LIAT KAPLAN
POEMS
Translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut
Be naked in
a warm place.
Read
slowly. Bit by bit
Let the air
touch you.
Close your
eyes sometimes.
Forget that
others exist.
*
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
Blo od
ber ries mut ter ing de li que scing
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.
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.
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