Poetry (Copy) — Noga Arikha

STARTER

Start with the flour, the water.
Start with the starter, with the start.
The living things vibrating there, invisible to eye.
Start with the beginning, of life, where did it start
sprinkle on the top rosemary and thyme grown from a seed
Where did it start
whose seed was it that gave me the plant I eat
Imagine living all life from the very start
growing your trees to build your house.

A garden of my own: I know what seeds I planted where.
Beyond those I cannot see.
Return to the start, make the starter,
create the dough that makes the bread.

Make my own bread, the stuff of life
the slow-burning energy of slow-grown grains
slow sugars, safer this way
comfort within safe walls, the dough warm in palms
moulded in time – grains wrought by wind and chance
before they became the grain
willed by ancestors long ago
and before the grain I do not know
beyond the cells we do not know

I started it but it started long before me
within walls, within the ancestry
of home and hearth and grains transformed
by human hands in open lands, upon living soil.

The living starter as sustenance
warmed into dough,
fragrant as earth
old certainty in a world asunder.

[Paris, 23 April-1 May 2020]

LOCKDOWN 4

The feel of the pool water on that summer day,
saturated white and the blue relief,
tingling on skin after the splash,

the slight discomfort of having sat too still
over long lunch and then nothing much
feet had swollen somewhat in the heat
time had stopped while earth rotated around another day

fresh water that recalled the sea, the sea -
too perfect to imagine now from my urban bed

where at night my body senses that old moment somewhere,
locked in a place I don’t recall
the lunch and white wine, the chlorinated splash

I know it was not enough: just an approximation of the salty water
that embraced, caressed and set us free

Here and now it is just spring
nighttime, and wisteria scent saturates the air
sounds echo in that warm weather way
(neighbours somewhere, not much else)

promising renewal like a crystalline gong,
vibrations from the world at peace

but not - this urban room is my place now
as along with millions of others
I lie in wait for the pandemic to end
dream of spaces and summer pools

and remember how they harked to the sea:

the horizon that makes sense of all this present
which has become infinite and still

but the air outside vibrates

we wait

(Paris, 12 April, 2020)

read also on the Garden Among Fires blog

LOCKDOWN 3

What is there in the world once the shops are closed
cinemas dark, theatre cancelled, everything postponed
airports without people and planes in hangars

until further notice
stories stop

no walking, building, meeting,
walking into the boardroom
getting late to the office, doing lunch in town

serving cocktails, planning menus
running the place and serving there

populating the planet with action, dreams and nightmares
stuff
ambitions, frustrations, occupations

There are people in their houses living lives grand or blighted
stuck in small rooms that oppress,
or deployed in large rooms that used to impress

brains functioning,
hearts beating, stomachs churning lungs at work
bodies targeted, protected from others

but people are still talking, writing, wondering,

still planning, still doing what can be done

What happens when the world’s work that remains
is what keeps everyone else alive, at risk of falling ill

when so many fall ill
and death is suddenly close even to those who had forgotten

We have words still and the news is on
we know what we have in our house

that is the world, for now
there is only now, because it was not planned

we were too busy running things
to plan their ever stopping

[Paris, 9 April 2020]

LOCKDOWN 2

This is big
we know from within our small interiors
protected and warm

a big event
but the cause is tiny, microscopic, multiplied
billions of times along with breath
and droplets, and love and hate

A big event for the history books
lived inside, enforced domesticity for all on earth
or almost

for some it's hell for others heaven
sometimes both, or nothing, or all
something strange for everyone

All in one place, the sleeping, eating, working
cleaning dust and washing dishes
the children schooled in their rooms

everyone's homes a place of work
the appointments and going in and out of inner life
to outer links with those outside
stuck in their place inside

If we’re lucky we see our friends
flattened on screens, voices rendered faithfully
by technology made indifferently
carrying emotions by waves

We count days alone and together
as one by one the tiny thing strikes
we await inside the turn it takes
our turn maybe or already

in sickness and in health
all corners of lives and loves cleared up
by the simple task of stopping
staying

Don't run, breathe in and out
breathe, breath is life
the bug can take your breath away
and kill
but mostly will run its course

