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By Amir Or Submitted by not*about*you Date: 2007 Feb 15 Comment on this Work [[2007.02.15.14.22.9939]] |
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This poem will be a poem of another century, not different from this one. This poem will be securely concealed under heaps of words, until between the last sand grains of the hourglass, like a ship inside a bottle, it will be seen, this poem: the poem that will speak of innocence. And common people that ostensibly were shaped by time, like tardy gods, will listen to it for no reason that wasn't there before, rise their backs like snakes from the junk, and there won't be anywhere else to hurry from, and it won't have an end different from its beginning. It won't be rich and won't be poor. It won't bother anymore to promise and keep or carry out its utterances and won't scrimp, or sail there from here. This poem, if it will speak to you, woman, it won't call you muse-babe, and won't lie with you like its fathers; or if to you, man, it won't kneel or kill, won't apply makeup and won't take off its words and flesh, as it has not has not- what. Maybe now I'll call it here, the bad poem of the century: here, sick with health it barely walks drags its legs in the viscous current of thoughts of the time or is stopped to show papers and to have its trivia counted with arithmetical beads. The inventory: flowers and staples, corpses (yes, no worry), tall glasses. After staples - also butterflies, and many footprints and other hooks and shelves for the arguments of scholarly criticism, and also just to fool around, teeth against teeth, in the anarchic smiles of a chameleon that doesn't know its colours have long since turned into a parable. Or in incomprehensible tranquility to try someone else's luck in games of to and fro that have no goal other than, let's say, a bit of fun the length of a line. Spread orange on the blue of evening sky: now, plaster a little cloud. Climb on it, see below: sea of sea, sand of sand. Or fingers. Ten jointed worms move in inexplicable charm. Now they encircle a ball whose circle is faulty, wonderful, fleshy, further more, you may say a word (it's a fruit, it's called a peach). And these words their taste is full of the taste of its being, of a tone that accompanies the sight with wonder and not with a thought-slamming sound. And this is the poem: it sings, let's say, to the tar that stuck to the foot on the shore, to plastic bottles, to its own words. It only sees: black atop white, transparent, or grainy. It is not less naked than you. Also no more. Only in this exactness that has no measure, but by the curves of a female-dog, a pot of cyclamens, or a hair strand on a bathtub railing. The creatures here don't want to know. The creatures there, that only want, are, for now, a possibility of becoming the creatures that are here, of becoming this antiquity that has nothing to say other than me, me, without limit without you. A dog lies on a step in the afternoon sun, and does not distinguish itself from the flies. Translated by Helena Burg http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2003/5/Hebrew%20Poetry%20in%20the%20New%20Millennium |