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.