Chana Bloch
Chana Bloch Poems
Apprehended and held without trial,
our friend was sentenced:
brain tumor, malignant.
Condemned each day to wake
...
We remember the rabbit when we see
the duck, but we cannot experience
both at the same time
...
1
FAT
is the soul of this flesh.
Eat with your hands, slow, you will understand
...
"Make flour into dough," she answers,
"and fire will turn it into food.
Ash is the final abstraction of matter.
You can just brush it away."
...
On the crown of his head
where the fontanelle pulsed
between spongy bones,
a bald spot is forming, globed and sleek
as a monk's tonsure.
...
My mother said what she thought.
If my father looked up from the paper
to inquire, sotto voce,
where the hell anyone would get such a dumb idea,
...
for my father
You and I used to talk about
Lear and his girls
(I read it in school,
...
There was a ghost at our wedding,
the caterer's son,
who drowned that day.
...
1
We speak too fast.
The child sits at our table, waiting
his turn. The clock
points a sharp finger. The daily
...
When I was the Baba Yaga of the house
on my terrible chicken legs,
the children sat close on the sofa as I read,
...
We're trying to strike a match in a matchbook
that has lain all winter under the woodpile:
damp sulphur
on sodden cardboard.
...
I hung my wedding dress
in the attic. I had a woolen
shoulder to lean against,
...
Words slip from me lately
like cups and saucers
from soapy hands.
I grope for the names of things
...
Sometimes I want to sink into your body
with the fever that spikes inside me
to be a woman
who can open a man.
...
A man after sex
has that squishy thing in the nest of his lap.
A bashful appendage
like a Claes Oldenburg vinyl drain
...
after Anselm Kiefer
Lately we've begun to talk logistics,
to draw up contingency plans
...
Chana Bloch Biography
Chana Bloch (born March 15, 1940, Bronx, NY) is an American poet, translator, and scholar. She is a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. Bloch earned her B.A. from Cornell University, her M.A. degrees in Judaic Studies and English literature from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at Mills College for over thirty years and directed their Creative Writing Program. Bloch has held residencies at the Bellagio Center for Scholars and Artists, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She has given lectures and poetry readings at numerous U.S. colleges and universities. Bloch has published four collections of her poetry: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty and Blood Honey. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation and included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. She is the poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty.)
The Best Poem Of Chana Bloch
Blood Honey
Apprehended and held without trial,
our friend was sentenced:
brain tumor, malignant.
Condemned each day to wake
and remember.
Overnight, a wall sprang up around him,
leaving the rest of us
outside.
Death passed over us this time.
We're still at large. We're free
to get out of bed, start the coffee,
open the blinds.
The first of the human freedoms.
If he's guilty
we must be guilty; we're all made of
the same cup of dust—
It's a blessing, isn't it? To be able,
days at a time,
to forget what we are.
*
These numbered days
have a concentrated sweetness
that's pressed from us,
the dying man most of all.
Today we eat brunch at Chester's,
poached egg on toast,
orange juice foaming in frosted glasses.
He remembers the summer he packed blood oranges,
stripped to the waist,
drinking the fresh-squeezed juice in the factory
straight from the tap.
He cups his left hand under his chin
as if to a faucet, laughing.
He is scooping sweetness from the belly of death
—honey from the lion's carcass.
We sit with our friend
and brood on the riddle he sets before us:
What is it, this blood honey?
*
A shadow is eating the sun.
It can blind you
but he's looking right at it,
he won't turn away.
Already his gaze is marked
by such hard looking,
though just now he asked,
plaintive as a child,
Why won't it go away?
Day after day breaks
and gives him
back to us
broken.
Soon the husk of his knowing
won't know even that.
*
A man lies alone in his body in a world
he can still desire.
Another slice of pie? he asks.
As long as he's hungry
he's still one of us.
Oh Lord, not yet.
He drums out a jazz beat on the bedrail
with his one good hand
when the words stumble.
See? he says. I can trick the tumor.
He can still taste and see.
The world is good.
He hauls himself up in bed,
squinting his one good eye at the kingdom
through a keyhole
that keeps getting smaller
and smaller.
It is good. It is very good.
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