The Color Green

By Chana Bloch Chana Bloch

Two floors up, at the corner of Hearst and Shattuck,

he’s clamped for good

in an iron lung. When it’s time to eat

he nudges his head a sweaty mile

to the edge of the pillow. It takes a while.

His brilliant bloodshot light-blue eyes

steer me from cupboard to fridge:

he would like his chicken burrito

cut into bite-size pieces,

a bent straw for his glass of water, please.

How does the body live its only life

in a cage? I watch him compute the distance

from bar to bar, and squeeze

between them

with a violent compression, a fury of bursting free

that doesn’t last.

His will is a crowbar, angled to pry up

the rooted intractable weight

of matter. I watch him slyly, I check out

the way he does it. He

does it. But pain in its absolute privacy

weighs what it weighs.

I come here to study the soul, posing one question

a dozen ways, most of them silent.

“If I’m only a body,” he laughs,

“I’m up shit creek.” His laugh

a gritty eruption of rock, salt and breath.

Like me he writes poems

but he does it letter by letter

on a propped keyboard, the mouth-stick

wobbling between his teeth.

That kind of speed keeps a poet accountable.

He won’t ever say, “The grass is very green”

when it’s only green.

Source: Blood Honey (Autumn House Press, 2009)

Biography

Chana Bloch is the author of four books of poems: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey. She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs as well as contemporary Israeli poetry—most recently The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and his Open Closed Open, and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Among her awards are the Poetry Society of America's Di . . .

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