50 KILOS, c. 1939
By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon.
Our endeavor with respect to art was commensurate with our will to live.
— VIKTOR ULLMANN
What goes with you, cured meats,
rice and bread, clean clothes,
medicinal items, photographs
of your past. Musical instruments
verboten and you, a young musician,
a cellist with a cellist’s fingers and soul,
Dvořák the angel inhabiting your ear.
Instructed to leave behind the instrument
that was the melody of your youth,
just six pounds of fragile wood,
the back, ribs and neck hard maple
the face, pliable spruce,
wood that swells the voice of wood,
you break it into seventy pieces,
placed into your unstitched
coat’s lining and restitched —
a deconstructed opus smuggled
in, broken down
with care and a sharp blade
(arbeit macht frei),
to be reassembled with hide glue
from the ligaments of animals.
The bow — of Pernambuco
strung with sturdy horsehair
snapped cleanly in half to fit:
stick, frog, hair, and screw.
And in the latest night you begin
to reassemble into the compounded air
the six pounds of reestablished wood,
the four strings again taut
awaiting the coarse hairs
of a neighbor’s horse.
The glue on wood expands
and retracts. Your bow now
held across the quartet of strings,
a sound In the darkness
of the endless night,
a sound so bright,
a sound without boundaries,
a sound beyond sound.
What drives you to keep the art
alive, to find a way to smuggle in
music on the horsehair of your bow?
You complete the cello’s jigsaw
and assemble a score honoring survival.
At last you place the patchwork
wood beside your ear, though
the sound enters elsewhere.
And in the dark a symphony
of blood begins to continue to flow.
AGE
As years pass — here’s a flower for you
From my youth, true rose, true lily and violet.
Now an earthenware vase, rich clay
For the cut stems, their brief lives —
What once flowered, this scent of petals
Now a dilute mist of colored air. Bowing.
HOMOGRAPHIC GHAZALS
Bow down. Know that
No bow is strung forever.
No bow is strung forever, the quiver of arrows abandoned
in their leather nest, time passes, pale feathers quiver in wind.
Out of the darkness, bats in flight.
My heart a bat, swinging at beauty.
My heart a bat, swinging at beauty.
Out of the darkness, bats in flight.
Spare me the retelling.
The details, spare.
Spare me what’s unwilling to reveal
more than the spare details.
The Sirocco buffets the Strait of Gibraltar,
On the cliffs above, a buffet of brochettes.
He produces a menu of North African specialties:
the produce of Berber women, tagines with fresh coriander.
What is tangier on the tongue than Berber khobz
dipped in a bowl of harissa inside the kasbah of Tangier?
A wind off details of the land, scented
with the woody perfume of trees. The paths wind down
to the desert scrub, scorpions, blue agave
casting up citrus. Will the sun desert the moon?
He was content with the quotidian, the content
of the day: the rising sun, the dark coming on.
The moon alone is a wound, its light
wound down, a disk dark, stranded above.
PARTING
When they stand at the window together and look out,
side by side, there is fresh white snow
on the buildings across the way in the last hours
of the winter evening.
When they look out the window together, her hand
in his hand, there are spring flowers opening
multi-colored in the median of the avenue, in the light
lingering later in the spring evening.
When they look out the window, together,
there is the leather of autumn
replacing the pale avocado of summer.
Late summer grass gasping on its roots.
The world outside moves at its own pace without them.
They are in a room above it, inhabiting
their own territory. Their place carved
from the stone of quotidian,
a place within, without.
He remembers to speak to her of Calvino’s solitary:
The hermit’s strength is measured
not by how far away he has gone
to live, but by the scant distance
he requires to detach himself
from the city, without
ever losing sight of it.
From the window they return
to the bed where so much
has been exchanged.
Exchanged,
in spite of her unyielding modesty,
something at first lightly humorous
and then, released to something intense,
sexual, private – revealing her
always for the first time. Only him,
as she releases herself into his hands, his body.
And he brings her into him, along with
the accumulation of all their nights,
into this one night.
And when he touches her
in the hidden places, they find themselves,
as they always do, beyond the confines of modesty
and boundary. And during these moments
he is able to find her eyes, and hold them in his.
And know them, as she looks back.
REPOUSSÉ
Just as we met with the coming of the moonlight
We’ll part with the rising of the sun.
— OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN (Mabel Mercer, singer)
Dearest
My heart
Has searched for yours
An air of the distant
My heart
Holds
Each of the fingers
Of your two hands
The taste of silver
Your earrings
The brass buckle
Gatekeeper
Of our considered passion
My heart
Has searched for yours
Between your unfolding legs
Your hair
Splayed across your shoulders
The double depressions
Below your neck
Where I sometimes
Reside
Tidal pools
The sweet sweat of the afterlife
