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Uvi Poznansky
Zeev Kachel
Home ©2012
Uvi Poznansky, Zeev Kachel
All rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,
including information storage and retrieval system,
without the written permission of the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published by Uviart
P.O. Box 3233 Santa Monica CA 90408
Blog: uviart.blogspot.com Website: uviart.com
Email: [email protected]
First Edition 2012
Printed in the United States of America
Book design, cover design, cover image and illustrations by
Uvi Poznansky
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012915617
ISBN: 978-09849932-3-9
ASIN: B00960TE3Y
Contents
Uvi Poznansky
Home
This is the Place
Muse
A Sentence, Unfinished
His First Home
A Child on a Wagon
A Heartbeat, Reversed
And Then She Left Him
Blade
Even One Mark
Don’t Open Your Eyes
This Tissue Is Me
Be Still, A Poet’s Heart
A Diamond Short, A Decade Late
Zeev Kachel
Reparations
We Were Born in Darkness
After You’ve Gone
Childhood Years
My Teachers
Fall
Memory
Every Day I Tear A Leaf
She and I
Lie to Me
I Forgive you Everything
Don’t be a Judge
Weep, My Heart
Not to Think
I’m Not Sorry
Not One is Home
Your Advocate, Your Voice
My Girl of Innocence, from Time to Time
My Ties Unhitched
We Met Here
Somewhere There
In My Dream I Hear
Another Time
Never have the Days
We Pass
Glass Eyes
Not in Good Spirits
Crossroad
No Need to Worry Anymore
A Different Man
Everything has Long Lost its Weight
Should I Fall
Now I Cry
When Life Becomes a Curse
Without a Compass
The Wolf
The Easiest Demise
Bent Over Memories
I Plucked a Wildflower
The Heart of Space
I Live Here on Paint and on Toxoid
The Time is Near
Fall
Autumn’s Gold
On My Body
Tired of Fighting
It All Passes
Maybe
Perhaps
Maybe
Vigil Light
A Memorial
A Lone Wolf
Time Crawls Slowly
Fantasy
Blessed
In a Dark Night with not a Friend
I Am
About the Cover & Illustrasions
About This Book
About Zeev Kachel
About Uvi Poznansky
A Note to the Reader
Bonus Excerpt: A Peek at Bathsheba
Bonus Excerpt: A Favorite Son
Bonus Excerpt: Apart From Love
Books by Uviart
Apart From Love
The David Chronicles
Rise to Power
A Peek at Bathsheba
The Edge of Revolt
A Favorite Son
Twisted
Home
Jess and Wiggle
Now I Am Paper
Uvi Poznansky
Poems and Prose
Home
Uvi Poznansky, 20121
Sucked in by a force, I'm flying through a tunnel
The tunnel of memory that leads me back home
The past blurs my present, so my vision is double
The walls and the ceiling curve into a dome
From here I can see my home, tilting
And falling from place, all the lamps are aflame
My father's empty chair is slowly ascending
Tipped by the light, outlining its frame
This is the Place
Uvi Poznansky, 2012
This is the place where he put pen to paper...
But clung to the wall, the shelves are now bare
All that remains of his words is but vapor
All you can spot is but a dent in his chair
He used to sit here, here he would stare
Years come, years go, an old clock keeping score,
He would scribble his notes, crumple them in despair
Waiting for his savior—but locking that door
That door sealed him off, away from all danger
Except from the depth of the danger within
No one could intrude here, except for the stranger
Who would carry him off to where his end would begin—
The poet, who’d mourned the loss of his mother
Would then, somehow, be reduced to a child
He would crouch at the threshold, and call, call, call, call her
Knock, knock, knock at the door; no more held back, but wild
This is the place where he put pen to paper
Till the door opened, creaking on a hinge...
Locked in embrace, perhaps at last he can feel her
No need to cry now, can't feel that twinge
Muse
Uvi Poznansky, 2012
The lamp swings like a pendulum
Pictures sway on their nails
Then slip down the walls, leaving scratched trails
Amidst the quake, the grief, the confusion and scare
Slowly ascending is my father's armchair
And beyond all these outlines of what I see there
Beyond the sofa, the knickknacks, the old furniture
Light pours in, and it paints something new
It reveals, it unveils at this moment a clue
The clue to a presence only he could once see
A presence he longed for, because only she
Could call him back home, and envelop him so
Touching-not-touching, her hands all aglow
These pages, upon which he'll never scribble a line
Are floating out of shadows, into the shine
Only she can now read the blanks, she and no other
He's ascending into the arms of his muse, his mother.
A Sentence, Unfinished
Uvi Poznansky, 2004
At this moment, a man is lying in his armchair, propped up on a large pillow. He has lived, or rather, has confined himself within these walls for decades, for a reason unknown. In this stagnant place all sounds are muffled, all images erased—but for one thing: his youth. There is a vibrant longing in him for the adventures of his early days.
Was it not just yesterday when he left his home in Poland, never to see his parents again? Has he not escaped from the Nazi death camp in France, climbed across the Pyrenean Mountains, and found his way to Spain? He can still spot the snow-covered trail winding down, shining in the mist. It is fading out now, vanishing into a cloud, into fog.
No, it is not fog anymore but a storm, a raging storm at sea. There he stands, aboard the deck of a small ship, straining to see the dreamy
outline of a new shore: Israel. There is a certain glint, the vivid, restless glint of the wanderer, playing in his eyes.
