Читать книгу Psalms - Joy Ladin - Страница 10

You scare me the way I scare the rabbit

In my path. I freeze,

Brown eye fixed on your approaching shadow.

Sometimes you rip me to shreds,

Sometimes squeeze

Till my ribs crack, always

You watch me bleed and blossom

Curiously, from a distance,

As though I were a furry blur of terror

Frozen between surrender

And the urge to disappear

Into the undergrowth

Of forever. You’ll scare me

To one death or another

If you come closer.

You come closer.

I smell you on my clothes, my books,

The toys my children scatter,

My two or three private parts

Devoted solely

To radiating pain, my organs

Of need and pleasure. Why do you bother

To provoke this terror

In something small and unimportant

That asks nothing

But to be allowed to vanish?

Why do you bother with us at all

When your being is bounded

By no conditions

But absolute freedom

And absolute distance

From the bits of bone and truth

That come closer and closer to freezing

The closer we come

To you?