Blood was originally black, but its color changed to red;
ink was originally red, but its color changed to black.

Abulafia

 

A freight train whose freight is an ocean unloaded sobbing into the night

Crocodiles on sand dunes grains on sidewalks    beds

and blankets    the sobs get under the skin the groans

tapping leaking because we are like that dripping honey and liquids

of venom and all the stars swallowed up into themselves like burn spots

coals of extinguished cigarettes and night’s sticky skin groans

and turns over it is hot in the rooms and the high rise buildings are graves with

ornate tombstones and the small ones are negligible tombstones in the garden of life trains

fleeing out of my veins groaning nothing can be that sad except a sob

that surges from the vanished distance within a silence of gigantic distances

that measure without words the solitude that is created from the crowdedness

of love that is close in time that is poured like oil into bottles

and the bottles are corked with time while they knead the bread of nerves and the tear of the wretched

suddenly pregnancies of night are opened like closets that vomit all the clothes

not like treasure chests that have deigned at long last to expose radiant diamonds

we write in the dark of night and the dark of blood on the surface of the brown dunes,

the gray dunes of the work-race for we are slaves we write on them

when the yellowish light and the azure rests on them lazy and how many acacia trees are scattered

carefully, maybe planted maybe wandering with the sand catching holding

for us all this black black that was poured when G-d created the world

he wrote in light on the dark of the deep and  the spirit that was hovering

was also like a dove or bird and the throne of glory also hovered on the face of the waters

all still depended suspended and trembling a bit haughty from its platform we produce the

ink from the darkness of night from the darkness of blood that trickles within us from the subsoil of tears and try

to write the things whose radiance will fructify within us meanwhile more and more trains

are discharged into the night and there are those that sleep pleasantly during the time

when we hover above the bed and the bedding does not absorb us we do not

sink down we wait tensely for the moment when we will be taken the next day we are

tired scratched and not only the trains that flee into the night are sad

with the freight of the dead sea which is unloaded loads and loads of plundered treasures

even the white hills are poured out collapse into my brain mealy

and slightly muddy with all the dung-beetles the lizards the wormwood shrubs

and then in the morning the newspapers are poured out headlines headlines worms worms

creeping creeping as if we lived under the earth maggots and worms

as if underneath our bodies the turtles are floating alive which count death from the moment

of beginning and then come the train stations and the bus stops and the flour mills

that stand and move walk sit collapse around them amid the hills

the roving sleeping dogs are swallowed up are brought in at nightfall and the chewed remnants

were chewed long ago again in the factory of night I have news that will surprise you

it is good to die for ourselves even if it cuts you off in the midst of life even if

you’ve lost years it’s all the same if we are born for ourselves we’ll suddenly return

to the rooms that have forgotten us like the dusty mouths of the dead will open

in astonishment they’ll be confused for a moment whether to say hello or not for this one is long

banned we all trampled on him when he lay on the threshold we created a sweet environment

vague with the smell of cinnamon and roses and the sticky perfumes of the moment

butter compliments flattery and may there be no hope for informers someone in the coffee

house takes pains to explain to her friend how life will look with redemption with

children to raise the difference between solitude and insulation, isolation, I add

in my heart and as for this exile it is the difference between isolation and voluntary solitary meditation,

man, said Uri Zvi Greenberg, pulls it over his head like a lovers’ canopy

sharpen the ban upon you to an inner independent stand

and once again I start up from the graves someone else is seeking God if

he is not that is a mistake how can you write ethics that way she asks that is not a mistake

but an evasion someone answers her and I add in my heart those who write about

ethics in the face of God and about good management erase for esthetic reasons

what interferes with ethics I try to stimulate what died in me just now

I live in the great black expanses of the night

that is stretched out over the crowded white expanses of the passing hours and then

I wake up for the only moments when the transition from darkness to the pure

firmaments is absolute and clear in those moments all wanderings

are clarified for me I forget the cities from which I came and to which I go I

am cut off from the barrenness of solitude as much as from the barrenness of crowded

love I am a slave to orphans as well as to old people I am a slave to lovers as well as to haters

master of myself I am quiet bitter and impetuous closer to the woodpecker the cuckoo seeking prey

like the hungry cat of evening I am passing simply passing and when day takes off and climbs to the height

of the yellow-brown hills trampled under new highways the starved jackals

put on black suits some of them have neckties at the great conference table

they sit roll dice actively not like the depressed ones

who are still playing sheshbesh in the refugee camps, casting lots and I run with

my mealy porridgey brain that is becoming an erasable whiteboard after all poetry

is something that now and then dies and is buried and then stays does not come back is in

no hurry and you are silent are silent a servant of time you are a comrade to slaves of slaves your ages

are in time, your hells are in space, forgetting and memory are just interchangeable parts

sometimes this kind sometimes that and a lot of abyss that travels beneath and they stuff the cracks

they move or get stuck, they shed and shed most of the original limbs

and then suddenly in a moment it again scratches as if it lives it creaks beneath you as

a cart creaks that is full of sheaves the earth that bears you cracks

the mattress is broken the sheets are sweating she dug her own grave says

the weary tired monotonous voice she shot him right in the heart woman and man

man and woman sometimes in their solitude all their news moves in the tension between

dog bites man is not news man bites dog is news what is this monotonous

voice like a screech from another dream it penetrates together with the howling of the traveling jackal that has arrived

from the Dead Sea clattering with burdens that are out of this world chemical salts

and taxes poisoned time is expiring is spilt is spilt after all poetry is a wagon

train that collapses on the soft sand and it departs with no return whenever it

wants and then sometimes in a sticky night when you lie on your bed like a body foreign

to the environment detached from the bed of mulch you awake in terror howling

is sent to you this instant on order.  Your soul, lonely to the point of terror, yelps like a she-jackal

crying abandoned sad the gold of dawns is muted suddenly it flashes in your silence

dawns grow radiant you take all this darkness of which you are made

and write dawns on the bluish screen of computerized dawns after all

you just are the dead salt sea which still dreams of fish “we are called on to collect

memories for a certain purpose” I am sinking.  From the overload of sweetened

memories or from the overload of bitter realities perhaps from the fragments of unrealized

messianic time poetry too is a project of collecting and scattering even woolen threads are not

formed without beating we are broken in order to be repaired at every moment in which

the howling is heard the gap between you and the bed hardens  becomes more

callous like wet clothes that have dried after being soaked in salt of the sea as if you float

on a salt sea of tears however tired you are you do not sink but recline

poetry is what travels from the darkness of the blood and to it and falls silent when things

are written in the ink of the blood of others in bitter realities the contemplation

of sweat of barrenness of aloneness then seems like an oppressive satiation, like a luxury,

the roaring of hunger that tears the veins is still sounding like a siren but its voice

is a weak noise of singing you are dead like the sea with all its drowned fishes and all

the plundered chemicals of your nerves there is a terrible dying in the slaughtered distances

you scream there is life that is robbed fences barriers corrals man all is

stuttering life is robbed you scream we are all lost

we are all remnants of dust and wandering sands

mothers and sons and sons and fathers seas and fish derailed freight trains

collapsing on the sand here we must defend people from themselves

whistles of all kinds of trains from all kinds of places drown out everything.

After all poetry is just something that stammers in a moment when a scream is required.

From the window the traveler with eyes wide open it looks at whoever writes graffiti

who does it better passing his judgment – do not dig graves for yourselves

you who write with man’s ink, which falls back into the sealed boxes