An hour of silhouettes:
It’s leaves like sponged paint
pressed against clean linen—
branches brushed with ebony
in a heavy hand,
and dusted with amber streetlight—
trunks like wet pastels swept sideways,
soaking into sleeping mulch.
This hour is its own shadow,
itself and its outline.
A tree’s roots lengthen
behind the drying oils
of these minutes.
When the candle wax over this morning cools,
I hope it fastens all as it is, now.
I hope it stiffens over still countertops
and stool legs, over dinner dishes
stacked like a house of cards—
the towel underneath already dry
from soapy droplets. It caught and drank
while we slept in separate beds,
turned in our sweat
a floor above.
I hope wax crusts over the dimness,
settles the quiet grey
dusting our floor tiles,
a peaceful coating,
like powdered sugar
sprinkled on Ima’s french toast—
a sweet, mindful spread.
Can you imagine a morning
embalmed in this mold,
hushed like a wasp in amber,
its stinger idle, trapped by film?
Now, sun thaws our window panes,
rumbles of a lawnmower
shake the cast of our light sleep.
Our vents can try to maintain this stillness
only if doors remain closed.
Sidewalks crinkle from rainstorms
in Jersey,
ridge between suburban valleys
and cave under flood-lines,
like my Savta’s fingers
pruned from three generations
of kneading dough
and scrubbing baby scalps
under the drip drip
of a shower head
that never fully ceased its flow.
This path darkens
under trunk-form shadows
like my Saba’s shoulders
after tending to his lemon tree,
glistens like his watered eye
downcast, strolling home
from the neighborhood shul,
Shabbat brimming his lashes.
He carries his prayers
to his wife’s dinner table.
Cobbles weld in my under-sight,
eyes set on the stop sign
at the end of the road.
Pebbles, silent and stable,
and there, like sand from the yam
grinding my shoe’s laces,
dragged into the sliding doors
of Ben-Gurion, outbound.
Is it a poem
or a silver platter
I feel in my back pocket
when the land grows still,
the red eye of the sky
slowly dimming over smoking frontiers?
Like clouds,
I build people from window sills—
fill in sketchpads of their panes
with Monday nights.
Prints of tennis tournaments
suspend from fridge magnets,
notes for filo dough
fray thumbtacked to a cork overhang—
the recipe, a family heirloom;
the cork, left behind by the home’s
previous owners.
Faces eclipse
across channels of the glass.
I step,
study a perspective painting—
Feather lines
fringe a single mother’s eyes
because Jeopardy skips
on her ex-husband’s TV box—
faulty cable from a man of faults—
and unpopped kernels fumble
between her buttered fingers,
lodge between stitches
of a faux Persian,
also from a past love.
Upstairs, a page
from a child’s coloring book.
A baby wriggles in a bassinet
between dreams
of her mother’s heartbeat
and a father’s Sunday humming,
too young to draw lines
between memory and imagining.
A house of drawings
strung up by cedar boards
on Blue Hill Street—
existence in outlines,
like an artist’s sketchbook
flipped open by the wind.
Your form looks seasoned
from the endline.
Your streaks faded
where winter has fouled you,
squeezed and stretched your leather,
tugged at your jersey
while the rest of us
spent halftime behind a closed garage.
Benched, you inhaled and held for a season,
retired by the base of the hoop.
You wheeze a sluggish breath,
air leaving you in whistles.
Neglectful months
have rendered you unfit.
Can you lift from the sideline?
Train the draft from your core?
Polish court grime from the
creases of your rubber,
repaint your patterns
and roll into hands worthy of traveling?
Sneakers squeak near you,
toe the boundary line—
an afternoon dribble before
it gets too hot to play
with shoes on.
See, the way your shadow
stretches across the court,
taut, perfectly whole.
Guns become soundless
when their ringing
is omnipresent,
when their bullets
are metronomic,
when their tragedy
tastes prosthetic,
grieved in phrases
between sips
of morning coffee,
lukewarm on our tongue.
Their sounds
were shrill with virus
long before our illness
forced us to listen.
We think we know
quarantine
when bodies
have been
in lockdown
for so long,
their chokehold is
an army knot
strung into the polyester
of our legacy,
their gasps
gusts of air
behind claps
of a waving flag.
I have reached the back cover
of my journal, blackened three
yellow legal pads, I’ve soiled
dinner plates with my dreams,
self-published my poem in the
blank pages of The Bluest Eye.
I have taken to my basement
walls to chart my meditations,
the branches of my imagining.
What would be my heaven?
Trimmed grass, fresh with streaks.
Trash cans just emptied,
their bodies stretching shadows on asphalt.
A swing in residue motion,
slowing to stillness,
its rubber seat still warm
with a child’s joy.
Distant voices and
closer birds,
hushed and hastened gossip,
circles coexisting.
A forgotten soccer ball,
a rusting metal bench,
heaves of a passing jogger.
Gradients of light
as evening settles,
from my parked car
around the pond’s winding walkway
through its forested trail
to the field
and back again.
Heavy lids,
blue to a yawning grey.
Night sounds clatter in the
plastering dimness,
a paradise lulled to rest.
If
my heel balances between floorboards,
halved by the middle creases,
my foot will not slip into lava—
no quicksand will swallow my limb—
the flatness of my arch
will not coat in the pollen
fetched from the day’s
outside stepping.
If
my nail pierces my palm,
I can pretend a wasp found asylum in me,
burrowed into my openness—
abandoned me with a kiss so sobering,
I felt its sting
long after it left me in
my aloneness.
If
coffee chars my mouth,
my tongue turns to graphite
and I speak in stencil drawings,
calligraphy in licks.
If I make a face, you will laugh.
If
this space stores memories,
my days file between ventilator gusts—
I pen through moments,
my tongue marking revisions,
indentations,
tasting freshness at junctures
as they pass.
Do you, too, see wings in trees?
Cardinal feathers ruffle far-off branches,
somewhere
swaying in an outlined oak.
Surrounding twigs, a stencil etch from this perspective—
embers poke holes into a canopy.
Do you, too, watch shadows across your porch?
Lamp light dim,
morning glow draws in charcoal lines.
A backyard swing
sketched from its model’s hanging—
the seat catches wind,
a portrait swells and retreats.
Do you, too, make shapes with your fingers?
Lips pucker between thumb and palm,
a chapel erects from intertwined hands.
Wrists hook, fingers stretch,
and a butterfly joins our play.
Outside,
a swallow tail docks on my window—
its toes kiss the glass,
its tiger print wings span back,
a rest between flight.
It scans my sculpture hands,
my skin pale under kitchen lights,
and it launches—here, then gone.