June - Come Home

Come home
because
I have funny stories to tell you about the cats
and
Huevos Rancheros aren't the same without you
and
you should know that I can do lots of things on my own
and
I have cool art friends that talk about their galleries and how it is not just a work, but its setting, that creates an impression


Come home
because
I don't think Gatsby remembers you
and
there's a dog that lives next door now, and we've changed the cushions on the couch
and
I've been having terrible foot pains
and
anyways, you shouldn't be smoking.


Come home
because
your laugh is so authentic, like you've spotted the truth for the first time
and
it sounds like that every time
and
I wonder what books you've been reading
and
have you really been reading enough?


Come home
because
I could tell you were lying about the car and your friend Josh
and
there's something about being alone that loosens your morals
and
here, there's no hill to worry about in the evening
and
Home is whenever I'm with you.

-BHN

stopping to pray on nablus road

our father

drawn to the familiarity
and thirsty for the silence,
i sat.

in heaven

i saw his shadow approaching,
and my heart pounded, please no, please no:
"are you just here for yourself, or for our 6 o'clock prayer?"

hallowed be

it's only twenty minutes.
as soon as i said

thy name

my voice cracked 
and my face went salty
but there were only two of us,

so i did my best with psalm 33,
thanking the Lord for his kindness,
making this world so beautiful.

for the Lord loves righteousness.

it may be sacrilegious,
but i did not so much as agree,
and not for confrontation's sake,

and justice.

it's just that
the church was in east jerusalem,
and earlier that day 

He is our help and our shield.

i drank tea with the cavedwellers
who told me how their town went from
500 families

to 43. 

was, is now, and will be forever.

later on
i sat next to a soldier 
who told me that he had had

to use human shields
and send palestinians to check for bombs
in deserted bags on the street in Hebron,
to deter booby-traps later on. 

blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.

the words fell out of my mouth
without hesitation,
but in between the sermons and pauses for silence

we believe in one God

i broke the song with my cracking voice
and blood shut eyes.

(where are you?)

but what is faith,
the reading asked,

without work?

sad eyes won't rebuild
demolished structures
or shield activists from the settler's
metal chains,
or give rightful owners
the right to their land
or make simple this
mess.

thy kingdom come.

maybe words
or cameras
or an almost sweet smile
or lots more tea
will help.

on earth as it is in heaven.

maybe.

DLS

exploding poem

with gunpowder and smoke, dark engineering, I will blow –
quick! read me quick the clock is ticking and I can feel
my mechanisms whir goodbye
I will tell you what it looks like from the other
side of the cannonball arc, when the flash
and claps have faded from the field and the dust
has cleared, the singed grass singing high-pitched, sad
goodbye I will tell you if it is glorious and cold
like morning and if a chorus rings out for us who
sputter our lives out
so long, goodbye, the spark is lit and fuse
it smells of sulphur – the wires straight as
the sleek blade-edge – how strange
it seems my springs are jammed the cogs
crunching together, breaking inside me, like
delicate bird-bones, and a little frail skull.

no
it is all a lie and never was that way at all.

the truth is I am plain
and ordinary, commonplace, enduring.
I will always be here, at this address, this light-screen.
on my toes, looking out the window for
your car to drive up. my bed made, groceries bought.

goodbye I’ve lost you forever. stop reading please you see
that I am not strange, any longer.
instead made cheap by jaded eyes and lights and wires.
by people in a world where everything is here, and always.

CDL

Worldly Possessions

Gandhi made do with
dinner bowls, a wooden fork and spoon,
three porcelain monkeys,
his diary, prayer-book, watch.
He had a bowl to spit into, for when he fasted,
paper knives, two pairs of sandals.
And that was all.
They are in a garden, still,
where he died.

I tell myself that I could make do.
Sell my books, my clothes, that great wooden hull of a house.
The sky is mine - all yards and yards of it,
like spun-cloth, woven-water.
So too the concrete streets and city jazz.
Mine, theirs. I begrudge no one.
I have every right.

This is refrain and chorus, while folding linens, shutting windows.
I lock the garden door behind me, go upstairs,
to seethe and hum, pretend I am a loom.

