Enter Sea

Look over there.
The sea has not yet appeared
though we’ve been driving for two hours, 
though its hot and humid air closes in on us, 
though our clothes cling to our skin.

In the car, we eat grapes
and don’t exchange a single word.
The water that drips from our bodies
is the only way we can speak to one another, 
the only way our souls can converse
or collide.

On highway six,
I’m on the phone making sure we’re in the right lane 
when you ask me to pass you something.
With the same two heads that crossed the checkpoint, 
with the same blank expression that masked our faces 
as we waited for the soldier to inspect our documents, 
we turn to scan the vacant hills.
There is no trace of the Arab villages, I say, 
and you shake your head—
your beautiful head.

The hills are empty
even of the silence that descends on a scene 
in the wake of a massacre
and never lifts,
the silence that cleaves to tree bark and rocks 
and rises from dust grains like gas;
that dense brand of silence, 
you know the one I mean—
you’d recognize it on the hills of Rwanda or Bosnia 
before you started walking backward,
as if beneath your feet were not grass 
but the gasps of the dead,
as though what protrudes from the trees 
weren’t branches,
but the fallens’ final words.

They’ve tried to eradicate this silence 
with highways,
with roaring cars.
Expertly, they set out to resect everything 
before discarding their white gloves
on the grass.

I feel like an actor;
none of what I’m doing seems real.
It’s as if what I’m wearing beneath my clothes 
isn’t a swimsuit,
but a ghost.

No one can return
the villages to the barren slopes—
I realize this on the way to the sea 
and a strange sadness overtakes me.

It’s as if the sea,
which has yet to emerge,
has made the same discovery and disappeared—
there’s nothing
but the water dripping from our bodies 
to tell us that it had once been here,
to say how deeply
we both long to meet it.

The white gloves
grow leisurely on the hills 
like toxic flowers.