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  For Nitzan

  YOU HEAR the sun in the morning

  through closed shutters. As you sleep

  the early sky is colored

  in fish scales, and you open your eyes

  like a street

  already lined with fruit.

  YOUR LIPS are as full as a wound

  guarded in battle. Your skin is the color of my eyelids

  when the sun passes through.

  The sea takes my shape as I float in it

  but your hair falls all around you, like the paths of gravity

  made visible.

  A BODY looks like an unopened bell

  and long sounds called me here

  but vast now and silent you are a bell

  and I do not know how to hold you.

  YOUR ARMS are as long as sand falling from a cracked fist.

  Visible petals of a silent swelling,

  you encase me in one motion

  like foam whitening a planet

  with the sea’s final strength.

  YOU ARE as happy as a waterwheel

  when the earth is flooding.

  Beside you I sleep with difficulty—

  a cherry rolling along the stem of its thought.

  Perpetual wings of the moistened eyelashes

  I waited for you like vines around a house that was never built.

  MY LIPS are shy,

  like a candle that will not flicker.

  RIPENING spots of white starlight onto our cold blue sphere,

  you made the night reflect everything

  in pools of water.

  Even the wet streets of the planet would see me reaching for your hand

  like a paddle returning to the surface of a lake.

  THE MOON has gone farming at night

  in the soil of your dreams. Tall trees

  are growing there, for you to climb,

  and the flower I gave you during the day

  can barely break through the ground.

  THE STRAWBERRY she held between her teeth

  was wild, plucked; quiet. Its color

  continued

  into the seal of her lips.

  I WOULD twist my arms like coral

  if that made them delicate enough to hold you.

  I WANT to boast

  around you, like a horse rearing straight up

  in the stars.

  But I have nothing to say.

  Like night

  when the moon is out.

  I TUGGED at your laughter like a rope

  that loosened the whole knot of your skin

  until all of it fell to the floor.

  A SPIDER cannot be used as bait,

  nor its silk as fishing wire. It will never agree to this.

  Lowering itself from your finger,

  making its own line down, through the water,

  these are things

  that even your naked body cannot effect.

  Bright as it is

  on the shoreline.

  THE WAVE has come to collect the little ports on the coast

  but it will take forever, since we are laughing.

  Near twilight dust settles in a cavern above the rocks,

  and a shawl conceals the purpose of the first heat.

  The air is filled with feathers, and our skin

  with shadows. Shall I say they are still?

  I HOLD your hips

  as you straddle me

  like a signature

  trapping white space

  inside itself.

  BETWEEN KISSES the air is quiet,

  like trees after a snowfall. Talking softly, after,

  a branch is shaken loose.

  EVEN YOUR words will not leave you

  now that they know

  that to lighten your body

  by even so much as themselves

  would remove the balance

  from what had been measured precisely.

  ON YOUR BACK you sleep as if your wings were planted in the sand.

  TO THE BIRD an island is not as bright as a star.

  But which can it land on?

  Is the earth really bent

  so gradually

  that we can make a bed anywhere?

  Not in the dark-skinned sea, or in night,

  which fills the shape of your mouth

  until your face is bloated,

  like something newly born.

  So we plant ourselves in some clearing, in a forest,

  until our bodies break like seeds at night—

  until a white tentacle, as tender as a root,

  grows in a glass of water.

  THE GROUND of the forest has become muddy in the rain

  and now it looks as though we will not find the earrings

  your sister gave you. Where did we first lie down?

  The whole earth

  seems to bear the imprint

  of our bodies.

  LOVE,

  the skeleton of a ship on the seabed

  takes water as its flesh

  and maybe schools of fish

  as momentary sails. A single pearl

  lost to a current

  can become to it

  a navigable star.

  THIS GIRL’S words are as ordered

  as birds in the sky when there are fish below.

  What is she saying to me?

  THE EARTH was fruit, and stars, and motion.

  Your mouth was sticky. And your sight

  flew in all the directions of birds.

  There was no need for music.

  So which devil taught you, sweet girl,

  to close your eyes when you kiss?

  YOU DISAPPEAR beside me in a forest. Walking,

  I cannot hear

  the moment when fewer leaves are crushed,

  and I speak to you

  as if it made no difference that the forest listened in your place.

  For you I learned

  that what is near us is never what is near us.

  COLOR IS sleeping in some birds

  when the sun is too early

  to make use of it.

  WHAT WILL you do with these pearls he has given you?

  Can you eat them? Can you grind them into honey

  and return them to the water, sweeter than they were?

  Your neck is not a graveyard for the sea.

  So don’t become a ghost

  that scares away

  the fish you must catch for your parents.

  SHE UNDRESSED in the deep shadows of the garden she loved.

  Swans meandered through branches,

  and pecked at black pillars

  still warm from ancient times. Hornets swarmed

  around a dethroned king. And she had not yet told him.

  APART from you I am as lost

  as a pattern in marble.

  The delicate hairs

  of the stone

  were l
eft behind

  by your own soft body.

  WHEN the sun is wide and drying and filled

  with the soft light that snares

  the evening mind of life, no feet

  will find the spot where a tiger

  leapt back and forth

  over the rose it worshipped.

  THE SEASON is yet unlit

  by the glint of the sewing needle.

  The thread is stored away, the light

  is an unwoven shirt.

  A GLACIER glows pink

  from the sun it encases

  in its ice. This is what is told

  about time.

  HOUSE, floating under moon

  on a river. Propelled by silver oars

  held from dark windows.

  Blankets, covers, and sheets

  raised as a sail.

