The Hands
in Exile
___________________________________
RANDOM HOUSE, 1983
Copyright 1983 by
Susan Tichy
Irrigation
Lying on My Cot The
Hours When I stop work
To
an Irgun Soldier
From now on
The
rich don't have children
Irrigation
Dust on my hair and face,
oil in the dust I can taste
when a truck has passed.
And the sting of grapefruit oil
in the small splinter-holes in
my hands.
The smell of the plastic cooler
when I drink, water running
down
my chin and throat and shirt,
disappearing in the heat.
A man told me his water
truck broke down
in the Sinai, in one of the
wars.
As long as convoys passed
he lived like a king
on cigarettes, brandy
chocolate,
and pictures of girls. Their
nipples
made his mouth water
in spite of the dust.
The soldiers drank
till they sweated again
and he slept under his truck,
dreaming:
The wars were over.
His country was an island
where men worked all day
pouring sand into the ocean.
Some schoolchildren were
reciting:
How many people live in heaven?
What color is God?
Where do trees go when they
leave the
desert?
Why is it cold?
And he heard himself
answering:
Don't listen to your own fears.
Pitch your tents in the shadow
of running
water.
It's cold in heaven.
And there are many gods in
this green
tree.
First
published in The
Antioch Review (1981)
Lying on
My Cot
The cigarettes taste like
horseradish
but they're free. Bugs
leave holes in the rolling
paper
going in and out.
Towns on the horizon go one
and off.
The mosquitoes aren't so bad
since I let the lizards in.
With crickets, orange soda,
the big guns and small-arms
fire,
it's peaceful, like thunder
and popcorn
on the back porch
on a hot, Southern night.
Down below, a tractor driver
takes his turn at the gate. I
hear him
check his weapon,
the spin of gravel when he
turns,
the short chuk of a
match.
One of his radios speaks code,
the other rock-n-roll: "Baby!"
I like to imagine the bugs
beating hell for fresh air,
tearing at huge walls of paper,
their teeth not fast enough,
their burned bodies traveling
down my
lungs.
Across this silence,
Lebanon blooms
like an irresistible flower.
First
published in Antioch
Review (1981)
The Hours
The crop plane stalls its
engines,
drops an octave and a hundred
feet
into a zoom of poison,
plowing through sleep nose
first.
That's dawn.
Noon is the whistle,
like a sword blade,
of passing jets.
They go nowhere.
They bomb nothing.
The papers say
no borders are ever crossed.
Dusk we mark by a rumble,
far away, noticed only
when a day's work is done.
The rumble is the animal that
guards us.
So, what if I slept on the
other side?
Right there, perhaps,
in that small twinkle of
lights?
I'd stroke the black, shining
hair
of the same animal
and feel safe.
This is peace.
It causes men to grow old. On
women
the face of an olive leaf
coarsens
into cracked ground waiting
for rain
or darkness.
We each like down.
Wind lifts soil and branches,
lightening everything
but us.
It even blows the borders
back and forth above our heads:
at twelve we are in Israel,
at two we are not.
At five, when the crop plane
already revs its engines in
half light,
we fall asleep and dream,
for half an hour,
that we climb the swaying
ladder
to God's house.
First
published in Antioch
Review (1981)
When
I stop work...
When I stop work and rub my
face
I rub soil of the Promised Land
into my skin.
Whose bones to you suppose
are filling my pores? Who
smiles
in the dark crescents under my
nails?
A soldier, or his shy,
malarial bride?
Except a corn
of wheat
fall into the ground and
die,
it abideth alone.
If I stayed here seven years
every cell would die
and grow again. I would be
Holy Land, all over
--except the brain, whose
cells
are grains of sand in a rock
fortress
imagined by tired travelers
to be the City of Peace.
To an
Irgun Soldier
1.
One camel survives Jerusalem.
A dollar-and-a-half a ride, it
lies
bored on the pavement
on the Mount of Olives, in
front
of the library. Don't you
remember?
El Lawrence was not in
sight.
