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80 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2009
He has found someone else – not another person exactly
but a self who despises intimacy, as though the privacy of a marriage
is a door that two people shut together
and no one can get out alone, not the wife, not the husband,
so the heat gets trapped there until they suffocate
And I tell her I know we’re trapped here. But better to be trapped
by decent men …
than by the sun and hills. When I complain here
my voice is heard ….
In the other life, your despair just turns into silence
When you look at a body you see a history
Once that body isn’t seen anymore
the story it tried to tell gets lost –
There’s a trap door here, and through that door,
the country of the dead. And the living push you through,
they want you first ahead of them
“Its natural to be tired of earth
When you’ve been dead this long, you’ll probably be tired of heaven
You do what you can in a place
but after a while you exhaust that place
so you long for rescue”
No one really understands
the savagery of this place,
the way it kills people for non reason,
just to keep in practice
So people flee – and for a while, away from here
they’re exuberant, surrounded by so many choices –
…
When they come back, they’re worse
They think they failed in the city
not that the city doesn’t make good its promises.
They blame their upbringing: youth ended and they’re back,
silent, like their fathers
….
To my mind, you’re better of if you stay
that way, dreams don’t damage you
When you got tired of walking
you lay down in the grass
When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you’d been
the grass was slick there, flattened out
into the shape of a body. When you looked back later,
it was as though you’d never been there at all
To get born, your body makes a pact with death,
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat
Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again.
Now we return to what we were,
animals living in darkness
without language or vision—
Nothing proves I’m alive.
There is only the rain, the rain is endless.
I know things are hard here. And the owners—I know they lie sometimes.
But there are truths that ruin a life; the same way, some lies
are generous, warm and cozy like the sun on the brick wall.
So when you think of the wall, you don’t think prison.
More the opposite—you think of everything you escaped, being here.
And then my wife gives up for the night, she turns her back.
Some nights she cries a little.
Her only weapon was the truth—it is true, the hills are beautiful.
And the olive trees really are like silver.
But a person who accepts a lie, who accepts support from it
because it’s warm, it’s pleasant for a little while
— that person she’ll never understand, no matter how much she loves him.