Blur

by Hadara Bar-Nadav

After the bombs
          and the buildings blow
                    I call Clover, Clover
and you appear—
          a dream limned in smoke.

Clover, my hermaphroditic dear,
          I kiss your singed
                    leaflet ears and fawn
in a café in Eilat.
          Clover sips from a demitasse.

Only a few sesame seeds left
          and the porcelain carried away.
                    Morning crawls toward
afternoon, and the sun
          says it’s time for wine

to drown this red day.
          I hear there’s a crater
                    where our bed last lay
at the Hotel de Ruin.
          A portrait of dancing

lights and fire balloons,
          a painterly gasoline blur.
                    Let’s find a sailboat,
bread, zatar, and figs
          and watch the distance burn.

 

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s book of poetry, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), won the Margie Book Prize. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and other journals. She is assistant professor of poetry at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. (4/2009)