CDL

http://www.mkgandhi-sarvodaya.org/images/g_glob2.jpg

(This Might be More Comfortable Reading in Word)—EWW

Historical Hills in the Middle of a Dark Lake in Paris where I Fell in Love and I Miss when the Moon Shines Nice and Goldfish Yellow on Your Blue Jewelry Shaped like Triangles Made by a Dead Man but only Strictly between the Hours of One in the Morning and Three Twenty One in the Morning OR What I’ll Miss about the Last Couple Months OR Thank God for Granting Me (and you and you and you and you) this Moment of Clarity OR My Summer Reading List Was Very Long and still Is now that I Think about It OR Reading a Book Called Snow in July Is a Very Weird Experience I Think You Should Try It OR Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans even though You’ve Never Been there and New York’s Already Really Hot and You Can’t Imagine What the Gulf Coast Would Be Like this Time of Year or Smell Like with All that Oil OR (Did you know they capped it? That it took fucking forever?) OR I Love Paris Something Something La-di-da-di-You OR How My Headphones Make My Ears Uncomfortable when I Wear Them Walking around Campus OR There Were So Many Days One Day and Now There just Don’t Seem to Be Any More Anymore

Jack and Jill Went Down the Hill

I saw a white bowl roll

down a grassy knoll unevenly

jilted not

straight where it would

end was a complicated

calculus but it

jumped even a bit with

its speed still

falling over the hill

once landing on the bottom as if set

on a table for breakfast

cereal but the momentum

in the moment

bumped it down

the hill.

—EWW

squared

now the moon

light is a

quarried

column

supporting

the sky, the

sea, the

clear

horizon

CVP

love squared + memory squared

spring moved in circles, and summer

for some reason is

triangles,

gold

glitter of

moonlight off the point

and now a single sailboat on the

horizon

drive me to distraction,

wash the distance between

points in my head with

radiant

calm

so that i can sleep without

that sad feeling between my salty shoulder blades

CVP

Obituary Poem

HE
knew, from light reflected off the bottoms of the clouds,
the depths of waters: shallow, treachery-deep, or wading-depth,
and all the hidden lagoons.

HE
poured fresh waters into gourds, and kept them,
as he lay inside his canoe, to drink.
Dried tubers tied with leaves, he stashed, as well.
He knew the swells, could read the
star-charts. Constellation consultations, he duly
noted in his ledger, and the coral pebbles on the shores.
Compass, sextant, map-maker: take note.
What instruments we have he scoffed at.

SO
I know he died, but can't remember how. I hope his
body never floundered - salty, leather-worn - and bobbed
ashore. Instead he might be hidden still, real deep,
slumbering with octopus, jellyfish, and squid.

CDL

Greyhound, Sunset

So very late and very July:
a glowing sky with painted clouds,
through windows made of glass.
And then the moon, un-cooperatively, yellow.
Just like butter or the way, that once, gold was -
that time I saw it all alone, unshaped, still soft -
a metal made of some strange quality of light.

THE MOON: a hunk of rock, light-stealer, thief.
A sham, a night-dissembler. I am a mad-woman,
shouting at the blueness. It should not be yellow,
warm and sunny, constant, as we pinprick away.
You are grey and cold and lifeless.
You are dust and ash-darkness.
Your craters and your airless silence.
I am not fooled by your seas:
they are cavities in stone.

But you are some unselfconscious marvel. Reflect away.
The whole night is an absence and you won't
succumb, however borrowed the light,
however false your gladness. I will take it:
this mask, matte sun. Your unasked
for glory. However cheap to come by
(used rays, secondhand beams), they stun now
as in the day. More rare and sought perhaps,
by eyes like mine, that see the skies
only when the afternoon blaze has dimmed,
and buses carry home passengers
in boxes, with bottled breezes, late.
After summer sidewalks cool from summer rain.

CDL

the desert warriors, and me

the orange street lamp

coated my small worded pages

in a cycle of copper tints and blank shadows

through the straight shot

of the negev desert.

i thought of the women

who had sewed, soaped, and "not shut up"

their way to freedom,

and how many pages i always felt lay

between me and my wings.

are we there yet?

DLS

thoughts from the tayelet

it's been

tearing toasty pita

to scoop hummus

and tomatoes

whose juices usually make it to my elbow

and cucumbers

who fall into my lap.

i've been walking the hills of history, everyday,

from the gardens of zion

to the graves of olive

to the settlement of scholars on scopus,

hiding out from time to time

for Bedouin tea,

inappropriate flirtations in parks,

disgusting pastries after work,

mostly peaceful protests against hate,

desert roller coasters in the back of a pick up truck,

dance parties on a porch in nachlaot,

and in front of the halva man in the shuk

because he says i'm sweet like halva,

and his free halva is very sweet.

it's mostly beautiful here,

except of course, when the red and white striped sidewalk ends,

but even there,

with the trash that stays

and graffiti that scares,

the sun sets and children laugh and the stones glow and my salaam alaikum gets a wa alaikum salaam.

