If There is Something to Desire (2 page)

No love? Let us make it!

Done. Next? Let us make

care, tenderness, courage,

jealousy, glut, lies.

Do you know what you lacked?

That dose of contempt without which

you cannot flip a woman on her back

to make her flounder like a turtle,

to make the heartless fool realize:

she cannot flip back on her own.

Whose face and body would I like to have?

The face and body of Nike.

I would fly past all those Venuses,

would have nothing to do with Apollos.

With the wind chilling my shoulder

I would leave behind forever

the hall of plaster copies!

Why is the word
yes
so brief?

It should be

the longest,

the hardest,

so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,

so that upon reflection you could stop

in the middle of saying it.

—Sing me The Song of Songs.

—Don’t know the words.

—Then sing the notes.

—Don’t know the notes.

—Then simply hum.

—Forgot the tune.

—Then press my ear

to your ear

and sing what you hear.

A girl sleeps as if

she were in someone’s dream;

a woman sleeps as if

tomorrow a war will begin;

an old woman sleeps as if

it were enough to feign being dead

and death might pass her by

on the far outskirts of sleep.

A light touch with a slant

like a first-grader’s handwriting, with a tilt:

you brush away a hair from my cheek

with a motion vaguely tender, stretching

my face slightly upward and to the left,

turning me into a doe-eyed geisha.

With a slant, yet in a straight line:

the shortest and the quickest path.

The trick is in the suffixes, diminutive and endearing:

to diminish first, then to caress,

and by caressing to reduce to naught,

and then to search in panic, where can you be?

Have I dropped you into the gap

between the body and the soul?

And all the while you are right here,

in my arms. So heavy, so enormous!

First, cursory caresses, on the surface,

light, a kind of coloratura: crumbs of

pizzicato in spots which seemingly require

a brusque, tempestuous treatment,

then with a bow across the secret strings,

the ones that were not touched at the beginning,

then across the non-existent strings or, more exactly,

the ones we have never suspected of existing.

Are my palms rubbing your shoulders,

or are your smooth shoulders rubbing my palms,

making them drier, sharper, more perfect?

The more repetitive a caress, the more healing it is.

Water slowly grinds stone; caresses

make the body light, chiseled, compact,

the way it wants to be,

the way it once had been.

Who plays blindman’s buff with those aged twenty,

hide-and-seek with those aged thirty?

Love does. Ah, the silky pelts,

the simple rules, the witless stakes!

Is it easy at thirty-five to say good-bye to love?

It is, not for the reasons of great shame involved,

but because there is no spot more tender, rosier,

more concealed than a scar.

Within a hand’s reach from the foreskin

is fleshlessness, dense, resonant, boundless.

Touching, because of its nature, takes part

in the mystery of disembodiment.

I am rid of the body, but the shiver stays,

and so do the pain, the joy.

The shiver, the pain, the joy have no fear

that the skin might never reappear.

How tender the sensation of ants racing,

how many shivers in a slow progression!

Some take no less than a full five minutes

to get from one vertebra to the next.

For years a gentle hand has been the trainer

coaxing them to run from one tiny hair

to the next, until the finish line,

until it is madness, until … 
Hey,

are you sleeping?

The first kiss in the morning

tastes like the first kiss on Earth.

My waking soul is innocent,

as I lie next to the tenant

of my best dreams.

When I caress him, I know:

a kiss is preverbal,

a word is a kiss’s junior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Sprawling

after love:

“Look,

the ceiling is

all covered with stars!”

“And maybe

on one of them

there is life …”

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.