Some are cosy in our houses though others flee
their non-houses
we can watch horrors flattened on tv
and then they swell inside
and out when we know who, how, when
but why, no one ever knows, why

Everywhere the corners of rooms are the horizon
at best
from where we can dream of landscapes

await
in sickness and in health
we live and love
until it starts again

what I why where, to what end
we ask, stilled beneath the question
caught in the midst of action
the self's demands on hold

survival, as best we can
rejoin the ranks of History
made while we film and watch
days prolonged and holding on
while we type our way to each other

tell each other truths
no space for lies when we stay still inside

the point of pointlessness revealed at last

at the end we will unite in one deep breath

I want time to slow for all, the earth to tell us
how to be

[Paris, 2 April 2020]

LOCKDOWN 1

What is the point of a city whose traffic lights alight alone
and asphalt is a cold convenience for no one?
Nature has lost its rights for no reason now
buildings aligned like a forest at night stand sober but no one is there to see

Humans unwelcome to each other in their own playground:
mere artifice remains of the city now silenced,
shops and posters, ways of spending money made in offices,
places for collective comfort, foods and wishes
now shut

the beauty of urbanity, an old so human story,
in the dark for now and revealing its cracks
the gashes in cement rolled over hill and plain

culture that was heaved out of heart and labour,
the talk of the town and the city, the well-read and well-healed resonating on straight pavement
all hushed

each one at home in the home of themselves

awaiting the veil to lift, or fall again

[Paris, 18 March 2020]

PANGOLINS

I dreamed of pangolins in the desert
or was it a market
a place of not-belonging it was, and I was lost
I’d never heard of pangolins before, have you?
scaly creatures, mammalians that nurture their young like us,
eaten for special feasts, they say, far away from my home
but all is close and far away
a word that entered our house, and my mind
enough that I write it down here, and think of a dream
for a poem
the world stretched and heaving
air dripping with its sweat
our labours monstrous and sisyphian
no other mammal ever asked us for anything
but we want and encroach and kill, kill, kill
all the creatures, even us, just not the tiny ones that escape
our only predators are us and the bugs
the bugs that unite us with the animals we kill
and have fun jumping from host to host
like fleas in a circus (there is a Tex Avery cartoon with sweetest fleas)
while all round the heavens heave and grass droops and riverbanks collapse, and the ice
the fire the scorched turf
where do pangolins live, even?
none of us know where our words and poems will go after us
now rest, I say: all the world is noise, now all is disarray
now breathe, and wait

[Paris, 6 March 2020]

AYALA, 1929-2019

A place
is where life is,
has happened,
her flat nearly emptied
but the walls insist with her presence
her books full of pages she turned
that turned into the thoughts she shared
though most not, because one cannot
the piano still but the wood vibrating still with the Beethoven
I heard her play sometimes
in between her lessons
to loyal students
aging, and some had started as children
and time passed for them too
but her time came and went without my seeing how fast
how fast, we all say each day when we ask
what day is it
oh already
and already
we spoke and I told her the day's secrets,
dissolved into time passed, and she knew
what I was, since my birth into my time,
and the walls still stand, the books packed into boxes
her knowledge packed up and I took some of it
like grains of sand from a dune
books I know you lived by and that I would live by too,
the Greeks, the language books you had so you could read them
not in translation
and Dante, and the Romantics, and Shakespeare you read each day
the last year of your life
you said you were happier than you had ever been
turned ninety in the company of words
composed by others long gone whose time
came and passed way before
ours, yours, mine, a cadence
shaped into scores whose corners were bent,
stacked on the top of the piano
the place will return to its owner, once emptied out
entirely of you,
existence beaten out of you despite the musical ever
the ether I breathed as I walked in today
never before without you opening the door
never again that place
where that life you squeezed out of you,
me, the books, the lives past,
was lived.

