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afloat.
    Lyrical poets are cursed:
    a caress is always firsthand,
    a word rarely.

28
    He gave me life as a gift.
    What can I give in return?
    My poems.
    I have nothing else.
    But then, are they mine?
    This is the way, as a child,
    I would give birthday cards
    to my mother: I chose them,
    and paid with my father’s money.

29
    The two are in love and happy.
    He:
    “When you are not here,
    it feels as though you
    had just stepped out
    and are in a room next door.”
    She:
    “When you step out
    and are in a room next door,
    it feels as though
    you do not exist anymore.”

30
    Sprawling
    after love:
    “Look,
    the ceiling is
    all covered with stars!”
    “And maybe
    on one of them
    there is life …”

31
    Begged him: do not fall asleep!
    But he did, and in the dark of the night
    loneliness took hold of me, like an incubus.
    Furious and rough was the onslaught
    of unchaste hands: this is the way
    a slave ravishes his master’s wife,
    a soldier rapes a schoolgirl.
    —I’ll tell my husband!
    —You’re lying.
    —I’ll call to him right now!
    —You’re raving.
    You will call to no one.
    You have no one to call.

32
    The hush of the combat zone.
    On my back, alone,
    I feel your seed dying in me,
    feel its fear, its wish to live on …
    I wonder if I can carry
    so many deaths inside me,
    as I nurture
    my own?

33
    Lay down.
    Embraced.
    Could not decide: would I rather
    sleep or sleep with him?
    Afterward could not decide
    what it was:
    was I sleeping?
    Were we?
    Or the one and the other?

34
    Perhaps when our bodies throb and rub
    against each other, they produce a sound
    inaudible to us but heard up there, in the clouds and higher,
    by those who can no longer hear common sounds …
    Or, maybe, this is how He wants to check by ear: are we still intact?
    No cracks in mortal vessels? And to this end He bangs
    men against women?

35
    I do not mind being away from you.
    That is not what the problem is.
    You will step out to get cigarettes,
    will come back, and realize I have aged.
    Lord, what a pitiful,
    tedious pantomime!
    A click of a lighter in the dark,
    one puff, and I am no longer loved.

36
    To converse with the greats
    by trying their blindfolds on;
    to correspond with books
    by rewriting them;
    to edit holy edicts,
    and at the midnight hour
    to talk with the clock by tapping a wall
    in the solitary confinement of the universe.

37
    An opaque, gentle, vulnerable day,
    as if it had been making love all night,
    a day when the past has no bitter taste,
    when the future retreats without a fight:
    the seventh day after a thousand-and-one nights.
    … In the morning Scheherazade opened the door,
    and three sons stood before the King’s eyes.
    But to me this tale is the least credible of all.

38
    Good-bye, my dear!
    The bugles call.
    I will kiss on the lips
    the mirror in your hall.
    And on the cheek. And lest I
    not survive
    this vicious minute, also
    the handle of the closing door.

39
    I have wasted such a love
    that surely I am bound for hell.
    With my new, proxy love
    no gate in hell will let me pass.
    I have ripped so many pillows,
    and now, for some winters to come,
    will be filling the caverns of flesh
    with your body. Love, a failure all around,
    a flaw in the shroud of days.
    … will be filling the howling caverns of mind
    with your heavenly flesh.

40
    Sex, the sign language of the deaf and mute,
    a confession of love by the mute to the blind.
    Do we not know the word
love
?
    Love. But the mouth is sealed,
    the eyes shut. My forearm is touching
    the childlike back of your head.
    The blind is tender. The mute is ardent.
    And the sign of accord, in unison: a cloudburst!

41
    If only I knew from what tongue
    your
I love you
has been translated,
    if I could find the original,
    consult the dictionary
    to be sure the rendition is exact:
    the translator is not at fault!

42
    I am in love, hence free to live
    by heart, to ad-lib as I caress.
    A soul is light when full,
    heavy when vacuous.
    My soul is light. She