By Noga Tarnopolsky
KHAMSIN
Even its name sounds like frustration: hot desert kh
catching in your throat and languorous oriental seen
bewitching. It is the restless soul of summer
pulling in for a day,
nervous, dusty, savage
here to hiss and shudder over the loss of lightness,
resisting change, protesting something-
dislocation stalks us from within.
Only the upright, hope-filled pines scratch and strain for water
against this wind that seems itself to be electric or unwell;
it is the dry current that blows between lovers
kept from each other; passion deferred again.
N.A.
I can feel you now,
slipping away
sliding from my hands
as though we are blind
embryos in the deepest sea
and the paste
that held us together
has turned into
marrow
oystery ligament
lubricating this departure.
I can feel you
leaving now as
last week I felt a fissure
creeping up the walls
of my heart
slink by crawl
the crack lengthening
into a black twig
I had swallowed
a bird's skeleton
and all this--
at a distance.
At a distance too far to see
in a language you don't read
and in words
you have never heard.
AMHERST
1
Early June, late spring in Massachusetts. Two wild rabbits
have emerged from the tall grass, skunks, hedgehogs, moles
and a few quick, slender beavers who seem despite themselves
to be exhibiting their stripes; they'd rather hide. A chipmunk
whose path I crossed this morning had the oddest look,
something like a green slash slicing through his left eye. Of
them
all, he's the only one who looked at me, and he looked worried.
He looked as though he thought he might get hit by a mallet.
QUESTION
How one night's slippage turned to this:
the question bared first in a kiss
ten years coming, a commotion
so sweet, fine and free, precaution
flew; the leap friend-to-temptation
leaving us in desecration
of the single thing we'd dismissed
and assumed would ever subsist:
a world replete with ritual
of approach, fear and withdrawal
by now ingrained, habitual
and sacred, as witnessed by all.
Islands waiting not to be revealed;
Praying, rather, to remain concealed
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