[Paris, 8 November 2019]

NOWHERES

See: the places that become readable with practice
from having been nodes of chaotic lines,
illegible nowheres,
the infinite number of somewheres mostly not notable
that make up places and people there
who make sense of their lives

communities
with shops and last names, events and scandals
central squares of some sort
whether ancient or tangled within the rubble
of post-everything nothingness
whether postcarded piazzas
or that stretch between malls

where teenagers whose names so far have gone asunder
practice skateboard still now, at dusk among flies
and dust - forgotten past and non-places tangled by time -
united in fury at how places melt in the overheated now,
lose face before the places known,
the public squares the filmed avenues
where trees are groomed and clothes will never become rags

where am I now? in what quarter of the map
of the known world that remains unknown, mostly,
to most of us?
we trace longitudes and dream of latitude
at motion within ourselves - and, always the same,
transport our inner places wherever we go
ready to recognise and leap at what we know
for the sake of some warmth when the world
feels cold

and those communities we create that are supposed to stave off crime
and delinquency wrought by the lost ones
those without a place, or whose place is inside out

I know - I recognise the faces in the crowd
I built my four walls around the hearth I want

there are hearths everywhere
sinks and faucets, refrigerators, if lucky
with latitude and longitude

ceramic suites to wash the skin that wraps each one of us into place

the skin we share
smooth over with creams that protect
and nourish

and while I stare at the self whose place is here
I learn to read into the chaotic tangles

that make only secret sense

[Sambuca, Sicily, 26 July 2019]

© Noga Arikha

UNWOUND

Unwind the wound up mind
as it sits within its flesh, unsure
of dance or sound or life born
one day and then bourne,
left behind and returned
to its starting place

in time, of time made and kneaded
like bread soft and then golden
in heat and sun, by love and being held

- warmth within can escape
and disperse like crumbs on the floor -

hold on and let it breathe, the dough we are
at first is shaped by hands that hold

and the breath of life gives shape
to flesh unwound and mindful

of song and dance
that start again each day
from where once we stopped

but time caught us by the arm and led the way

[Sambuca-Palermo, Sicily, 6 August 2019]

LUGGAGE

The stuff in my bag
things accumulated, haphazard, treasured maybe,
needed mostly, details of life forgotten in between uses
packed for purpose and just in case
cases of cases packed for travelling
en route between home and harbour
the room where stuff disperses and the bag where all things coalesce into
what belongs to me
my stuff
unpacked in other rooms, used, re-packed
lugged on shoulder and dragged on wheels
criss-crossing the baggage of other lives, places, persons,
shielded in private darkness from public view
in those places of transit where everyone converges
briefly, on the way from place to place where stuff must be cocooned close to the body in motion
through a world full of stuff that belongs to everyone
and no one

[Eurostar Paris-London, 25 November 2019]

TWO TRAIN POEMS, PORTUGAL

1.
Let it expand, like the rails on ground
levelled by steel and human hand
let mind again reach the sky wide outside
the window of the train as it speeds
through scheduled time, turning lives
into landscape glimpsed as fragments
of history and past and now and later
let the body seated here as myself, an I,
stretch itself out to sky and ground below
melodic wheels, the rhythm of forward
and arrival ahead - we departed on time
- I am, on my way

2.
There is a man on the train from Porto
with earphones in his ears and on his computer screen
a music score, for second violin,
and with his fingers he plays the music
memorising the piece he will play
soon somewhere I don’t know where
but the sound is so loud in silence
as the train makes its sounds and there is no noise within,
I can hear it
and it may well be Bach
and now he has the other parts, a quartet,
Mozart maybe, and he makes notes on the screen
with a special pen, studying hard and as unstintingly as the train on its journey
wrapped in the notes and the written score that has wrapped itself
around his fingers, and arms, silently,
and as the train cuts through a landscape I’d never seen
one he seems to know so well he never looks outside
of the music inside his mind and in the world I know,
so it flows and stops and time has made it so
that the rhythms today are kind
the light of Portugal is soft as a glow
in some places there is peace
I can only smile, silently thankful
for the music he will play, and that I know
exists even when darkness falls

[train Porto-Lisbon, 27 October 2019]

VIRUS

Heavy-limbed, weak, exhausted
by life, world, things falling:
the virus arises and this state, they say
is a set of symptoms that will go away.
Yet the state pulsates while it lasts,
nasty thoughts brew while guts are wracked
head aches from front to back
and languor sets in during a sunny day.
Sleep, they say, just sleep and water.
Imagine being set down on a bed of leaves
some dead some alive, soft and cool
near a brook, no one in sight just this languid self
and the children too, playing hide and seek
and carrying jugs of water from brook to mother
splashing happily as I close my eyes and await
what comes next.

[Paris, 1 September 2019]

BLUE SKIES

somebody painted it blue
of course it isn’t so
no one painted except our crystalline cells
in their saline solution at home in the sea

we see blue because of sky and sun and phenomena
that have nothing to do with us
though we have everything to do with them

we have fallen from the sky into the sea
and it wasn’t blue then
when we fell out of the watery womb

we paint what we will and the sky is indifferent
to its apparent colour, set off as firmament
in line with pigments strewn by rocks far older than fleeting life

cells begotten in water before it was blue

yet here we are watching the sun set on sea
the sky painted over in hues of orange and pink,
real colours exploding as if beauty were there for all to see

and we talk in falling light and tomorrow the blue will reflect
again the time we spend counting the constant rising and setting

(and the horizon is a line that no one has touched
it has only been painted)

each day a spectrum where all colours will fit,
as into the crystal prism my father gave me long ago
to show me how light was made of colours
as clear as the pigments he painted with

and sometimes he painted the sky blue

though it was white the day he went into dark underground
leaving to us painted skies, our time too allotted and counted
from dawn to dusk each time anew, and nights allowing

even colours to rest
while cells divide and lives are made inside the dark
saline sea of each being asleep and hoping

for the morning sky to be blue

[Sambuca-Lido Fiori, Sicily, 26 July 2019]

FROM DAWN TO DUSK: TWO SUMMER POEMS

to access that place between front and back
tongue and cheek
eyelid shut
that place where it unfurls -
‘it’ as time and thinking back
to when that birdsong first rang
to where it happened, where the I that was
first heard that sound
in childhood, remote,
locked away and yet in the undertow
of all the present that unfolds
abstruse to the grown beholder and yet
the senses fly round and round that place
between front and back -
time askew and curved like the spine
from start to finish, that present still
perpetual as the song of the bird that awoke me at dawn
this morning

[Lido Fiori, Sicily, 23 July 2019, 6:00am]

for how long will time feel so stretched
like arms against weights, body borne out at sea
while the golden light alights, then fades
slowly into the yellow fields and the greens thicken
against the blue that has no bounds
except long ago, beyond the current
spell that we taste smell drink touch,
swimming into the present full as calm seas
at last
and it can last
as long as I let time stretch like muscle
alive for its long swim

[road Lido Fiori-Sciacca, Sicily, 23 July 2019, 6:00pm]

SMALL

Little fingers tickling skin
voices high with youth - sons on lap
they are small still
and taller every day

- large persons that fit within small bodies
within small cabins on a large boat that has it all.

When I was small I saw how small were my hands
how much future they had before they would become impressive grown-up hands.
My body was dainty and its anatomy quirky
my sister was taller and her arms were long
I felt enclosed in my littleness, awaited breasts to form
- I wanted to see their shape shadowed on the sidewalk -

I grew without my seeing it happen
because it takes a while to see one’s life happen.

So small for so long and so it was so brief a chunk of life
- I told my friend it hurts to be a self -
growth was a stretch beyond the long present
but endless childhood suddenly stopped.

Childhood centralises
all sensation and all that matters
before everything becomes peripheral.

When did that taste no longer feel so strong
and when did that music cease to delight,
when was that threshold crossed, beyond which
wonder was less?
How does it happen that the heart hardens -
as one says, although it just ceases to beat so strong
because it was all expected, predicted,
already known?

Our cells multiply and complexity sets in like an illness
until we remember what smallness once was.

The ferry is large but soon we know its secrets.
It has arrived and soon it will leave again.

[ferry Palermo-Naples, 6-7 August 2019]

RED MOON

Moon moon! Do you remember being red for a while,
A proud bride for the sun?

