Burning Napkins, Famous Poets

Today I found myself dreaming of the empty coasts of the Marin Headlands, the neon green forests of upstate New York where I did my artist's residency last summer, or even the big clear patch of sky above the BART parking lot outside my house in Berkeley. Friday I escaped Jerusalem with a plastic bag full of wet laundry as the commune near my parents' house was having an afternoon trance party that was making the walls shake. The Indian woman in the purple sari dug her knees into my back on the shared taxi, and Tel Aviv is exploding with people.
The older ones are promenading on the beach boardwalk and eating fish dinners all night long, the pre-teens are finding dark corners on the deserted orthodox separate bathing enclosure, and clumps of hipsters with shiny minidresses and slicked back hair are congregating in Florentin, their cars parked haphazardly around the dumpsters, their table candles setting fire to napkins.

At the rooftop restaurant/bar our table spilled over into the next table. The blond girl asked us, "How old are you? Did you all go to the same class? Guess how old I am?"

And it's Hebrew Book Week, so I dragged myself off with the rest of the crowds to Rabin Square for a good deal on poetry, or maybe a new concordance. When I pushed my way to the front and asked about the two-for-one books I realized that I had been speaking to Natan Zach himself, one of Israel's handful of famous living poets, if not the most. Crowds and space. No artist's residency for him tonight. Or maybe ever. Poets here don't have the license to go off into the silence: they're in the crowded sticky city like everyone else, full of gossip and terrible interconnection. Even the Hebrew poems themselves I'm reading this week seem crowded - all this intertextuality! So much crowding from Bible and Midrash and Bialik etc. etc.! It's so crowded here on the page.

Outside Y.'s bedroom window, the Filipino boys are blowing bubbles. I can hear their delighted tones as if they were right here in the room with me, and I don't remember the last time I heard silence.