Late in the Game

We sleep peacefully,
side-by-side,
except, by chance,
when she or I turn outward, to the edge
of our plush and well-shaped bed.

Never inward, it would seem,
and no fuss:
no reaching for each other
—like four-limbed
cephalopods swallowing
the mattress seafloor
that lies between us—

but more like two relaxed
and pale and silent corpses
in the same soft coffin,
completely still, yet breathing,
in steady, rattling rhythms.

Touch has fled:
as in a passioned race
with my emptied imagination
to leave behind our bed,
bereft of all except
my ceiling-staring rumination:

When did our bed become
a pyre without fire,
its heat become the ice
of separate space
with neither spice
nor panting sounds
of mutual desire?

Is this really something new?
Could it be some rough-skinned
interior complexion
redirecting outside from within,
that’s redefined the very nature
of our mutual expectation?

One Day’s Questions

I am too schooled
in all that we have suffered
across the centuries.
My tribal memories
are all too clear:

the horror of this slaughter
and that rape,
the ongoing expulsions
with no escape,
the rarely living without fear.

October 7 was another day
of cruelty too well known.
It seems, since 1945
such ragged, sharply honed
deep slicing of the hive
through flesh and ligament to bone

seemed far away—
until it burst into proximity,
with ugly silent familiarity,
and still—and yet—this time begets
a different afterlife

and quite a new array
of questions, not for them,
and not for God—for us:
the leaders who made such a fuss
of their unmatchable ability

to protect us, all but failed
to stop that wind-swept sailing
ship of murder and of doom:
the leadership that flailed
against responsibility

and chose, instead,
to multiply the dead—
both ours and theirs,
to slay their myriads
into dark infinity:

to slaughter them as if
to bring our murdered siblings back,
and more: to blind us to the sleep
of their intelligence when
once again the sweep

of history across the southern plain
of a state too marked by too much pain
had churned up with it once again
the memories all too surfaced
from within the deep

of our experience of genocides
endured at others’ hands,
as if within the slaughtering of the very land
and its inhabitants by thousands
that vicious sowing might just reap

a memory-laden purpose,
that in the act of slaying
and with it, our own forgetting,
redemption might, somehow, reside.

Ori Z Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across a range of disciplines, from art history and theology to philosophy and political history. His poetry has appeared in a handful of journals, and in several colections. His most recent book of poems are Then and Now: Love Lost and Sometimes Found (Canal Street Books) and The Poppy Poems: My Life As a Dog.

Image: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons