Sharron Hass

Hehasnoname, 27-31

Translated from Hebrew by Marcela Sulak

many years ago I was a boychild

there is no reader who shall not stand under the sentence
as under the sky of a floating island

he is unsure if he’s forgotten to cut
or to tie the roots of the island (aided, as his parents
and as ancient merchants were, by his teeth)

now, when I am about to turn into what is revealed to me
and build it from within (the conch, the growl that rises from the blindness
of water, from the reflections)
the biographical returns, a kind of external firebird, igniting me with a love
that will not distinguish
(and how awful that it has no need to distinguish)

What am I doing here, where am I going?
I am plowing the faces of the dead

We wrestled like angels, with terrible jealousy at the dawning of the idols, and the mask
that falls from the body, our body, the new body, through which the rumor of death,
and the rumor of the new sweetness
of God enter—

But I did not get what I asked for, even when I got what I asked for,
an absolute admiration which doesn’t obliterate the admirer

What music will succeed me?
The blue-black void has deepened
until treading over the tiles I seemed so tiny to myself that if I would have tossed
my hat or a nail the ants would have collected them as is their habit into their
storage bodies that
taste of straw and rust; I used to go to the circumference
to measure my brain against muse and sky; I would retreat to some room
to play, reading poems by the hour,

primordial
the electric shock of the heart meeting the electricity of the poem!
Pound to beat beat to pound
amplifying the lowly life
that it will touch the heights of depth, on several sides—leave