What is an eclipse
but the need to dismiss
the sun’s constant shine. Which isn’t the light
from original night, although it can also blind
you, along with the other imposters of bright,
you know who I mean, those stars that pretend
to live past their time. I’ve seen them all trip
on a piece of sky and still in radiant death
they insist, theirs is the right way to navigate.
Why should I trust a million year lie? I want
Orion to take out his sword and fight, already.
Helios will only be confined on certain celestial
occasions. And without his glaring bag of tricks,
icy dust can begin to birth the comets, whose
velvet tails have another map of darkness to design.
Their velvet tails have another map
of darkness to design,
as the Milky Way unwraps its newborn constellations,
and lays them down inside the night’s configurations.
One rocky lamp is left to give illumination. Oh moon,
teach me how to disappear like you and fool the oceans
one evening at a time. I also want the tides to crawl
into my lap and then reveal myself. It’s not the slow
unveiling, but the promise, perhaps, that keeps the flags
and poets coming back. All those stories about bending
by a pool to see your soul; it’s the tease of reflection,
that door that only opens in one direction, the gap
between what you lack and the slap of expectation.
And so the moon circles back to overlap
and please the eager face of earth that lifts in its direction.
To please the eager
face of earth that lifts
in its direction,
that fickle crescent rises first. Do they rehearse? The steps
are different every nightly assignation.
I read my horoscope
this morning just in case:
Today you might get caught up
in the fray to support a friend. This goes against your grain.
Is it worth it, Gemini?
But earth, that loyal planet, waits
patiently, rotates, while gravity or maybe space convinces
the mirth of spring to embrace February’s snowy girth again.
There is no dearth of second chances.
Summer, full of Grace,
will fatten up her sphere of plenty. Nature is a lover who wants
only to amaze.
And on the third day it was good — although
the fruitful ground did replace one of the commandments.
(A minor one, albeit, that’s fairly hard to trace.) And there was
evening and there was morning, before the garden was erased.
And there was evening. And there was morning
before the garden was erased, replaced by all that talk
of feasting in the dust, the taste of lust, and how
there must have been something before need.
Do you believe there is a birthday for the trees?
I mean, why not? They breathe like us, only backwards,
lose their leaves and their blood is sweet, their roots
can speak to one another. Yes, it’s true, almonds
always lead and are the first to blossom and appease,
after they have crossed over the winter. Or so it seems.
The body tends to freeze and there are certain seeds
still lost and dazed below. Remember. Written in the deed
of the circles that they leave is an accounting by each tree
of the years that have passed, since we left together.
Of the years that have passed since we left together,
Of the plans that were not sown, and of the weather Which has nothing to do with it. Of the story That has been told, of the clues that are enclosed, Of angry angels blocking all directions. May they Be fruitful and multiply. Of the glass that becomes Known by breath that is on loan to the inanimate, Which also comes from earth. Of the difference Between skin and leather, the many holy names Of letters. Is it the tone that makes it prayer? Of getting up, of getting up again, of the undertow, Of the murmur of the river’s flow beneath our feet. Of the water that tries to navigate by learning to Evaporate, which is to say, there is another way home.
Which is to say,
there is another way home.
Just
yesterday, I saw the beating arc of starlings
who migrate to the Negev every year. It was late
and you have to take my word for this. They
became a single body that exhaled a melody
of startled scales made out of bones and feathers;
a flock of notes that scattered to swoop and play,
then reassemble in a different serenade, a fist of
sky squeezing its shape, or the curve of a swan’s
neck.
It was remarkable,
how soundless waves
could cart away the distance,
and how I forgave,
in that moment, everyone.
Which is to say,
that the desert is a grave and lonely place,
where silence reappears as another kind of music.
Where silence reappears as another
kind of music,
and the fence of rules is bent by the Divine. Once
I saw a play about the deaf and the blind, I mean
to say, the cast was both combined. I don’t know
how they did it, someone guided them at times,
I suppose. It was my birthday and the price included
dinner at a restaurant nearby, called “Blackout.”
There we were led to the island of a table, then left
behind to find our food in the dark, only our waiter
could save us. You could say we were feeding on
his kindness. And they stood under the mountain
and saw the voices and the thunder. No wonder
all those souls were afraid to be confined inside
their senses, so they fled,
and left their bodies behind.
So they fled and left their bodies behind. I am
reminded of a man I met in Tzfat who died for
seven minutes, but the angels said he wasn’t finished
and sent him back instead. He woke up to find
his arms and legs had been replaced and were
now synthetic. If that’s their gift, then I don’t want
to ascend. But then again, my mind won’t bend
around most of the endings, or imagine being led
off to anywhere. I want my bed and the heft of my
breath, to continue being fed on dreams of theft.
After all, if time can steal, then why not I? Is it
just dread or has the thread of my consciousness
been wed so long to feeling, there is no medication
left to divorce them, only this dusty payment of a debt.
Only this
dusty payment of a debt and yet
the universe begets again and again while
we are held by the eternal neck of murmurings
and nothing.
Let it be said:
We were gathered
in the firmament.
Last night the yellow wind
cried and threw itself against my window.
The air hurt.
It was so full of dirt
I couldn’t
tell if it belonged to sky or had been blown
off its perch of earth.
It’s true, the elements were
once told to comply, but they are more inclined
to devise a way around that separation.
You know,
how tides like to rise, and cells want to multiply
in time, then wander past the sticky net of heaven
overhead;
for chaos is a magnet, not a void.
For chaos is a magnet,
not a void, where confusion
is assembled and the star drunk asteroids await
their orders, spirits cross the borders into matter,
and God’s breath loiters over possibility.
Or maybe not.
It’s hard to feel the formless pulse
of meaning; when time is not deployed, there is
no lack to ferment, no pull to regret. How do I
navigate you, Lord?
I call you The Great Name,
but you are also A Place to enter or avoid, depending
on the daily constellation of these yearnings, my desire
to find that restless harbor where creation resides
beyond geometry of reason, beyond calculation
of each season, when to fix the hours with light
and when to let need dismiss the sun’s constant shine.
Jane Medved’s chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh was released by Finishing Line Press in 2014. Her recent essays and poems have appeared in Lilith Magazine, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly. and New American Writing. She is the poetry editor of The Ilanot Review, the on-line literary magazine of Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv. A native of Chicago, Illinois, she has lived for the last 25 years in Jerusalem, Israel.