  ON MAPS the sea carries color.

  But a swarm of shadowed fish

  under the surface,

  like moving marble,

  eats the colored bits, gradually.

  One day maps will show this.

  BIRDS AGLOW in yellow do not carry ashes.

  What the river carries, their talons cannot trap

  and even sand slips through. Where the river narrows

  ashes splash together, making the shapes they were.

  THE STAR has given me a body:

  an empty room

  without windows.

  SOIL GUARDS the sleep

  of plant roots. When we pull them

  they taste soft, like night.

  THICK IN the forest masks are hung in rows, grinning.

  The underside of a dripping leaf is dry.

  Dawn is still pinned under the black body of night that fell asleep on top of us.

  The cackle of thunder, like a puzzle, summons the spiders in the canopy.

  A nest of stone birds is getting wet.

  The drumming of fish, thrashing in a canoe, consecrates the rain.

  Charcoaled trees burn slowly, to tease the lightning.

  But the underside of a dripping leaf is dry.

  THE SUN began eating

  the parts of the fruit

  exposed to air.

  What was lodged in dark soil

  would stay whole. Until the panther

  dug it up with its paw

  and sliced away the poison half

  with its nail.

  BY THE EVENING your hair is curled

  like the new tentacles of an octopus. You move

  where the light of the surface

  has set.

  APPROACH shadows like shallow water

  into which you can reach

  and touch indigo reefs.

  WHEN YOU slipped off your dress, orders streamed from your lips

  like a waterfall

  that birds think they can land on.

  Your cheeks maddened with color, your breasts

  accusatory, you looked at me as though I knew

  I could never lower your eyes in the morning.

  THE PIGMENT of crushed petals

  was smeared along both sides

  of the bird’s beak.

  But its wings were still limp enough

  to drag along the ground.

  I EMBRACED YOU by mistake

  when I was only trying to caress you.

  Now you love me.

  COOKING under some trees

  you must break the salt necklace

  and let its white beads

  fall into the iron pan.

  Rain in the glint of an eclipse.

  Your dark breasts glow,

  the pan crackles.

  LIKE the wind that gusts coastal pines toward the water

  sleep bends me toward my lover

  and I cannot drink from her.

  I GUARDED your sleep like a young cat

  who hunts down dreams

  that climb out of the floorboards

  in the dead of midnight. I’m sorry I found it hard to stay awake

  during breakfast.

  IF YOU stand there in the open rain

  and cup your breasts in your hands

  the stream of the sky cannot take its course

  around your whole skin.

  You were always modest like that, leaving something

  even to the imagination of water.

  But what is left for me

  to not know of you?

  Need I open a sky

  to find the last soft shame

  in your nakedness?

  YOUR HEAD seems lower in this light

  as you try to dry fish with your candle

  at nightfall. You should not have spent the day

  sleeping on my chest. Your skin is too young

  for a man caked in salt. Happy as you were

  on my hill of nets.

  My love, they will always seem like a hammock to you

  at noon,

  when I return.

  THE still

  shadowed

  sand.

  Impatient for heat.

  The fatigue of a shell

  from keeping its arch.

  No longer than a beach

  can I wait for you

  to become naked.

  FRESH BANANA LEAVES can carry whole fish

  across the surface of the ocean

  when they are too tired to swim.

  With your eyes half-closed

  your still shaking body

  wants currents

  to continue the work of motion.

  THE AFTERNOON is a fugitive

  from the morning, and the night

  is another country.

  YOU curse the rain outside your window, believing

  that it alone prevents your journey.

  Your young lover, at the other end of a sea

  suspended in the air

  would surely understand.

  AND if a bird descended on your shoulder

  to whisper nothing in your ear

  would you be angry? Vain beauty

  that expects messages

  to which it can reply.

  YOUR HAIR is suspended in motion.

  The silhouetted mane of a galloping horse

  painted on a rock

  by which it passed.

  LIKE wooden planks from a broken ship

  dashed against great stones,

  my words you made into a spectacle

  for the whole village. I only meant to tell you

  I love another.

  DOWN the river the creatures in the basin prepare

  for the splashes the children will make

  when they dispute their race. Stirred silt

  will fill the little mouths of fish

  with clay.

  THE TREE collapsed on itself

  leaving a pile of bark

  over its roots.

  What, foolish daughter,

  did you think?

  That it would shrink back into the ground?

  THE growing fingers of clouds meet

  like children

  discovering they have hands.

  DAUGHTER, along the rim of what you were knitting

  I can see the circumference of your will.

  You rarely show it,

  and most often you end where you are silent.

  But somehow, after the edge of this quilt

  there is refusal

  where there is nothing.

  WHY IS the forest canopy strung with rope?

  What have the children done with the branches?

  Now the sun can only reach us through a maze.

  As if it, too, had to pass through their games.

  We walk around, all of us now, preparing the morning

  with a grid of shadows on our skin.

  As if we only escaped sleep

  illicitly, the print of its servitude

  still on us.

  It was a cold morning on the forest floor, and wet.

 
And now, waking to a canopy of ropes,

  as if the tree trunks were spiders’ legs at night

  needling a web around us in the air,

  we, awaking already within its mouth …

  The old man has gone back to sleep another night.

  What have the children done with the branches?

  THE BIRD is in the center of the sun.

  Its outline is silent,

  as its nude, smooth wings extend

  across the sphere of light.

  They almost block it.

  I can never tell

  which part of nature is posturing:

  To the sun the bird becomes a wall of glass,

  its eyes, at the top of its silhouette,

  pass pure light—