Writing to You
BY AVIA TADMOR
Again, I woke up before daybreak
wanting to write from my dark
to your dark; it is possible
I dreamed again of the horseback courier
whose words turn all night in his chest
or satchel—
what chisels itself into shape
as he nears the stone-eyed Apollo
above the city gates. Or I dreamed
of the old epistolaries: burning their candle
past dusk, each word increasing
in tincture, import
as the flame dies down. I am not sure.
All I know is that here
it is August. Already the fall webworm is busy
weaving its bridal tombs
in the poplars. My hair grows long,
it will gray & I worry how soon
the first sunlit arrows will shoot past
the dogwoods & into the bedroom window, the one
facing east. Again, I will not have written to you.
Look, even now—
I’ve just written this line & stopped
to put on the kettle. Already day
unrobes its pale torso & it is the way
the night rider’s horse tends to water:
veined neck leaning toward what
a moment ago, could only be supposed.
All I can do is suppose where you are,
this morning, I mean. This hardly-
mauve minute. When I think of you
it is always your sunburn-red hair
which comes first. It is always three weeks
before the war that would call
both our brothers. Your body not yet
at war with itself, we’d never
horsebacked so close to the border,
past the shirtless men who fish
along the Banias, past the boys
teaching each other to burn
the glochids off prickly pears.
How is it that all I’ve been teaching myself
is to hold what punctures and burns
at a distance, that we must canter through hurt
guardedly & on our own? On our way
back from the horse ranch
your car broke down. Remember how we swerved
into the ditch, how it burst
with wildflowers?
The engine stopped & our girl bodies started
shaking with fright & fury,
then laughter: how summer, as if it knew
all we were going to lose—had won us
this unwritten time.
Campanology
BY AVIA TADMOR
The first time I went down on a woman
I thought I invented it. I wanted to patent it,
you said after you left the religion, stepped
on the night train from Schopfloch to East Berlin—
in your black plastic bag you swaddled a bottle
of Fanta, the braided butt of day-old
raisin bread. Your one holy possession:
a German-English dictionary
which you promised to one day return
because you were raised to take care best
of what is not yours alone. You didn’t say
if the hole in the sheet was a myth when I asked,
or if it’s true that we love more intently, wholly
after having kept time-honored distance, from a woman
or god— you didn’t say
but I understood both the sheet
& yarmulke were reminders that love works
like any language: we utter
what we can’t reach but spend our lives
reaching for. I want to ring the lone bell
in the back of your throat, you’d tell her
as if you were climbing
the blue-domed church in Santorini on the hottest day,
thumbing the cool caper buds, tomatoes
yellow & green on their vines—what grows wild
after long desolation. I want to ring the lone bell
in the back of your throat, you’d tell her
suspecting, it isn’t the chiming we want
but the echo—what shapeshifts & stuns, then stays
burning through us.
