THAMAR AND AMNON

The moon turns in the sky
over lands without water
while the summer sows
murmurs of tiger and flame.
Over the roofs
metal nerves jangled.
Rippling air stirred
with woolly bleatings.
The earth offered itself
full of scarred wounds,
or shuddering with the fierce
searings of white light.

Thamar was dreaming
of birds in her throat
to the sound of cold tambourines
and moonlit zithers.
Her nakedness in the eaves,
the sharp north of a palm-tree,
demands snowflakes on her belly,
and hailstones on her shoulders.
Thamar was singing
naked on the terrace.
Around her feet
five frozen pigeons.
Amnon, slim, precise,
watched her from the tower,
with thighs of foam,
and quivering beard.
Her bright nakedness
was stretched out on the terrace
with the murmur in her teeth
of a newly struck arrow.
Amnon was gazing
at the low, round moon,
and in the moon he saw
his sister’s hard breasts.


Amnon lay on his bed
at half past three.
The whole room suffered
from his eyes filled with wings.
The solid light buries
villages in brown sand,
or reveals the ephemeral
coral of roses and dahlias.
Pure captive well-water
gushes silence into jars.
The cobra stretches, sings
in the moss of tree-trunks.
Amnon moans among
the coolness of bed-sheets.
The ivy of a shiver
clothes his burning flesh.
Thamar enters silently
through the room’s silence,
the colour of vein and Danube,
troubled by distant footprints.
‘Thamar, erase my vision
with your certain dawn.
The threads of my blood weave
frills on your skirt.’
‘Let me be, brother,
Your kisses on my shoulder
are wasps and little breezes
in a double swarm of flutes.’
‘Thamar, you have in your high breasts
two fishes that call to me,
and in your fingertips
the murmur of a captive rose.’

The king’s hundred horses
neighed in the courtyard.
The slenderness of the vine
resisted buckets of sunlight.
Now he grasps her by the hair,
now he tears her under-things.
Warm corals drawing streams
on a light-coloured map.

Oh, what cries were heard
above the houses!
What a thicket of knives
and torn tunics.
Slaves go up and down
the saddened stairs.
Thighs and pistons play
under stationary clouds.
Gypsy virgins scream
around Thamar,
others gather drops
from her martyred flower.
White cloths redden
in the closed rooms.
Murmurs of warm daybreak
changing vines and fishes.

Amnon, angry violator,
flees on his pony.
Negroes loose arrows at him
from the walls and towers.
And when the four hooves
become four echoes,
King David cuts his harp-strings
with a pair of scissors.