LIAT KAPLAN

 

POEMS

 

Translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut

 

 

 

IN PRAISE OF FRUIT (1) 2

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR READING: 2

IN PRAISE OF FRUIT (2) 3

MEETING.. 5

TEXT. TEXTILE. 6

PASQUEFLOWER.. 7

 


 

IN PRAISE OF FRUIT (1)

 

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR READING:

 

Be naked in a warm place.

Read slowly. Bit by bit

Let the air touch you.

Close your eyes sometimes.

Forget that others exist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

IN PRAISE OF FRUIT (2)

 

*

Take

lychee, fresh, cold and peeled

pulp touches your lip

moving slowly, fleeing, sliding,

the tip of your tongue caresses the round opening, comes to it,

the sweet perfumed wholeness of its tastes melts in your flesh,

texture of cool nectar on your lips, burning in your mouth

the fruit rolls between lips to gums, under the tongue.

 

*

 

A thick white carpet is spread out in the room.

On it tiny fruit, red and round and naked, abundant mounds.

You roll over and invade the wild fruits, your body mingling with their dark lusciousness,

you lick your skin and burrow, cradle yourself and taste.

 

*

 

Season

in a bath of oils; almond; coconut and rustling words:

Pe   ach. Cunt  cunt. Straw  berries.  But  tocks

Hack  berries   Cher  ries.    Cli  to  ris.

Blo  od   ber  ries   mut ter ing   de li que  scing

 

 

 

 

 


 

MEETING

 

Tomorrow you will speak, my first love.

The wind will carry spines of sand upon the old shore.

And you will tell me who I was

when you knew me first.

 

My face opened like an anemone,

my limbs trembled like cyclamen,

I knew nothing.

All the wrinkles were obscured in my bulb:

face, neck, memory, fat, appendixes.

I had not been pulled at by many hands.

Only dark void met your lips.

 

You will tell about me.  I will absorb what I need

to get up the day after, at six fifteen exactly

like a sinuous sycamore, exposed to the mirrors

framed  in the dark void where your lips are not.

 

 

 

 

 


 

TEXT. TEXTILE

 

I’m doing nothing.

I’m weaving time like Japanese textile artists, I

write the place where the vertical threads of warp

slowly disappear into the weft.

 

Delicate word threads encircle the voids, like weave

of rice paper capturing the sprint of the leopard.

 

Sentence after sentence woven patiently into yarn,

the wick rolled and dipped into indigo hollows,

blue capillaries now stretch asymmetrically into the text,

transparence and stain emanate from each other.

 

When they hang my fabrics in the exhibit,

the lucid textures will tempt all passers,

all the cells in your skin will desire

to penetrate the cloths,

 

the minute the guard turns away.

 

 

 


 

 

PASQUEFLOWER

 

Always the last. Tomorrow I will see only

simple poppies in a sea of mums

and wheat,  hollyhocks, stubble.  Chopped.

I am on the road to Beit Zeyit, and thinking

how, how always you refuse to see

 

me.  I remember: the hill shone with anemones

narcissus, adonis.  I ran in the mud, my head

thrown back to the skies.  I was three and knew

bliss.  I confided to you that narcissus will not fade

if we persist in looking at the sweet smell of its crown.

You wiped my shoes and hurried to the dining hall

 

Now the pasqueflowers.  The last ones.  Liat is forty,

an echo rolling and longing in these hills

I smell narcissus every summer, wipe children.  By now

I will never reach you.  I always refuse to see

you.  The spring pushes to its end.  A gray

day collapses into me