Under a Tree in Santa Cruz - Poem

You want to be an absence in my life,

like the moon

penetrating from a distance,

no marks that show.

Remember our pleasure.

Tie me to the redwood tree.

Tell me slowly

how long how deep.

Wife, child, husband, children,

fly to the top of this tree.

Show me that you remember

lean into me

while I am tied to this tree

like a statue

suddenly pieced together

out of ruins

scattered like the leaves, the leaf mat

at the foot of this tree.

You stand under our tree

your shirt pressed, your pants creased,

a fresh mango in your upheld palm.

I want no less

than this.

You move in your orbit,

swing closer, then further away.

Time and Narrative

I sit with you in your kitchen, Juliet,

at the edge of the desert; outside

the sand shines like waves

fixed in the water.

The neckline of your dress

slips past your collarbone,

the hem ripples

in the air

moved by the fan.

You show me pictures of young children

in your new garden; I see my daughter extending

like a pole sliding

upward.

She will reach the ceiling. And my mother

folds into her wrinkles like a

collapsible handbag or a briefcase

whose work is done. Outside

July heat shrivels the roses. There will be a time

when your children do not need you anymore;

the shape of a mother may change. The

fan hums. The story in my mind

shifts - once he hurt me,

once there was snow.

Once I wasn't nearly fifty

years old.

Where is he now? I will

back out of your driveway,

only a single way out.

But not yet.

I enter the sea, again and again,

a different one each time.

His and Hers

Her husband walks to the remaining campfire

for a cigarette he says.

The tour jeeps are behind her head,

the Red Sea at her feet.

Under the staring moon of earth, that single partner,

she unrolls their sleeping bags

then with a small gulf between them,

side by side,

then side by side again.

At the oasis they leave the group and rent a hut

almost big enough for both of them, and a couple of thieves argue next door,

so they swim in turn in sight of each other.

And her husband pays a man with a boy

to lead them on camels to a quieter place.

At Ras Abu-Golum, two deer

kick pebbles into the creviced earth.

Striped fish swim the shoreline in schools, the fins of sharks

slice indivisible water: is there a place

where the sea ends and the bay begins?

The guides and camels

nestle at the foot of the mountain,

and the couple camps at the end of the beach.

At night, like a blot of ink on folded paper,

they seem to be

composed of equal parts,

one astride, one underneath,

like doubled souls.

She finds one useless sandal sticking out of the sand,

and a smooth white stone like a shell filled in.

On the flat surface in the shape of a spiral

a long dead animal or plant

has left a curve smaller than her thumbnail in the stone:

no separating them now.

On the way north,

the air is a wall of sand,

fixed passion.

And here Lot's wife alone,

imagined in sand

pink as a ballerina's tights,

ordinary as a dream.

First there's the hope

expanded by its own force

distended

and then at the peak of the journey,

it is ended.

LISA KATZ'S translations from the Hebrew currently appear in The Defiant Muse, and in the journals Ariel, Modem Hebrew Literature, and Modem Poetry in Translation, and are forthcoming in Poetry International and Fiction magazines. Her poetry is to appear in Inkwell and Kerem. She teaches in the English Department of Hebrew University.

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