|
|
You say, for instance, the word “I," and already you’ve created for
yourself
a peg
on which to hang your coat
a nail
with which to strengthen the deception of the windows
a hook
to rob the colors of the objects dear to them.
Is it you producing cunning instruments with which I
fill abandoned halls with respectable words,
faulty roads with tourists carrying outdated maps and ships
in which a hole gapes with the ringing
of water? The slaves who’d only just held the paddle punishing the
sea creatures
and bringing us
thieves of distance
to bitter lands,
the shipyard workers with the boring bread that is their flag and
mirror
the unimaginative engineers--
--all of them are cursing you right now like poets in a moment of
too great anxiety
or beauty.
When you decide to end your journeys, pretend you are a man
returning home.
A foreign electric shaver
nests in your toiletry bag. The bushes hiding the house have
new pretense of life.
The house’s landscapes are as light as guilt.
And here, on the remains of a religion I didn’t dare create,
lies the figure of a breathing man.
With an untalented finger, mark his lips, tell him his name, listen
to the song of thin electricity.
This is the song of a precious enemy
who travels in our veins.
Hezy Leskly was the author of four poetry collections (published in Hebrew): The Finger, Plus and Minus, The Mice and Leah Goldberg, and Dear Perverts. Individual poems have been published in Arabic, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. Born in 1952, he died in 1994.
(Photo courtesy of Dina Guna)
Gilad Maayan has published poems in major Hebrew literary journals, including Iton 77, Alpayim, and Helicon. Between 2000 and 2002 he co-founded and edited Anonymous Fish, Israel's most widely read poetry publication. Presently he operates a firm that performs English-language technical and marketing writing, and studies Economics and Management at Tel Aviv University.
|
|
