A Well of Milk in the Middle of the City

Sometimes you're just minding your own business in your (temporary) apartment when a pigeon falls into the spare room and flutters back and forth and you're torn between pity and revulsion.

My roommate was trying to move it off the windowsill and it fell *inside* instead of falling *outside.* We brought it water in the top of a Tupperware container, but envisioned a slow painful death all afternoon. Before scooping it up in a carton and leaving it to die in the front yard, my last ditch attempt to trust in The Law was to call the Tel-Aviv municipality hotline (106 for you locals!) A sweaty veterinarian arrived within the hour. He seemed to be throwing our pigeon on the floor, thereby further injuring it, but he said, in a somewhat surly tone, that he was checking its flight capabilities. He said it was still a baby, and he would leave it on the bushes to let its parents find it. He hurried off, taking two stairs at a time, holding our pigeon in his bare hands. What did Jesus say about a single sparrow, and what can I say about the tender care of the Tel-Aviv Municipality for a single pigeon?

And somehow this is related to the astounding poetry reading I just came back from -- maybe because I arrived at the little square at the end of Bialik street just at sunset when all the birds were circling in the sky and cooing. There's also something here for me about tangibility: all week I have been reading about Bialik's poem about the Kishinev Pogroms from 1903 and here I am almost by chance at his house -- a strange pseudo-Mediterranean villa for the Russian-Yiddish-Hebrew Father of Modern Hebrew Poetry.

Perhaps it's a move from metaphor to metonymy - from my games with imaginary cities to the pigeon that dropped into the room. Or, I've been having these intense conversations with N., who I hope very much will post some guest blogs here in the next few weeks about witnessing. I told her that my reading on Bialik visiting the Jews post pogrom in Kishinev reminded me of her work with the Palestinians who were given cameras by Amnesty International in Hebron. In the beginning it seemed to be a metaphorical connection, but the more we kept talking about the way Bialik's poem shaped Zionism and attitudes toward victims, it became clear that there is a real family connection here: a physical linkage and not just a circumstancial connection.

How is this connected to the wonderful luminous Chezzi Leskly reading I went to tonight in honor of the new Collected Works" recently released by Am Oved? I think Chezzi Lesky might have approved of S.'s question to me - which I bring here in tribute - are you experiencing Tel Aviv with a condom or bareback?

I'll translate a taste of tonight, very bloggily, a little segment from "Poetry." p. 175

Poetry can be a kind of jam
in other words, a dead and tasty fruit.
Poetry can be saccharine
in other words an artificial and cancerous sweetener
poetry can build
an apartment building
a hospital
a school
a jail house
a synagogue

but it prefers
to discover
a well of milk in the middle of the city.