my recitation.

"If I could only get hold of the-whole-of-you-now,
How could you ever be for me what I myself am?"
-"The Second Trying," Dalia Ravikovitch (trans. from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld)

Perhaps life becomes merely a listing of things
When I enter for the second time,
a box of matches, an empty bottle, an empty room, the sheets, the pillow, the light switch, the thoughts I suppress, those I call forth for you.
This time I am brave.
I do not fear my own contortions.
I do not think of the torn photographs.
I do not wonder.
Perhaps you feel the change in me, in the softening of my bones,
in the thumpthump thump thump of my chest,
the irregular heart beat.
A girl calling out to a man in an open field.
A boy, "you are astounding.
you are assiduous."
he says in the natural rhythm of the language, in the natural rhythm forming from their hushed exhalations. she says tell me how. he never answers. the men never answer. the women wonder how how how and why why am I anything at all? i am nothing at all until the existence of you within me. my thoughts are not my own until you reside alongside them. my breath turns sweet when i share it with your breath.
share me, please share me, please show me what you mean. answer my questions with the parting of your lips.
I end by pleading. I ask for forgiveness in the dark,
where your eyes turn to sometimes-sparkles,
where the smooth surface of the back of your hand
feels like the back of my hand,
where we search our bodies for new ways of searching.
In my sleep,
I stop looking.
I dream of nothing, of the spaces between the burnt brown of static electricity.
I wake up reciting lines of Middle English from memory.
And when it begins again, I forgive you
In another language. I learn that
We are both alone.
That
We are always alone
That
When the tips of your fingers finally melt the white snow enveloping the backs of my legs
We are not one.
For One is an illusion, One disappears
when distance absorbs your bed and your music and the soft echo of our a capella.
It is I alone, it is I
You, well, you are a handsome diversion from the reality of never-ending exile.