It is high noon, but the room is dark. The blinds are drawn. Only a thin plume of daylight reaches in somehow, and writes a bright dot against the shadows. If—like him—you waited long enough, you could actually see the dot bleeding slowly, steadily across the bare floor, rising up over the wall, becoming longer and longer still, until at long last it would fade out, like a sentence unfinished.
Dark circles can be noticed around his eyes; which suddenly brings to mind a tired animal, one that has not felt sunshine for a long time. The eyelids fall shut and at once, the glint is gone. An invisible hand is writing on the wall. He knows it in his heart. He bears it in fear and silence.
And then, trying to ignore the ticking, the loud, insistent ticking of the clock from the adjacent kitchen, you too would, perhaps, start sensing a presence. Voices would be coming from a different place, a place within. A faint footfall… A soft laughter... Who is there? He glances nervously at the entrance door. Is it locked? Can a stranger get in? Then—quite unexpectedly—the fear subsides and for the first time, gives way to something else. Something wells up in his throat. Why, why is the door locked?
He feels a sudden urge to crawl down, get to that threshold, and cry. Mommy! Open the door! Let me in, mommy! Let me come home! But for now, he can still hold it in. He forces himself to turn away from that door. Somehow it feels lighter in the dark. The bareness of this space, which was once adorned with rich Persian rugs, colorful oil paintings and fine furnishings, is more bearable this way. So is the weight of loneliness.
Opposite from him, playing out endlessly, unintelligibly and in quick succession on the TV screen, are strange images from unfamiliar places. Noise. He lets the images come. He lets them go. He has no will. He has no curiosity. But from time to time he stirs, despite the sharp, sudden pain in his wrist. He fumbles at the remote control, wondering why the sound is so distant, so mute. And yet—no matter how much he tries—he finds it impossible to fix that which is broken. The shelves behind him are laden with books, three of which he has written himself in years past. Signed: Blue Wolf.
Here is the poet, a man notorious for his contradictions, a man of a great passion and an equally great skill to capture it, to put it in beautiful, eloquent words in any one of ten languages. Here is the storyteller whose listeners have left him. Locked in a world of no sound, in a world of no expression, here he is: a cage within cage. This is the place where even the wolf surrenders. The fight is over. No more howling.
Here, at last, is my father.
His First Home
Uvi Poznansky, 2004
Here is the place—he can bring it back—his first home.
Straight ahead is the door with a big handle high above. He can easily reach it, standing on the tips of his toes and pushing, pushing forward. It opens! Here is the room, which he shares with his sister, Batia. He is three yours old; she is five. And somehow he knows: she will come in later, much later. He can climb into bed now. Sleep is coming; he can feel it. Sleep is almost here.
It weighs heavily on his lids, but—for just a second—he can lift his dreamy gaze and look up at the painted ceiling. Half of it is night, with a large crescent moon surrounded by a swirl of stars, the other half—day, with a bright, yellow sun. He rubs his eyes, astonished. Nothing like this has ever happened before: They stir! The sun, the moon and the glowing stars—they all seem to move, seem to turn overhead...
Then, all of the sudden, amidst the glow, he finds himself standing at the banks of a lake with his daddy. He lets go of his daddy’s hand, flings a stone and at once he can spot—right there, in the middle of the lake—a ripple taking shape. One circle rises magically inside another, widening, riding out farther and farther until at long last it fades out. White lilies can be seen floating all around. One of them is right here, at arms reach. Only a thin line, the line of illusion, separates the petal from its white reflection. And underneath it, schools of golden fish scurry in one direction, then take a sharp turn and flow elsewhere.
And from somewhere in the distance he can hear a shrill sound: the whistle of a train. Soon, Zeev knows, it will go out of earshot again, as the train travels past the hills, going away on its mysterious journey, calling him to come, calling him to follow.
A Child on a Wagon
Uvi Poznansky, 2004
There he sits, pressed in between bundles and things that keep rattling around him, on top of a horse-driven wagon. Looking up at his parents he can sense something big, something fearful and unspoken casting a shadow over them; and they bend their heads together over him and his sister. He can see an endless line in front, an endless line in back—horses and wagons, wagons and horses as far as the eye can see—all advancing towards the same gray, unclear horizon, all escaping towards the same destination: Unknown.
The sun rises in front of the wagons, and sets behind them. Towns appear and disappear. Rivers pass by, then forests, brick houses, motels. In Minsk they stop. He finds the three-story hotel quite fascinating at first, especially the curved rail of the staircase, which is meant, no doubt, for sliding down and yelling at the top of your voice. Of course, landing down on your butt, he finds out, is an entirely different matter—and so is the harsh, unforgiving look cast down at him by the hotelkeeper.
They settle down for the night. In the rented room, his mommy blesses the Sabbath candles. Her hands are tightly clasped, her eyes closed. And early the next morning they mount the wagon again, and the journey goes on in the dim light, guided by nothing but an instinct to survive, farther and farther away from home. Squinting at the rising sun, Zeev finds it more and more difficult to keep his eyes open. His mind is going numb listening to the wheels as they spin and turn, spin and turn, beating incessantly against the mud.
Cold rain starts coming down at him, sheet after sheet, and streaming in the same direction is the wet mane of the horse. Its head keeps bobbing up and down, up and down in front. When will it end? Where can they go?
Many days pass by—he cannot count them any more—until, one evening, as they travel along the river, a big town comes into view, closer and closer against the smoky blue backdrop of the Ural Mountains.
This, his daddy tells him, is Saratov.
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