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FALSE ANALOGY

I want her the way I want health
never-ending, obligatory and fair.
I want her without the words
without the headache of successfully attaching myself
like breading to chicken.
This plain and visual relation is easy
enough, but her words run too thick against me
pulling away in large sheets,
she is consistent and has facility and grace
the frilly behavior that lies on her like a thin film.
I am afraid of such facile connections;
we do not cook the way we make love,
we do not thrill to the simple strips of similarities
that bind, unbind, and flour is not a film of sweat
earning its presence, its purity
by the rubbing together of our skin,
the clear failure, the features of erotic despair.

WHAT THE POET DOES

It’s not that he wants to be like Bukowski
looking for his teeth near the bar’s toilet,
vomiting in the Geraniums,
but he likes his drink, not to assuage the fear of death
or the simple anxiety of flying, he likes the taste,
doesn’t have a problem with waking up to a headache
the size of a small Italian city, and isn’t overly bothered
by being too drunk to find his way home on certain
warm nights when anyone
would want to be out under the stars.

That one of those times was last night
is neither here nor there.
It was a little difficult to get to sleep
wedged between the empty
aluminum beer barrels behind the ski lodge
but not different enough
from lying awake in bed worrying
about the placement of commas
in the broken sestina about his wife’s miscarriage;
it’s not the miscarriage (her third) that was the problem
but the poetry implicit in these events
requiring such difficult form.

I understand this completely
the challenge is not the mourning
or even the demands of some obscure piling on of lines
or being soberly housed
in fact, he likes the taste and the stars,
the roof of trees and the silence spread out around him
like a hushed audience readying him to begin.

NOT ME IN NABLUS

I wasn’t the boy shot through the hand
as he walked along Sal-hedin street
idly brushing his fingers against the concrete market stalls.
His hand, not mine
would sometimes throw rocks at the tanks
smoking up the streets near the school.
I wasn’t the girl with the scraped knees
and circular rubber bullet bruises
cornered by a jeep as she returned home;
and how could I be my uncle
hung by his feet in Ariel
until blood bloated and blushed his head.
Nor am I the blasted body of a mother
cut in half by her bedroom door
as soldiers triggered a shaped charge.

The differences are obvious:
my hands are whole
and I use them to make Italian pastry chefs,
British pensioners, and French jugglers laugh
at my pantomime of soldiers hiding in tanks
shooting at my friends with shirts on their heads.
A hundred feet away a sniper
runs his laser across someone’s chest.
How could it be my chest?
It is not my heart and lungs blasted away
by a tumbling 25-caliber shell
It is not my blood running out my mouth
and it is not my smile stuck to my face
like a paper donkey’s tail.
I am still telling this story
an insightful, and more to the point, living narrator
who lets you believe death
is for someone else
in some other place.

Robert Lipton was a contributor to "Live from Palestine" International and Palestinian Direct Action Against the Occupation" (South End Press, 2003). His poems and stories have appeared in various literary journals, including Echo 681, Interband, Jacaranda Review, Squaw Valley Review, King Log, Shades of Contradiction, the Texas Observer, and the Parthenon West. He was a poetry workshop leader at Berkely Art Center for seven years. He has received a number of grants, including an individual one from the Vermont Studio Center as well as program grants from Berkely Community Arts and Alameda Community Arts Programs.

A Complex Bravery is available at select Border’s and Barnes and Noble stores, and the Grosse Pointe Artists Association Art Center. It’s also available online at abebooks.com, alibris.com, amazon.com, bn.com, and marickpress.com.