Lullaby (with Exit Sign), and: Still Life (with Death), and: Donor (Wind), and: Sketch, and: Speech

Abstract

Lullaby (with Exit Sign), and: Still Life (with Death), and: Donor (Wind), and: Sketch, and: Speech Hadara Bar-Nadav (bio) Lullaby (with Exit Sign) I slept with all four hooves in the air or I slept like a snail in my broken shell. The periphery of the world was gone. The giant exit sign blinking above my head. My family sings its death march. They are the size of the moon. No, they are the size of thumbtacks punched through the sky's eyelid. What beauty, what bruise. (What strange lullaby is this that sings from its wound?) Here, my dead father knocks on a little paper door. Here my family knocks, waits. Come through me, my darlings [End Page 19] whatever you are: flame, lampshade, soap. Leave your shattered shadows behind. I'll be the doorway that watches you go. Still Life (with Death) After Magritte's The Lovers We were burned and we were blind. We wanted to record the occasion of us so stole sheets from a sagging clothesline and wrapped them around our heads. This is decoration-inhaling damp heat through the rose-colored gauze of our bandaged faces. Every shadow loved us, every eyeless girl made of cunning and wind. We owned nothing but ourselves and we were only an idea. In a church parking lot I found a man's tweed suit and a box of pastels the color of a bakery and drew you shoulders, a dress and pink shoes. [End Page 20] Our heads full of flies and violins, we tucked and smoothed our new skins and sat for our portrait on a Sunday afternoon. We scared away the half-drunk picnickers and raised their cheese sandwiches in the air. The hours stood still. Even the worms held their breath. Donor (Wind) The throat is optional,as is the larynx.What small objectcan you pullthrough the pink?Many things diedhere: a nest, an oilleak, a typewriterribbon's languageof bile and thread.Spread my uselessparts in the citydump, spleenfondled by seagulls,vertebrae pluckedby lonely men.Tape my uselessparts together again [End Page 21] and I'm your disappearing shatter.Your snowflakein heat. Now feedme to the windwhere I belong. Sketch Thinking entersthe landscape- what detours! A region in which human beings and books used to live Vienna, my eyes in German In the midst of losses language remained deathbringing muting Those years and the years darknesses [End Page 22] I was meant to sketch the clockhand's direction a poem perhaps Language is shelterless open An erasure of Paul Celan's "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen" from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001). Speech I have come to you alone a green word growing an inward landscape The force I believe I have been conversing in is human An erasure of Paul Celan's "Speech to the Hebrew Writers Association" from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001). [End Page 23] Hadara Bar-Nadav Hadara Bar-Nadav's book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House) won the Margie Book Prize. Two chapbooks, Show Me Yours (winner of the Midwest Poets Series Award, Laurel Review) and The Soft Arcade (Cinematheque P), are forthcoming in 2010. Recent works appear in American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Copyright © 2010 University of Nebraska Press