Dividing Jerusalem

John departs for his studio, its walls circular as prayer,

lined with images of his father for the animated movie afoot

where the mob loans him, then owns him; then John erases or

he can't invent the next panel and there the wall is white as sky.

I walk to my room tucked in a high corner like a garret,

my computer humming with the words it expects from me,

all others doing the same, breakfast, soft talk behind us now.

In the big hall a gathering of Jews and Arabs, a mini-conference,

locks its doors, big tables, babble of shouts, waiters in, out

Planning what to do with Jerusalem when war's finished, they

sound like the Harvard man and the Michigan lesbian at tennis

on the terrace, day dust old as Rome heeled up, fat ideas lunging,

blows couched in ritual courtesy, players with little to lose.

"Great shot." "Yours, too." Thunk and answering ca-thunk

like remote mortars I can't see, only the crystalline blue lake

infinite as the buttery sun I imagine those inside are bartering for.

Those who will win or lose don't come here, they are still

washing clothes in a ditch, running checkpoints to steal food,

holding their breath as they pee quietly over the planted mine.

I try to see them with three servants per meal, naps, discussions,

but it's John's father I see, Italian, in debt," wiped out.

Below, an army of workers moves at hill's bottom, quiet

so valuable here, they ply simple tools of their fathers, silent

snippers, mowers, diggers in glare's boil. Rows of olive trees

tremble with speckled leaves as they advance. One, two

voices call, faces lift here, there as if to see what is waiting.

Hawks, small-beaked, orbit and swoop, held off by glints of

sparrows working hard over nests, mouths open, hot day ahead.

I can see from my room tight streets of Belaggio spooling

to shores of Lake Como, gelato shops, family boats, ferries

for home workers who sit, eyes black, unblinking, as we make

words we hope will engage a neighbor, a friend, even the father

who's come home desperate, beaten. It's like movie here,

old, dose, shocking, the way we find, astonished, a perfectly

preserved Nazi cycle and sidecar. In an alley we stand and stare.

John buys us a drink. We praise his work. We speak of playing tennis.

DAVE SMITH'S most recent collection of poems is The Wick of Memory: New & Selected Poems 1970-2000 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000). He has been coeditor of The Southern Review and Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University since 1990. He will become the Elliot Coleman Chair of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University in 2002-2003.

photograph by Dee Smith

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