55

I complain and the music is dissonant,
Clashing with voices that sing
A song that's agreed is a song in tune.

If it were, why does it grate?
Why does the laughter it engenders
Spring come from the diaphrams of the dead?

Why does it seem that the joy in it
Is the victory feast of jackals
And a revelry of vultures?

If I had wings (all men have wished it)
I could escape this place, so I dream:
Then I would have peace:

I would wander at will
In wilderness places
And count the stumps of the stubble

Where once green trees and wonder
What brought them low, what thirst,
What calamity of nature sapped them?

What voices crash in cities!
What clattering of silent tongues whose eyes
Are sent as assassins to the heart,

Whose powerful hands divide
Flesh from the bones of both
Living and dead. They meet

On the wall, high, high,
Where watchers out of sight of watchers
Dine on fetid excrement.

And in the doorways lurk a hundred whores
Who sell or rent: a cunt, a house, an embryo
Crushed in a Bodum to make the coffee sweet.

It's not as if an enemy hunted me—
This has been the custom; a bully
Would find my door quite dumb.

But it was you, my friend!
We took tea together,
We spoke of uplifting things.

Let them go where they will, for they will
And quickly; quickly is their sign©post: where
Is last in their thoughts. As for me

I will dwell within the uplift,
A line graved in the palm that measures me;
I will surge and ebb as I must: the good brook

Traversing the stony path, the pool
Reflecting the light by morning
And the light of the moon by night.

Look at your palm—
All you've made's left its mark.
This is a kind of love—

To hold the spear and shield
And battle as we must
In a line, deeply etched.

The ear has heard and the eye has seen
What was to be seen; they have walked
Into walls but could not enter:

They were flesh
But insisted not. They warred
With buttery words,

With oily shafts
Of tongues touching teeth in whispers
Like a silent unsheathing of a sword from its scabbard

And hissingly, kissingly, the blade.
But my sword will be bathed in heaven:
I will not shrink myself for love

or glory. I will abide
As a line
Measured in a palm.


© Dan Goorevitch 1996