Excerpts from “Hehasnoname”

Sharron Hass
Translated by Marcela Sulak

these are not lines of poetry

the poem is soaked in darkness

it moves along the tracks on the other side of words

and it screeches. I hear the screeching.

I was sitting beside the wanderer and he vanished in the lawlessness of blood

one hand held the dying man – (my whole life revolving on the pressed lines, hard and damp don’t let go)

my eyes are turned to the spirit arising in the corridor (serpents descended the stairs on their ancient legs

before sin and left a trace of light—a place comes closer, and I am within—holding the almost dead body

so as not to drop into the spirit that the serpents left—

and I saw how poetry holds back another moment the approaching might from him whose might is being taken

I was holding the almost dead—palm to palm, tenderly

I hear the words from the other side joined to their visible kin, but no

they aren’t alike, winged creatures and reptiles are more alike than the lines accumulated in the dark

around the soul that is about to blossom? (knock knock question mark

and maybe the missing body will emerge from the events to tell) (my father now stands behind the door)

(pain is the intimacy with the dead that is given to the living)

—❉—

on the kitchen clock—maybe six

on the wrist band—midnight’s ticking

and on the stool fluorescent teatime flickers

the clog and wheel climb into each other silent

and oiled but the high voltage in the nerves

burst into an empty space of musical links, holes opened

in the rhythm of the times, in the slim metal hands

my heart is beaten mad

I came and went

as I wished, a grey mouse, on my skin

my skin—

—❉—

He wakes with great difficulty

he’s an orphan girl who has no model of orphanhood

her hope is not for what is impossible, like the resurrection;

her desire is another impossibility

that the trees return to the trees and the light to rustle,

the snake to rest its tail in its mouth

and she will see and she will hear

the unbearable and the inconsolable and the what-has-no-form-to-hold-it

(death—she has clearly seen disappearing—

behind

an open door—)

—❉—

There are days the circling hands of time

are resolved to tell—the form gives birth to the land

where the thing that is born from the rules of the form will flourish

as if seated again at white marriage tables

where the tears are tears of the golden rule partaking in the radiance—

long hours of contention and hunger have preceded it

and there are days—the face of the clock imitates the stars

it’s not enough—it’s not enough—something terrible has happened

and shattered the beauty. The salt has turned

into a weak whispering for the desert—

and how will you summon the hand to grasp what is left—

there is love to be enlisted

—❉—

Hey, Muse! Bless me with language!

No, to ask for language is to turn away from you.

(Why hadn’t it occurred to me before bless me

for I have turned away from you) grant me, Muse, the language to be the written

and the writer of worlds at their meeting. Stand in the syntax and shower me with gold,

the gold of leaves and the gold that the moths under beds don’t eat. O Muse, the path to you

is as difficult as the path to the I is easy and light

“Hehasnoname” appeared in Hebrew in the book Music of the Wide Lane.