The two boys passed time
molding camel shit into
enormous piles
with their bare feet. I had
just
asked you if a man
remembers what country he died
in.
You turned to face the
synagogue.
"When blood is spilled, may it
spill
on the outside walls." Your
eyes
nested in their deep
lines--from laughing
or from squinting at the sun?
Your lips embraced their
cigarettes,
your tongue its poems...
And yes, yes, you helped me
get a job, a ticket, drinking
toasts to me, to you. but here
I work. And here
the hillsides wear their houses
like an old tattered shawl.
I build. But what I build
some other will knock down.
It's simply
Ha Yorden--"that
which falls."
And everything I see around me
falls--men, houses, hair
of a woman, tumbling from its
combs.
If not by bombs, by wind.
And last of all the sky.
Still, there are
detaiils--flecks
of mica in the soil, streaks
of red
down certain blades of grass.
Be details
I remember this is more
than the dry course of our
thoughts.
Just now, the hands you
once compared
to white cups--unbreakable and
pristine--
are oiling a pair of boots
with Vaseline. Once stylish,
the boots are French
and crudely painted black--an
artist
would have had them for his
models
if there were artists like
that anymore.
And landscape? Days are
cold.
The lake of miracles is gray
and placid as the sky. I've
learned
to move slowly, to ask few
questions
in these oil-and-mud-stiff
pants.
I work.
And after work, I drink
until the memory of your hand
falls
away, light as a shock
of wheat against my thigh.
2.
And yes, yes, maybe you didn't
blow that building up. Perhaps
ships
approaching on the two seas
--salt and sand--collided.
That's your business--
knowing what no one knows,
not seeing what everyone sees.
I believe it. I believe
crows wish there were no
animals
dead at the side of the road.
And among these men and women
seated at the café,
one of them loves another.
The rest?
We made it up. Your hands are
virgins.
And Israel, their bride, lies
still
just under the face of the
hill.
Out in the street,
where boys are cracking puddles
with their bare heels, ice
shatters
like clapped hands between the
walls.
The death of God was not
like that.
The death of God was gradual,
a workman's shirt falling
slowly to pieces.
From
now on...
From now on I am a road
just reaching the top of a
hill--
I go one but I can't see where.
Let rain fall. Let breath
condense on the dirty glass.
The present is my house
and my house is full of
children.
I lift each one above my head,
and shake
out
the armies that fly from their
mouths.
Some of the children speak
plainly.
Some comb out their tangled
hair.
Some pack the suitcase
they'll carry to the next life.
But what I love and what I
hate--
I'm letting go of their hands,
those two poor twins.
Who will take them in?
The sun will shrivel, the
rain distend,
and the wind will roll me over
in her
arms.
No one will know what size
shoes
I was wearing, not even me.
It will be "the day of
labor,
the night of gunfire" forever.
No decisions but the necessary
ones.
And no more nights like this
one.
From now on I am a road of
stone,
hewn, and mortared to the hill.
When a man strikes his foot
against my
shoulder
let him swear, let him stoop
to rub the
bruise,
and rest where a cypress
blocks the wind
like a shawled woman turning
her back.
The rich
don't have children...
The rich don't have children
because of the expense,
the lazy because they're lazy,
and the sad because of wars.
Here that's especially true.
The rich go to America,
the lazy die,
and all the sad are drafted.
Fine soldiers, these boys.
They stay awake all night at
the gate
keeping the dark orchard at
bay. And they
love
to walk through Old
Jerusalem, inspecting
every one of her widening
cracks
for bombs. A fine lady,
Jerusalem,
united now with her lover,
her other self.
No more love letters.
No more smuggled children to
be raised
by the dark sisters outside
the wall.
"No rape at all?" said a
French correspondent,
shaking his head. "What kind
of army is
that?"
"I'm sorry," said the Arab
girl, "but it
is true."
"I'm sorry," said the
paratrooper
who gave me a lift to
Bethlehem.
"We can't do everything. We
are so few."
Irrigation
Lying on My Cot The
Hours When I stop work
To
an Irgun Soldier
From now on
The
rich don't have children
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