Alte #16: Hot and Cold
Helen Engelhardt
YOU CAME TO ME
in the middle of the night.
May I bring you water
May I lie down
Beside you?
This August night
holds its breath
shawls of heat
stir in the darkness.
Your hand finds
my breast, your mouth
my mouth opening
drinks your kisses.
Wherever you kiss
me kneel
by my side
lower your head
kiss me there
kiss me everywhere
until the grey light
distinguishes you
from me and we see
our faces.
Now it begins.
THE SONG OF THE GOURD
The wild- eyed man sits
at the eastern gate to our city.
As soon as the sun rises
it finds him
in the heat of its glare
There is nowhere to hide.
I unfurled my green stem
and sheltered him
under the canopy of my leaves
my fruits succored him.
A worm gnawed at my root
sucked my juices dry.
A furnace wind blew
without relief without pity
and he begged for death
weeping over my withered stalk.
Louise Luger
Ed Ahern
WIND ON SKIN
This hairless animal is comfortable only with
wrappings to hide the Garden of Eden shame.
Animal fur or skin, fiber of plant or hydrocarbon,
even the hottest day needs sweat swaddling wraps.
And yet, in some carefully nurtured situations-
beaches and pools, coital intimacy, saunas and baths,
I largely or completely reveal my imperfect flesh.
And it is an unrefined pleasure to sense the sun
warm and tan the palest of my body parts,
to let the wind caress my skin like a new lover,
to feel pebbles and plants indent my feet,
to hold place while rain washes away artifice.
But always and ever I re enshroud with
wrappings for a gift never presented.
Lawrence Bush
Ronald Gordon
Judith Rubenstein
Jessica de Koninck
THE COLD WAR
Drugged I was dragged into this
world sleepy and helpless.
My mother, numb from the waist down
could only watch
The way she watched the army
McCarthy hearings
That hot summer of my infancy.
She believed in doctors the way
she believed in television,
indiscriminately.
Minute Rice is good. Lawrence Welk is bad.
The Rosenbergs were framed.
Suspect mayonnaise, the Red Cross, Catholics
and mothers who let their daughters get nose jobs.
Don’t interrupt. Don’t talk about politics.
Not now. You’re not old enough.
You weren’t there.
You don’t know
what you’re talking about.
Lawrence Bush
Carolyn Wells
HOT AND COLD — A GASTRONOME’S DREAM
For a while I’ve wanted to make baked Alaska. How could it be, I wonder, putting essentially an ice cream cake into a 425- degree oven? Would my meringue brown in soft peaks the way it’s meant to , or would the cold ice cream leak out onto the oven floor? I puzzled for days, should I or shouldn’t I attempt such a folly… but my gastronomic demons tugged at my brain, begging me to fuse the hot and cold, in a seeming contradiction, an extravagant fool’s errand, turning the ordinary upon its head. Then I thought why not. A cold hot cake, a contradiction in terms, a sweet oxymoron guaranteed to be a challenge and reward, the thought of cake and ice cream together, melting on the tongue against the warm meringue , its perky browned peaks crowning the triumphant boule of frozen delight and buttery cake.
Who said hot and cold were contradictory, could not exist together?
Judith Sokoloff
Judith Rubenstein
Jeff Blum
Zev Shanken
Esther Cohen
THE WRONG PERSON DIED
A cold day in the middle of a hot summer when Beulah Hill, a 73 year old half-Jewish (her mother so she was sort of Jewish), retired librarian, never married, in love one and a half times (that’s all) in her long long life, Beulah Hill got a call from a total stranger asking her, entirely out of the blue, if she would like to solve a crime. She did not read mysteries, did not watch any Scandinavian series, was a skeptic by nature. Will you find out why? asked the stranger. Beulah Hill, neither curious nor adventuresome, said Yes.
Jessica de Koninck
SOLSTICE
I know the summer solstice.
Gray on the horizon threatens
an argument. Then rain
tropical, steamy as sex,
as if the sea moved inland
streets knee-deep until the sun
remembers, emerges, wipes sand
from cloudy eyes, turns emerald
each tear on each leaf
exhales slowly and caresses the air
with the scent of storm-washed grass.