Moon, o mine! not ever done away with, never far off
insistent friend or fiend whose mystery protects her

against the prying eyes that look like stars
but fool the cosmos into existence

we see you, Moon, blush for a while, while you tried to hide
in full light

you wore your revel garb, exposed to us
so close and yet so far,

the full extent of your geology, and yet you blushed
while we stared, in awe, and agony

at your longevity while we gasped and then fell
back into our primordial sea

We stood on that beach and read ourselves
into your roundedness,

projected color into blank space
and hoped for it within the black of night

We lived and loved and danced on the sand
and when you sighed, we heaved

and when you hid, we wept
and when you were up in the nightsky,

following us as the children say,
we never slept

and tried to love into the night
and clung to the seconds we have

while you laughed in our face
no, our Moon doesn’t blush

that was the red of anger
it was an atmospheric trick, stupid

how can you anthropomorphize a celestial body
can’t you leave the sky out of it?

whoever has left the sky out of it?
and who has seen without sighing the sight

of the Red Moon,
ticking her way back into darkness

unaware of time,
unaware

just us aware, just us
standing there

on the beach
while the waves did their thing

in tune with the Moon
that made us do her thing

until it was over
over and over again, over, for each one in turn

while we sigh on the beach and exclaim
look at us puny things

look – but the Moon doesn’t look
we do

that is all we can do

[Lido Fiori, Sicily, 27 July - Paris 28 August 2018]

BACH

(when Yo Yo Ma played at the Arc de Triomphe)

The streets tell us where we are, and when,
testimonials of twists turned by history
begetting us, victims of the here and now.
Neons, screens, the advertising of everything,
lives arrested in the buying, plundering, plundered,
bought, devoid of plenty, carnage celebrated.
What was the cellist thinking as he played Bach
before the leaders of the world’s plunder,
sitting under the canopy as it rained around it,
and honored were the millions who died for nothing
because world leaders could think of nothing better
and plundered along, blinded by power?
For whom that universal harmony?
The gods are always present when that Bach
vibrates on a cello string. What are they thinking, then?
Will they survive the leaders’ zeal, the buying frenzy,
the forces flattening Olympus?
How come those notes sent tremors everywhere,
through the emptied streets, bouncing off the screens
advertising underwear made by desperate people east of here?
Let it rain, for now, let the rain cleanse us, let us drink its drops
and let it sink before it sinks us all. Heed the call, leaders.
Before it is too late.

[Paris, 11 November 2018]

DIAMONDS

No matter what you do
nothing is left in the end
The work produced beyond the self
despite minute minutes lost to time
beyond and between the everyday helpings
of dishes to wash, nods and frowns, smiles and laughs;
the breathing, the smells, the way you dressed that day –
the work stolen from life, bequeathed from a life,
is not that life, it is there whether we live or die
and we always die anyway.
It has all and nothing to do with you.
The you that lived goes. The work does not make you immortal.
The work itself may live on and on, and nourish the everyday
of others, feed into their dinner conversation, imprint their social habitat.
But that is all.
Our little conversations vanish as soon as they end.
You might retrieve diamonds from the river,
but you will never stop the river.
Diamonds are what we are stuck with,
at best.

[Paris, 27 September 2015]

TEN DAYS

And I, loosed into birth, mortality upon me
as new breath blows itself into space,
overwhelming its begetters
with the fragrance of heaven

treading day to day
as the little body fattens itself with soul
and air, and water, and light,
the milk of my blood

fearful, fretting, loving
finding space within new time
new self, new cares

anxiety abounds
with sleepless nights
with a father gone
whose face is etched into that of his grandson

[New York, 30 June 2010]

THE HUMAN ANIMAL

The human animal –
two legs only, yet unable to fly
flat-faced, yet unable to grip with the jaw
conscious, yet condemned to die,
like everything else

except sand, gravel, stone, air,
molecules abruptly finding each other.

Not very pretty, we are -
hairless, but not entirely,
smart, but not enough,
needful of love, but brutal and bloody.

We are not what we look like:
our thoughts are more lofty than our frame,
stolidly built, imperfect, mucus-filled,
composed of water, air, earth, fire
like everything else.

And yet we know ourselves.
We build mirrors, paint portraits,
write and believe what we read

enough that a poem may make a difference
to the gaze that emanates
from a beautiful face.

