POEM: "All" by Agi Mishol

Life that swirls in the scraps of swallows in the early evening,
reaching out red from within the flower,
sprawling lazily along the entire length of the cat,
barking and then listening for a moment to itself within the dog,
fluttering in the gecko's transparent belly,
hiding behind the appearance of separate forms
moving inside the wheat or frozen in a trampled badger's body
on one side of the road
all, all of this -
life that defines itself and deconstructs in philosophers' minds
twisting in the bodies of spring vipers
or whispered by a cold carp,
its mystery glistening in the geometry of spider webs,
endlessly gushing, green, from the earth
or wandering restless in the bodies of storks
all -
rustling in thickets,
strangling the lovely homes with clutching ivy,
steaming through the window from the pots of barley soup,
dispersed in the semen scent of flowering carob
rising in bellies and in poems the length of a cigarette,
Life that exhales now between the ribs
in the heart's harmonica
all of this --
inside you -- blood and bone
inside me
now.

Agi Mishol was born in Transylvania, Romania, and brought to Israel as a very young child. She is the author of a dozen books of poetry and the winner of every major Israeli poetry prize, including the first Yehuda Amichai Prize in 2002, and the Dolitsky Prize in 2007. A collection of her work in English, Look There (Graywolf Press) was published in 2006; volumes in Romanian and French are forthcoming. Poet-in-residence in 2007-2008 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and lecturer in literature at Alma College, Mishol holds BA and MA degrees in Hebrew literature from Hebrew University. She lives on a farm near Gedera, Israel.

Translator

Lisa Katz was born in New York and received a Ph.D from the English Department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she has lived since 1983. Reconstruction, a volume of her poetry in Hebrew translation, is forthcoming this summer from Am Oved Press in Israel. Winner of the 2008 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, her work appears most recently in the US in Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner and in the anthology Illness in the Academy, (Purdue University 2007). Look There: The Selected Poems of Agi Mishol in Katz's translation was published in 2006 by Graywolf Press. She teaches literary translation and creative writing at Hebrew University .