Simone Weil

 If I had seen her in Marseilles,

smelling of mûre-musc soap,

I would have thought her a poet

as we hid from the rain in greyblue cafés—

till she enriched her coffee with her blood. 

At times she was almost a tourist,

a young student curious about living,

passionate about dying.  In photographs of her,

she was the fixed moment among eternal blurs. 

History, a firefly in her hand,

wrestled in the frames of her mystical glasses.

 She hated the Author of her script.

Her scream was prefabricated,

the war to fight before

 the ensuing battles of buildings and men,

 before adopting Tarzan’s yell

  with all the passion of that endless afternoon

in Golgotha. 

Tropical Dance

You throw yourself into the dance

As a drunk would against a wall,

Your flowery dress splashing wildly

Like a flower garden in a windstorm,

But no flowers drop to your bare feet. 

With what joy, with what marvel,

I watch your hands rise, your hair fly,

Your dress swing like a cape in the wind.

Your mouth opens and you shout fiercely

The voluptuous thrill in your squinting eyes. 

Oh how you dance: is it to show your thighs?

The night you suck up under your dress,

A music heavy as papayas and coconuts falling,

A sensual finish like morning glories

Splayed for the night after a rainstorm.

No Rewind

Some flowers droop

down the shoulders of the vase

like exhausted tongues.

They rebelled against themselves,

refused to live.

Others look away, their necks rough,

their color faded

into the same zone

where our love disappeared. 

“They don’t last,”

you said, so matter-of-factly,

the morning you choked them

into a tight bouquet in water.

Yesterday you brought me a tape,

and a note in a small cream envelope.

Today I listened to the wrong song,

somehow missed the right one.

When your hands fumbled

with the tape player, when your finger

trembled to my silence—

“You’re a dangerous man,”

your note had read.

“Let’s talk about God”—

and your hand orgasmic

followed in its wake,

I knew that today

a death would separate us.

Whatever music had glued us

during the minutes

we converted into history

was frozen in the violet frenzy

that rounded your eyes

and the tape player

that had no rewind. 

Stopgap

It was your face that darkened over me

In the back seat of your father’s car.

It was your name I whispered

To the moon on a hilltop in boot camp.

It was your letters that fired me

Through the snow to the freezing latrine.

But in the Black Forest in rain

I trembled like a wet bird for another. 

Saturday Inspection

By the time they arrived

Our polished dress shoes

Were white with frost

We had stamped our feet

Walked around in our morning crate

Our Friday night preparations

Saturday morning deteriorations

But what joy when it was over

When we again were free

In our fatigues and boots

When we without duty

Could delude ourselves

Downtown in our civvies

That no war was raging

In our streets, at our table,

And somebody’s jungle and rice paddies

Would not fit in the box home

Ivanov Reyez was an English professor at Odessa College.  His poetry has appeared in Paris Lit Up, The Galway Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Cafe Review, Pinyon, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere.  He won the riverSedge Poetry Prize 2015.  He is the author of Poems, Not Poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2013).