Lecture with Celan
How many know
the number of creatures is endless?
So many know,
only a gasp in their questions is possible.
All that fullness—
of wounds that won’t scar over.
pain’s grillework
persisting in the memory.
What sets one free
within the sign and blesses the wordflow
without barrier?
Not literature, which is only for those
at home in the…
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Sderot
It took me twenty years to love
this hole in the middle of nowhere.
The cotton balls spread a white flame
and there was an ill wind in the cypresses
until for the first time I saw,
with a just eye,
t…
An Affirmation
I am not I
when called to account—
plaster over, dumbly benched
the corrosive ardency
of blinkered identification.
To affirm nothing, a veil
of asymptotic bent,
prattling over-
tunes in the striated…
Lamentation of the Borderguard
I do not want to be a borderguard, said the borderguard.
I don’t want to be a bodyguard.
I don’t want to be a guardian angel.
I don’t want to be a guide.
I want not to be a grinder.
I don’t want to…
Scattered Psalms: I (Handiwork/Glory)
To the Conductor: A song of David.
The heavens declare the glory of God,
the firmament tells His handiwork.
Day on day utters speech,
night on night announces knowledge.
There is no speech and…
The Limestone
If it forms the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,Are constantly homesick for, this is chieflyBecause it dissolves in water.—Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”If beauty and truth were to overlap…
The New Egypt
I think of my father who believes
a Jew can outrun fate by owning land.
Slave to property now, I mow
and mow, my destiny the new Egypt.
From his father, the tailor, he learned not
to rent but to own…