it's hard to be blind here,

even the rose bushes and unlabeled pink flowers that drape into the sidewalk and fill it with incense

remind me of the water shortage

and the future war with the jordan river

as the dead sea dies.

looking out over the storm of this city,

whose mocking clouds haven't given me one drop in two months,

my tears promise to fall with the same certainty

that the morning mist will rise equally

over the wall to the west bank,

the bars of ben yehuda street,

the israeli flags in sheikh jarrah

the cafes of emek refaim,

the ruins of silwan,

and american accents on king david.

the mist knows no green line, barrier, or border,

besides those of the olive trees

whose leaves are left damp with dew.

can it change? for 2,000 years, one city's

history has been a sinusoidal fluctuation

of conquerors and desire and loss.

can anything but this wavering road

stretch out between the separation barriers

of this holy city?

up here,

it's just stones,

a pleasant village,

or a hilly view;

an alien would never have guessed.

now i'm gathering my things.

i have said my last shabbat shaloms on a quiet friday night in katamon,

and in one week,

will escape the constant pain

of walking anywhere,

and exhilaration of learning

the dense history the city constantly unfolds

in subway excavations

and street signs.

and i look forward to my smile

as i'll take whiskey with balanced birds and disposable cameras,

and devour the frosting on chapel st.,

and play august monopoly when the storms set in,

and flap my wings at my favorite snake,

and jump up and down at the faces i've missed,

and sigh at the top of east rock,

but i'll miss my frowns at the heartbreak of this city,

and the love for those making it better.

i'll miss the crazy protests to protect girls from learning anything,

and the neighborhoods that have taught me to look frum,

and my daily fix of battling the ideas of the middle east

and the pervasive disagreement.

i'll even miss the aggression on the bus,

and the absence of a fair line anywhere,

and the freedom of every afternoon,

and my vegetable delivery on wednesday nights.

i'll miss my landlord who calls me sister,

and the black hat battle that floods my face red,

and the awkward conversations with tami, ran, and ithar,

as i try to test my hand in a radio station for peace.

i'll miss never knowing what to order except taybeh beer,

and bickering for my 35 shekel price for two rolls of film in the old city,

and the onset of fear as the sun sets and i realize i have no idea where i am,

until every passerby is willing to direct me home.

i'll miss the thick smell of cardamon and coffee on al khan street

and the falafel at damscus gate
and watching the three men near the christian quarter play backgammon in intense silence

and tea with sage, rosemary, and mounds of sugar
and restaurants filled with the sweet smell of apple hashish
and kids dancing in the fountain in yemin moshe.

i'll miss frozen yogurt with mango, passionfruit, and date honey,

and waiting impatiently on saturday nights for the west of the city to wake up,

and the man who sits on the bench on emek refaim everyday, who smiles, waves, and sometimes asks why i'm sad.

i'll miss never knowing whether to say toda or shokran as i leave taxis

and the bus driver with aviators on egged number 18 bus that comes at 9:10 outside the post station,

and the train the weaves amid the hills between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,

and the view of the valley driving away from the city.

i'll miss the espresso machine at work that i always mess up,

and overpriced ice cafe at aroma that i always find worth it

and lemon and mint sorbet

and 20 warm pitas for 6 shekel at the shuk

and oily rugelach from marzipan.

i'll miss light shows in old city,

and jerusalem bread outside jaffa gate,

and sighing at the concrete by the west bank.

i'll miss playing drums in archeological parks,

and yelling words i don't understand at protests,

and watching the sun set as i take my dried stiff laundry off the line

and the glow of the dome of the rock from the tayelet.

i'll miss playing john lennon on repeat and imagining no religion,

and thanking iron and wine, because it does look so perfect from these great heights,

and jangling to music that i don't understand, but makes me smile.

i'll miss the rush from stealing rosemary from the sidewalk to roast with my potatoes,

and the chaos of cooking for shabbat,

and the sweet kick of fresh challah

and the gooey delight of stuffed eggplant.

i'll miss the prayers i have come to memorize

and the caves and stones that surround the city

and the dates frozen at the back of my fridge

and coming back to curly haired smiles or long walks to nowhere and back.

amid this city of hatred,

stale and resilient hatred,

there's so much to love.

i'll have to play from the sideline now,

rooting for the love here with everything i have,

and remember its strength amid

reports from gaza and hebron in the new york times

that ignore its strength.

there is love.

i promise.

