Yesterday at the cafe
while I tapped on my laptop

a coffee spoon disfigured
in my palm. Just like that,
a goose whose neck broke in the wind.

And then a crowd congealed outside,
and sirens. Somebody’s flat
up high across the narrow street,
just a room really, up in flames.

Bystanders swelled and blocked the firemen
who were too busy shouting into radios
to shout at us

and I thought
in there is all of someone’s stuff
(it was a really tiny room)

and the waitress said
I know him, he comes here all the time
with that black dog

and from the back,
someone was screaming
for his bill, his fucking bill.
 
 

Is a field guide for this country
six wars back. Alphabetized by town, kibbutz
or by the spoils of war: by ruined village,
homestead, ancient station of the desert caravans.
Published by the army, inexplicably
“a pocket-book to get to know the land“

It opens left-to-right, in the style
of our language. It is the same size as a bible,
maybe thinner, or a trammel of my mother’s
yellowed photographs. The hardcover reads simply
Every-Place cutout of black over a shade
of the crushed flesh that collects in the bottom
of the olive press. This armor could withstand
a few more decades of misplacing, rucksacking,
wedging underleg to adjust the cants of tripods
leveled in tilled fields. Six wars ahead.

It includes color, hand drawn fold-out maps
in the back pages. Topographical.
Cartographers would drool over these naked charts,
so sparsely settled, thick green line demarking
foreign lands with none of our soldiers in them.
Nineteen sixty-two, the year my mother
learned to say her country’s name.

Its paper is still crisp, the pages married neatly
with good glue, nearly a miracle of heritance.
It opens left-to-right, the way
you take your hand off of your heart.