" American Tourist "

 

 

In a city made of seaweed we danced on a rofftop, my hands

under her breasts. Subtracting

day from day, I add this woman's ankles

 

to my days of atonement, her lower lip, the formal bones of her face.

We were making love all evening ---

I told her stories, their rituals of rain: hapiness

 

is money, yes, but only the smallest coins.

She asked me to pray, to how

towards Jerusalem. We bowed to the left, I saw

 

two bakeries, a shoe store; the smell of hay,

smell of horses and hay. When Moses

broke the sacred tablets on Sinai, the rich

 

picked the pieces carved with:

"adultery" and "kill" and "theft,"

the poor got only "No" "No" No."

 

I kissed the back of her neck, an elbow,

this woman whose forgetting is a plot against forgetting,

naked in her galoshes she waltzed

 

and even her cat waltzed.

She said: "All that is musical in us is memory" ---

but I did not Know English, I danced

 

sitting down, she straightened

and bent and straightened, a tremble of music

a tremble in her hand.

 

 

   Kamínsky, Ilyá, Bailando en Odesa (Edición bilingue). Madrid: Libros del Aire, 2012, pp 32 - 34.

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