Hadara Bar-Nadav

Two Poems

The House Is a Difficult Text 

                       —for Jenny Clyde 

 
 
Line breaks 

trace the windows. 

            Blankness follows.  
 
            More moments  
            of blank. 

Show them   

what burned:  

                          every thing.  

The house, her red hair,  
the roots.   

This is the difficult 

next—  

            who fell asleep  

            on the flower-printed couch, 

            whose cigarette wore 

            a bright coral ring? 
 

               Her lips, her slow 
               breath, her dream. 

 
Newspapers mounded 
around her, 
 

a paper maze  
three-feet high, 
                                                                                                                                        

 
           and her body  
           at the hot center,                                                                                                                                                                                             
            her body as kindling, 
           tinderboxed. 
 

She died inside 
a dying house 
 
returning itself  
to dust. 
 
The difficult part 
is two deaths: 

a palpable  

emptiness, 

                        a field.  

​

 
A Coffin of Clouds 

 
 
The dead make a kite 
the size of god— 
 
           omni-present, 
           omni-eyed. 
 
Four kinds of god: feather, 
blanket, cotton, sheet.  
 
The clouds offer 
their sums, their minuses. 
 
Our vast wreckage— 
 
            ghost opal,  
            blighted egg, 
           
            a blood sea.  
 
Entire eyefulls  
of endings. 
 
Weren’t we at last 
provisional,  
 
             delusional, more hull  
             than whole.  
 
My lack of compass,  
composure. 
 
I throw out  
a shallow noun, 
 
             anemic invectives. 
 
Fuck you, sky, 
you liar, 
 
where a god has gone 
to die. 
 
Figment, idea,  
nothing here— 
 
           the great blankery  
           of us 
 
           torched by the sun’s fire.