Letter to Israel

I.

11/24/96, Hartford
Do stone stairs and cracked columns
calve sheets of sand and dust with time?
Is there a marketplace with carts and sunbleached awnings,
salt fish and silver, dusty-faced children, odd postcards on racks,
sandals bound in pairs, wooden clothes pins,
figs and dates and olives, lapis lazuli or
polished amber, robes in cotton gauze layers,
candles, incense, cigarettes, tarnished coins?
Do voices and music at night
drift and curl up stories of adobe and through
unscreened, unglassed, uncurtained, rounded windows?
Can you smell the age of the streets, the speech, the sand?
Do the women line their lids with black and drop their eyes?
Can you feel the time pass, and the statues
fall grain by grain, then rise again like hourglasses finished and flipped,
like waves on the Atlantic?

II.

Could you remember those waves? Something
cooler and far north? Sand that did not float or drift
but stuck damp like one piece, water rolling in on it
from Gardiner's, Block, Plum.
Could you recall? The sandgrass blued in the moonlight,
more like moongrass than anything which ever grew
in Connecticut or Cape Cod. Kelp and poppers in the night
breathed ocean foam and floated. Not a stitch on us two.
Not a stitch so that the sky dropped down on us,
settled around our bare shoulders and bellies like dust, fell through our legs.
Sprinting from jetty to jetty we lifted a wake of spangled froth
in droplets eight feet up behind us. And I've forgotten to say the salt:
stuck seaweed on our calves.
Sand on our scalps. And do you remember all of this?
The chilled drop of ocean brine and splash on your bare hip?

III.