THREE POEMS
Tioneers, Melvin Wilk
THREE POEMS MelvinWilk Tioneers When we arrived we were at bay and so we are today driven into some pocket of the past. We stitch a patchwork culture against the naked collapse of our common...
...When we kiss I know the meaning of home...
...We mend our ethnic costumes...
...I wish you would write a poem about me— because of me—" 2 He answers first about the human traffic...
...He starts to say that spirit is more than a response to the question each morning asks and discovers his way: "I miss the curling reach of your voice that no place in me is too far from...
...The last time, forexample, I dreamed of someone else making love to you...
...In the water, his fingers swirl, songlike and psalms spill from his arms as he beckons...
...In a language I do not follow he talks the story of our lives to me, his voice turning in me like the pages of a Siddur...
...Rich, powerful, but frightened into savagery, children, trees, and food burn in our arms while we slow down at home, darken, and conserve...
...He steps into a sunlit rush of water, and warmed by reason of ritual, he raises hiseyes and the sun becomes a suggestion only of a warmth beyond and yet to be...
...But whatever desire it expresses I haven't the heart to pursue...
...Proust said that dreams are not to be converted into reality...
...I like to get in as far as I can and starting slowly off my way through to you, unlocking rooms, shattering idols, until there is only the dark delectable sweat of your space cupped in my hands your breaths flicking my nape like a crop as we ride home flickering, flickering, flickering until our knees melt and we race in flame...
...All day it was difficult keeping my mind off what I'd seen...
...Other images clogged my blood...
...Oh, darling, if only our children have similar luck...
...It gets colder all across the land...
...I turn my American eyes to my car embarrassed at the possibility of being so deeply loved by a man...
...But I learned it from you...
...Melvin Wilk teaches English and Jewish Studies at Iowa State University...
...We stitch a patchwork culture against the naked collapse of our common life...
...In the park, he's restless, watching the horses trot tourists in traps, caged, pacing, driven, unable to come to terms, mad manure steaming in the street like a hot breakfast...
...My empty bed is too horrible— also my empty hands and arms and etc.— If only we knew where we were...
...4 Only recently have I felt at home in you...
...I don't budge...
...The skimobiles are noisy...
...5 All my flags are up for you, baby...
...My spirit waits on my tongue for your mouth...
...blessing My grandfather is leading me through snow to a river he says dances...
...We think we know how to live and who we are restless in the suburbs when terror strikes moving averagely every three years, pioneers lost in a myth ever inland, ever farther from God's Country...
...Why not a poem about noise...
...Soft as snowflakes the tragic trifles pile up...
...7 Afterwards let's browse through the house, grazing until we're ready to put the feedbag on...
...Lave Letters (for Mary Beth, my wife) I She writes that she is glad he's coming home...
...He dips to his neck in the stream murmuring his Yiddish pleasure...
...6 Separated from you I feel the meaning of Diaspora...
...The urbane hotshots hotfooting it on Fifth Avenue, lips locked because whoever screams first loses...
...There were times when I didn't feel much...
...The wind works its beak over our exile...
...Let's dream of the ingathering, exiles together...
...Underground the workers pace on the station platforms like soldiers, no train in sight...
...Then we'll sit opposite each other at the table in our robes and eat the cold apples together...
...Then, before he is immersed for Jewish reasons, he calls me by my Jewish name...
...These poems are from a newly completed book, IN EXILE...
...So stuck in whatever season 1 stand, so stupid at the river's brink with no one now to call me: "Come in, Mordecai...
...3 He writes how mornings get lost in the city...
Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3
