.

  58

  The serenade of a car siren

  under a window gone dark.

  Anything but betrayal!

  Let us stop ears with wax,

  tie the daredevil to the woman

  as to a mast … The sleep,

  restless and moist.

  The arm goes numb.

  59

  Writing down verses, I got

  a paper cut on my palm.

  The cut extended my life line

  by nearly one-fourth.

  60

  Teeth dull, veins collapsed,

  heels worn down.

  We are young as long as

  our parents are young.

  Dry is the riverbed where milk and honey,

  white and amber, had run.

  In the hospital, comb your mother’s hair,

  clip the yellow nails.

  61

  Bathe me, birth me from foam,

  cover me, swathe me in hugs.

  Paradise is where

  nothing can ever change.

  You’re crying? —No, a speck in the eye.

  You’re crying? —No, too much reading.

  Hell is where there is no way

  you can ever change.

  62

  You are, my dear,

  a wall of stone:

  to sing or howl

  behind,

  to bash my head on.

  63

  A tentative bio:

  caught fireflies,

  read till dawn,

  fell in love with weirdos,

  cried buckets of tears

  for reasons unknown,

  birthed two daughters

  by seven men.

  64

  I walk the tightrope.

  A kid on each arm

  for balance.

  65

  Old age will come, will arrange books

  in alphabetical order, will sort out photos and negatives.

  With a head shake: “How meager the heritage of the most gifted.”

  With a shrug: “Still, they must have done their best.”

  Wrapping a shawl tighter: “Incredible: any man that comes along

  can deserve the title ‘darling’!”

  With a toothless grin: “How lovely they look now,

  the rejected photos never put into albums!”

  66

  A Remedy for Insomnia

  Not sheep coming down the hills,

  not cracks on the ceiling—

  count the ones you loved,

  the former tenants of dreams

  who would keep you awake,

  once meant the world to you,

  rocked you in their arms,

  those who loved you …

  Yo
u will fall asleep, by dawn, in tears.

  67

  Eyes of mine,

  why so sad?

  Am I not cheerful?

  Words of mine,

  why so rough?

  Am I not gentle?

  Deeds of mine,

  why so silly?

  Am I not wise?

  Friends of mine,

  why so dead?

  Am I not strong?

  68

  A cake of soap, a length of rope,

  a chair to hang socks on.

  Death from depression seems

  a bit ridiculous.

  Starless is the abyss,

  dark the water’s depth.

  Too late for me

  to have died young.

  69

  The sleeping are no mates for the crying,

  the crying cannot judge those asleep.

  How quickly you succumb to slumbers,

  how blissfully, as I lie crying

  next to you, hiding in the pillow

  and saving for a rainy day

  the lullaby to mourn the one

  who had fallen asleep before I did.

  70

  “If you want, we can part with a smile,

  or you can cry a little, if you want.”

  The sole profession in the world

  for men only: the executioner.

  Has all been properly done:

  the verdict duly announced,

  the scaffold set nice and comfy?

  Is the ax razor sharp?