art music poetry

DEAD MEN

dead men don”t care what the surgeon general thinks

dead men drive around with no place to go

dead men figure the come-on at the end of the bar, more trouble than

she”s worth

dead men hold alcohol in a medicinal light

dead men will sleep in their work clothes

dead men never have to RSVP

dead men keep the curtains drawn

dead men buy cars, and smokes, based solely on price

dead men avoid eye contact at all cost

dead men doodle on the obituary page

dead men drive on bald tires with cracked windshields.

dead men accept with resignation, the next day”s hangover

dead men listen to Coltrane, and Davis, start to finish, no

interruptions

dead men never floss their teeth

dead men will drink Sake cold

dead men take the long way to work

dead men don”t sweat expiration dates

dead men never wear bandages

dead men are past blaming anyone

dead men see horse-shit and diamonds the same

dead men don”t care where the candle-wax falls

dead men forget what day of the week it is

dead men can”t get to sleep at night, can”t wake up in the morning

dead men have nothing in their hands

dead men never ask another chance

dead men have no need to make sense of anything

dead men play dumb when they know they”re being lied to

dead men have made the connection between sorrow and desire

after losing the thing he loves

a dead man will spend the rest of his days

anesthetizing the past

pouring gasoline on the future

dead men

have no fear of dying the second time

***

LINE OF SIGHT

maybe the angel watching over me

strikes a match along the corner of my eye

the way them TV outlaws use their cowboy boots

whenever they need to light up a smoke

or maybe the skittish ghost of a firefly

tries to engage me in blind man”s mystic bluff

I turn to look-too late-I miss it

left to ponder the validity of the hidden message

it happens all the time beyond the borders

micro sunspot surfing the line of sight

Marlboro angel in a nicotine fit

fires up when God looks the other way

***

PRIMER GRAY

Smoke ring in a windstorm

old man with blindfold and cigarette

at the university he had “shown promise”

was called a “diamond in the rough”

but the years have gotten away from him

he pissed away his time

now he waits for the phone to ring

for Gabriel to call and ask if he has one last request

from the beginning desire had been a map without names

never sure where he was or where he was going

change made for the sake of change

point A to point B in a car painted primer gray

he drank too much-slept too much

read too much-chased “easy” too much

never finished the book he had been writing

for the last 24 years

now the Rambler sits on blocks

the manuscript lost somewhere in the attic

he calls himself “invisible man on blue planet”

the events of his life written in disappearing ink

nothing to offer as evidence of having circled the Sun

staring at the autumn sky, chain smoking, sipping tea,

he waits for the angels to raise their rifles

and take him home

***

THREE COLORS

translated from the Hebrew by Seymour Mayne

On Memorial Day I make my way up
to the small military cemetery.
In the northwestern corner
we’ve placed a grey basalt rock
and facing the southern corner —
a blanching chunk of chalk.
And between under the loose sand
our red loam
spreads itself all around.

And when the loudspeaker booms out
the memorial prayer
I close my eyes
and see those three colors
descend before me and disappear
into the encroaching shadow of the stones.

Elisha Porat, a 1996 winner of Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature, has published more than a dozen volumes of fiction and poetry, in Hebrew, since 1973. His works have appeared in translation in Israel, the United States, Canada and England. Mr. Porat was born in 1938 to a “pioneer” family in Petah Tikva, Israel. In the early 1930’s his parents were among the founders of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, where Mr. porat was raised and still makes his home. Mr. Porat was drafted into Israeli Army in 1956, served in a frontline reconnaissance unit and fought the Six Day war in 1967, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. A short story by him — On the Road to Beirut is also posted at Ariga. As a lifelong member of his Kibbutz, Mr. Porat has worked as a farmer as well as a writer. Mr. Porat currently performs editorial duties for several literary journals. You can write to him at porat_el@einhahoresh.org.il
Copyright © by Elisha Porat, All rights reserved

***

STRANGE SNOW

translated from the Hebrew by Riva Rubin

Strange soft snow descends
on the slopes of Jebel-El-Kebir,
chill and silent it falls
on dogouts and vehicles
armored on the screens of memory.
Astray in me in the damp haze
forgotten comrades call
whose lives once touched my life
now grown distant beyond the roads
the roadblocks the rolling hardare.
Once, among them, I saw
such a pure white suddenly crushed;
minced and ploughed under and rearing up
and then subsiding silently absorbing
rent veins an reddening stain.

***