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For Nitzan
YOU HEAR the sun in the morning
through closed shutters. As you sleep
the early sky is colored
in fish scales, and you open your eyes
like a street
already lined with fruit.
YOUR LIPS are as full as a wound
guarded in battle. Your skin is the color of my eyelids
when the sun passes through.
The sea takes my shape as I float in it
but your hair falls all around you, like the paths of gravity
made visible.
A BODY looks like an unopened bell
and long sounds called me here
but vast now and silent you are a bell
and I do not know how to hold you.
YOUR ARMS are as long as sand falling from a cracked fist.
Visible petals of a silent swelling,
you encase me in one motion
like foam whitening a planet
with the sea’s final strength.
YOU ARE as happy as a waterwheel
when the earth is flooding.
Beside you I sleep with difficulty—
a cherry rolling along the stem of its thought.
Perpetual wings of the moistened eyelashes
I waited for you like vines around a house that was never built.
MY LIPS are shy,
like a candle that will not flicker.
RIPENING spots of white starlight onto our cold blue sphere,
you made the night reflect everything
in pools of water.
Even the wet streets of the planet would see me reaching for your hand
like a paddle returning to the surface of a lake.
THE MOON has gone farming at night
in the soil of your dreams. Tall trees
are growing there, for you to climb,
and the flower I gave you during the day
can barely break through the ground.
THE STRAWBERRY she held between her teeth
was wild, plucked; quiet. Its color
continued
into the seal of her lips.
I WOULD twist my arms like coral
if that made them delicate enough to hold you.
I WANT to boast
around you, like a horse rearing straight up
in the stars.
But I have nothing to say.
Like night
when the moon is out.
I TUGGED at your laughter like a rope
that loosened the whole knot of your skin
until all of it fell to the floor.
A SPIDER cannot be used as bait,
nor its silk as fishing wire. It will never agree to this.
Lowering itself from your finger,
making its own line down, through the water,
these are things
that even your naked body cannot effect.
Bright as it is
on the shoreline.
THE WAVE has come to collect the little ports on the coast
but it will take forever, since we are laughing.
Near twilight dust settles in a cavern above the rocks,
and a shawl conceals the purpose of the first heat.
The air is filled with feathers, and our skin
with shadows. Shall I say they are still?
I HOLD your hips
as you straddle me
like a signature
trapping white space
inside itself.
BETWEEN KISSES the air is quiet,
like trees after a snowfall. Talking softly, after,
a branch is shaken loose.
EVEN YOUR words will not leave you
now that they know
that to lighten your body
by even so much as themselves
would remove the balance
from what had been measured precisely.
ON YOUR BACK you sleep as if your wings were planted in the sand.
TO THE BIRD an island is not as bright as a star.
But which can it land on?
Is the earth really bent
so gradually
that we can make a bed anywhere?
Not in the dark-skinned sea, or in night,
which fills the shape of your mouth
until your face is bloated,
like something newly born.
So we plant ourselves in some clearing, in a forest,
until our bodies break like seeds at night—
until a white tentacle, as tender as a root,
grows in a glass of water.
THE GROUND of the forest has become muddy in the rain
and now it looks as though we will not find the earrings
your sister gave you. Where did we first lie down?
The whole earth
seems to bear the imprint
of our bodies.
LOVE,
the skeleton of a ship on the seabed
takes water as its flesh
and maybe schools of fish
as momentary sails. A single pearl
lost to a current
can become to it
a navigable star.
THIS GIRL’S words are as ordered
as birds in the sky when there are fish below.
What is she saying to me?
THE EARTH was fruit, and stars, and motion.
Your mouth was sticky. And your sight
flew in all the directions of birds.
There was no need for music.
So which devil taught you, sweet girl,
to close your eyes when you kiss?
YOU DISAPPEAR beside me in a forest. Walking,
I cannot hear
the moment when fewer leaves are crushed,
and I speak to you
as if it made no difference that the forest listened in your place.
For you I learned
that what is near us is never what is near us.
COLOR IS sleeping in some birds
when the sun is too early
to make use of it.
WHAT WILL you do with these pearls he has given you?
Can you eat them? Can you grind them into honey
and return them to the water, sweeter than they were?
Your neck is not a graveyard for the sea.
So don’t become a ghost
that scares away
the fish you must catch for your parents.
SHE UNDRESSED in the deep shadows of the garden she loved.
Swans meandered through branches,
and pecked at black pillars
still warm from ancient times. Hornets swarmed
around a dethroned king. And she had not yet told him.
APART from you I am as lost
as a pattern in marble.
The delicate hairs
of the stone
were l
eft behind
by your own soft body.
WHEN the sun is wide and drying and filled
with the soft light that snares
the evening mind of life, no feet
will find the spot where a tiger
leapt back and forth
over the rose it worshipped.
THE SEASON is yet unlit
by the glint of the sewing needle.
The thread is stored away, the light
is an unwoven shirt.
A GLACIER glows pink
from the sun it encases
in its ice. This is what is told
about time.
HOUSE, floating under moon
on a river. Propelled by silver oars
held from dark windows.
Blankets, covers, and sheets
raised as a sail.