[New York, subway, 1 April 2009]

BETWEEN WEFT AND LOOM

The soul itself resides
wherever there is room
between weft and loom
cleft and tide,
below the tongue and underfoot

whenever time stirs
slowly, aflutter memory
and when silence comes, alone,
unbid by willing cries
unsmothered by the crowds
inside and out, enraged and alive

we are obsolete
a species too strange to mock
and too cruel to pity

but the soul resides, it does
within the words that shape me
and the hands that press your warmth
to my eternity

[New York, 5 December 2008]

ONLY THE LIVING

Only the living can write of death
I read that somewhere, a line by one living
perhaps no longer alive

the skin is so thin, so soft and warm
your chest so fragrant, the night so deep,
alive we sleep, embraced, a night after day,

while time, we know, eats its way
into our skin, as if the simple fact of living
were soon the slow act of dying.

A gash above the eye, an accident happened -
a friend whose leg is hurt, a grave incident
our fragile selves, our brittle bones

each one of our bodies so easily crushed,
quickly forgotten, by ourselves and by others
embraced and then gone, the skin soft and then cold -

this is my breath, my kin, my home,
the circle in which my life is one
and these the lines that mean what others,

alone, in love, anxious or glad,
one day or one night,
may recall

[New York, 1-2 May 2005]

DREAM

Make sure peace is in as well as out,
within sight of reason; tender,
collected within the embers of foresight,
at rest within the gut, embraced at will,
sweet when listless people fight,
strong at dawn for the waking yawn.

The night’s passage upon the eyes
leads straight to sunrise; the steps
traced by sleep upon each brow resound,
magnified visions of seas unseen
and townfulls of departed friends, rooms
enclosed within tall blocks, the sleeper lost.

Asleep, the soul’s awakening proceeds.
Tip-toe, aghast or at ease, amused
by tongues unspelled by error,
wandering in house-boats, burning on deck,
unable to catch the fleeting chill, the captured friend.
Blue-black paper on the wall; a voice laughing from abroad.

A waking start - the day again
begins, added on, prefigured by the night.
Peace eludes the dreaming sleeper; it must fight
the cruel reaper of fear, desire, anger, lust; appear
in the blue-black room, appease the rocking boat, the captured friend
locked in the tower of confused tongues.

[Ischia, Italy 23 July 2002]

SHRAPNEL

It struck, it hurt, a blow to harvests and pride: a war zone established
on the site where tears sprang from shots in the dark after our crops were burned.

But do not mistake the shrapnel for the bullet, the wound for the striking hand.
The heart of the shell-shocked is a weapon of flesh warm like the sun-drenched land.

‘Put me on a stronghold then’, I thought, ‘let me prepare and meditate, in time
for the cold fight. Hark to the danger of ignoring the signs of unrequited hate’.

No: a shrapnel writhing at the gut is not a message from the heart. But an oversight,
an accident, a tangent to the line between the hand-held gun and the shot-down star.

Now remember the flash of light before dusk sets in, at the onset of first fire:
beware of post-shock amnesia and of jumbled story-lines after joyous battle.

Then caress the shrapnel that tears at your skin, embrace the sadness of death
which restores faith to the wounded, or deepens the lines in their face.

[London, 25-26 April 1999]

CHANCE AND NECESSITY

It was chance again,
its recognisable features
mapped onto the window pane
while night-time outside bred reflections
that dimmed in and out like the spell of lights
on a retina or living-room wall, when the curtains
around the day stop shutting out the sun’s effects;
a curvaceous dance for the spell-bound gaze of one who wonders
how necessity is hatched out of chance, embodied as it is now in these eyes
whose glitter matched, each time I looked, the fragrant, first, then odoriferous
burned-out fire, match or dusk, once the dark allows the smells nearby to flower.

Necessity takes the rub away from chance’s slippery ways,
and it comes in a box shut tight with a ribbon, red to signal
the perilous cleft on either side of the bend taken
for the sake of an omen or the absence of it.
What do you say we tell the hours that pass away from us, flow
into our skin as into the cave where at the end we must bow our necks, obedient;
once the maps reflected and mused upon disintegrate, the roads we crossed
return to dust, and memory, proud of its solitary prowess, takes over to counterfeit
the power it shares with enclosing arms and beholds, within the shape of a head,
a face’s beauty - its mobility a register of chance’s conquest?
And would you know the way to tell if you saw it?

[London, 12 March 1998]