Louise Luger
Norma Ketzis Bernstock
INDIAN LADDER FALLS
He describes the scenery
how it looks in autumn
when leaves spill
like water
in winter
when snow muffles
all sounds
at dawn
mist above ferns.
Seated on a ledge
between
cascading falls
he points out
slate formations
details in shale
she thinks
of kissing him
making love
on the rocks.
SHACHMAT
1 L’an halach yaldi? Yaldi ha-tov le’an
2 chayal shachor makeh chayal lavan
3 lo yachazor avi, avi lo yachazor
4 chayal lavan makeh chayal shachor
5 b’chi bachadarim uvaganim shtika
6 hamelech mesachek im ha malka
7 yaldi shuv lo yakum; l’olamim yishan
8 chayal shachor makeh chayal lavan
9 avi b’chashecha v’lo yireh od or
10 chayal lavan makeh chayal shachor
11 b’chi bachadarim uvagamin shtika
12 hamelech mesachek im ha malka
13 yaldi sheb’chiki, achshav ho b’anan
14 chayal shachor makeh chayal lavan
15 avi b’chom libo achshav libo bakor
16 chayal lavan makeh chayal shachor
17 b’chi bachadarim uvaganim shtika
18 hamelech meschek im ha malka
19 l’an halach yaldi; yaldi hatov le’an
20 naflu chayal shachor chayal lavan
21 lo yachazor avi avi lo yachazor
22 v’ain chayal lavan v’ain shachor
23 bechi bachadarim uvaganim shtika
24 al luach rayk rak melech u-malka
Marc Shanker
I’m offering this translation of a lyric by Chanoch Levin (music by Alex Kagan) that I found on a CD, sung powerfully by Chava Alberstein. I retained the rhyme scheme and meter of the Hebrew so it could be sung in the same haunting melody of the original.
The lyricist was a highly decorated Israeli poet and left wing activist who won the Jerusalem Prize, the highest literary award in Israel.
The conceit of the poem is that soldiers of all sides are ordinary people, treated like mere black and white — hot and cold — chess pieces. while the king and queen play. (Play chess? Play with each other?) Or the king takes advantage of the queen, ruling class (king) exploits the people (queen).
CHESS
1 O where has my boy gone? My good boy, where’d he go?
2 A pawn that’s black is striking a white foe.
3 My father won’t return. My father won’t be back.
4 A pawn that’s white destroys a pawn that’s black.
5 Crying in the rooms and silence on the green,
6 The king is playing with the queen.
7 My boy won’t rise again. He sleeps. He will not grow.
8 A pawn that’s black is striking a white foe.
9 My father is in darkness, darkness without slack
10 A pawn that’s white destroys a pawn that’s black.
11 Crying in the rooms and silence on the green,
12 The king is playing with the queen.
13. My boy once at my breast is now a cloud of snow.
14. A pawn that’s black is striking a white foe.
15 My father’s tender heart is now a frozen sack.
16 A pawn that’s white destroys a pawn that’s black .
17 Crying in the rooms and silence on the green,
18 The king is playing with the queen.
19 O where has my boy gone? My good boy, where’d he go?
20 All soldiers black all soldiers white fall low.
21 My father won’t return. My father won’t be back.
22 There are no pawns all white and none all black.
23 Crying in the rooms and silence on the green,
24. On empty chessboards only king and queen.
Esther Cohen
BIKINI, OR A WOMAN NAMED MICKEY
1.
As a young girl I wore a yellow bikini
body straight and thin our neighbor
Charles Curanno said Esther you
look like a number 2 pencil. He was right.
2.
Two fuchsia bikinis in a row. The first was skimpy,
The second little bit more modest.
3. Then when my body became
another body, still mine but body parts
in other places, I wore one-piece
bathing suits called tanks.
4.
A few weeks ago a woman
named Mickey, 83 in Sarasota, she
came to the pool in her bright red
beautiful two-piece. Her real body looked good.
Where’s yours she asked.
I have one now.
Lawrence Bush