ON MAPS the sea carries color.
But a swarm of shadowed fish
under the surface,
like moving marble,
eats the colored bits, gradually.
One day maps will show this.
BIRDS AGLOW in yellow do not carry ashes.
What the river carries, their talons cannot trap
and even sand slips through. Where the river narrows
ashes splash together, making the shapes they were.
THE STAR has given me a body:
an empty room
without windows.
SOIL GUARDS the sleep
of plant roots. When we pull them
they taste soft, like night.
THICK IN the forest masks are hung in rows, grinning.
The underside of a dripping leaf is dry.
Dawn is still pinned under the black body of night that fell asleep on top of us.
The cackle of thunder, like a puzzle, summons the spiders in the canopy.
A nest of stone birds is getting wet.
The drumming of fish, thrashing in a canoe, consecrates the rain.
Charcoaled trees burn slowly, to tease the lightning.
But the underside of a dripping leaf is dry.
THE SUN began eating
the parts of the fruit
exposed to air.
What was lodged in dark soil
would stay whole. Until the panther
dug it up with its paw
and sliced away the poison half
with its nail.
BY THE EVENING your hair is curled
like the new tentacles of an octopus. You move
where the light of the surface
has set.
APPROACH shadows like shallow water
into which you can reach
and touch indigo reefs.
WHEN YOU slipped off your dress, orders streamed from your lips
like a waterfall
that birds think they can land on.
Your cheeks maddened with color, your breasts
accusatory, you looked at me as though I knew
I could never lower your eyes in the morning.
THE PIGMENT of crushed petals
was smeared along both sides
of the bird’s beak.
But its wings were still limp enough
to drag along the ground.
I EMBRACED YOU by mistake
when I was only trying to caress you.
Now you love me.
COOKING under some trees
you must break the salt necklace
and let its white beads
fall into the iron pan.
Rain in the glint of an eclipse.
Your dark breasts glow,
the pan crackles.
LIKE the wind that gusts coastal pines toward the water
sleep bends me toward my lover
and I cannot drink from her.
I GUARDED your sleep like a young cat
who hunts down dreams
that climb out of the floorboards
in the dead of midnight. I’m sorry I found it hard to stay awake
during breakfast.
IF YOU stand there in the open rain
and cup your breasts in your hands
the stream of the sky cannot take its course
around your whole skin.
You were always modest like that, leaving something
even to the imagination of water.
But what is left for me
to not know of you?
Need I open a sky
to find the last soft shame
in your nakedness?
YOUR HEAD seems lower in this light
as you try to dry fish with your candle
at nightfall. You should not have spent the day
sleeping on my chest. Your skin is too young
for a man caked in salt. Happy as you were
on my hill of nets.
My love, they will always seem like a hammock to you
at noon,
when I return.
THE still
shadowed
sand.
Impatient for heat.
The fatigue of a shell
from keeping its arch.
No longer than a beach
can I wait for you
to become naked.
FRESH BANANA LEAVES can carry whole fish
across the surface of the ocean
when they are too tired to swim.
With your eyes half-closed
your still shaking body
wants currents
to continue the work of motion.
THE AFTERNOON is a fugitive
from the morning, and the night
is another country.
YOU curse the rain outside your window, believing
that it alone prevents your journey.
Your young lover, at the other end of a sea
suspended in the air
would surely understand.
AND if a bird descended on your shoulder
to whisper nothing in your ear
would you be angry? Vain beauty
that expects messages
to which it can reply.
YOUR HAIR is suspended in motion.
The silhouetted mane of a galloping horse
painted on a rock
by which it passed.
LIKE wooden planks from a broken ship
dashed against great stones,
my words you made into a spectacle
for the whole village. I only meant to tell you
I love another.
DOWN the river the creatures in the basin prepare
for the splashes the children will make
when they dispute their race. Stirred silt
will fill the little mouths of fish
with clay.
THE TREE collapsed on itself
leaving a pile of bark
over its roots.
What, foolish daughter,
did you think?
That it would shrink back into the ground?
THE growing fingers of clouds meet
like children
discovering they have hands.
DAUGHTER, along the rim of what you were knitting
I can see the circumference of your will.
You rarely show it,
and most often you end where you are silent.
But somehow, after the edge of this quilt
there is refusal
where there is nothing.
WHY IS the forest canopy strung with rope?
What have the children done with the branches?
Now the sun can only reach us through a maze.
As if it, too, had to pass through their games.
We walk around, all of us now, preparing the morning
with a grid of shadows on our skin.
As if we only escaped sleep
illicitly, the print of its servitude
still on us.
It was a cold morning on the forest floor, and wet.
And now, waking to a canopy of ropes,
as if the tree trunks were spiders’ legs at night
needling a web around us in the air,
we, awaking already within its mouth …
The old man has gone back to sleep another night.
What have the children done with the branches?
THE BIRD is in the center of the sun.
Its outline is silent,
as its nude, smooth wings extend
across the sphere of light.
They almost block it.
I can never tell
which part of nature is posturing:
To the sun the bird becomes a wall of glass,
its eyes, at the top of its silhouette,
pass pure light—
Lacunae Page 1