DLS

Day at the Hot Springs

We ate strawberries and dug our
feet into the hot pebbles,
thrilled by the thought of
molten lava running down below.
I swam out, though,
further, and further,
to the middle of the lake,
wading through the wall of algae
that would ornament me when I
emerged, as though they had
embraced me, I had gone
far enough, I was
one of them.
You were scared though,
a fear of dark water,
the mystery of unknown
below, you
preferred to stay on the shore.
I said,
Come to me,
and you obeyed,
swam out and met me there in the
dark deep,
which is how I know
you loved me.
But I never jumped from the cliff
for you.

Which is all only to say
that this was foreshadowed,
this moment,
when you ask if you should stay up
and wait for me and I say
I will have to see whether or not
I am very late.

EWV

A Goodbye

Most of all I will miss
this window,
that wakes me earlier than I'd like
and shames me into staying awake
with its view of the morning sky.
It's as though all that light flooding through
to stir me from slumber
was trying, more, to show me
all that it could see.
These walls, too,
starkly white and bare.
Not as cosy as my
multi-color room
or dorm walls covered in photographs,
but fresh, cool,
walls for the summer.
I will miss
other things too like
the glow of stone on the mall at night
and the eerie singsong repetition of
"Good morning" at the Metro stop--
I never found the source
but she sounded sad,
she seemed to doubt her words.
Perhaps miss
is not the right word;
really these are things I will only
remember. To miss something
one must feel its absence,
the way I would miss a pair of keys
or earrings when I've nothing to fiddle with,
the way I miss you
when I lie on an empty bed.
To miss something
is to mix strong memory
with yearning.
I leave little behind to yearn for,
here, but moments passed
that I now forsake, to see
why the window wakes me
tomorrow morning.

EWV

Why O Why July?

July is pathetic—why, the
Umpire's about to declare it OUT!, over,
Loved, but done, and there're just three poems! (four now.) Let's write
You away something nice.

—EWW

Breakfast poem, redux

I forgot to have my toast and Nutella (Nutella and toast) this morning
But still I had a meal
The walk over--
The world, filtered and funneled into my ears
Compressed and expanded, looped and double-tracked.
The sun shone so clear, warming the air without totally shutting out the night
The contrast, I think, is what made it so precious
The blue tendrils of smoke matched her hair and ear jewelry
As she leaned in, sighed, and expressed
The women running. The kids in their perfectly pressed casual clothes, smelling fresh and fake
Why is it that I am so captivated by those outside the system which I inhabit?
The ones who push in, support and remain invisible
While we drift by, occupied by more important thoughts

Today and every day I try to help them understand the world
In which we live
"It isn't bad," I say. "Or good. It is how it is, and it's our job to try and understand it."
But they can see through what I say. And if they can't, then I have failed. A paradox, sublime.
But I am not jaded, I am not a cynic--
I am worse. I am beginning to understand the way it works, and still refuse to reject it
"By sitting down we are sitting down."

"Eat breakfast everyday," I tell them. It's important. But when I haven't eaten mine, what right do I have?

Day 12874

Where is comfort and why is it sometimes somewhere you haven’t been before?

Day 12874

Takes off glasses
Places glasses on keyboard
Computer hummmmms
Rubs procerus muscles in small circles (radius ¾ cm) bilaterally with index fingers

Up until day 12874, he designated the time between 5:52 (Gladys, the secretary, leaves mumbling about a dentist’s appointment for her youngest) and 6:57 (Bill, the janitor, comes in to take out the trash, blaring radio perched on the rim of her mop-and-trash operation) as 64 minutes of quiet in which he could accomplish his most delicate work, the most thought intensive aspects of his day
But today, on the 12874th day he didn’t think he could stand the ventilated air
He would suffocate today

Desk chair overturned
22 flights of stairs. Sprint.
Park park park

Tulips, today
Just about to
Bloom
Green sepals
Blazing red suns
Tipped yellow
Orange

He thinks of the human race
The moon
Airspace

He thinks of the math he would need
To graph the transitions of color

He kneels down into the grass
And lets the wet dirt soak into the knees of his pants
He extends himself into the place where the stem first meets the ground
He lets his fingernails fill with silt
He reaches deeper
He keeps his fingers there

—LNPR

Paris, June 17

Eiffel Tower and a

football game:

sparklers, horns,

drums, Mali bambara and

Tunisian flags. Stuck

on the

sidewalk behind a couple

kissing, I tossed a few

coins to the Chinese man

echoing singing then fell

in love with the

stranger waiting

for the Metro, blue

checked collar undone,

reading Lolita.

CVP