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Alibi
from "The Guides" section of Guide School

What they did about losing the Byzantine well under it the mosque under it the fountainhead from before Roman times. The Israeli Antiquities Authorities cannot save it 

 

What you did about being blame, losing your house, under it the cellar stocked with food for winter, the samovar passed for generations, your profession as a baker when they cut off your hands and put them in your oven 

 

Collate 


 

In which century-country were you 

 

excavations of assembly


 

Collate. Or be found guilty 

 

If you were not there, what is your alibi?


If you were there how could you lose the fountainhead from which, some say, water still   springs


Your hands, which still reach for the glass 

 

which subterranean pre-Roman water table fed the fountain? 

 

which fulfills the double necessity
to flee and produce a replica of stability 

layered in schist and clay
traceable as a mosque covering a fountainhead 

 

Sift from the four midrashic levels. The first P’shat, the hand brushing. Remez, the second, a shard refers. The third, Drash, speaks the question the shard asks. Sod, the fourth, air curriculum 

 

echo eastern direction


Byzantine Mediterranean or Aegean 

Any wells, olive trees, terraced fields 

Where any 

 

go and do not land


land and


are required


to not come from


Aspire to be a National Heritage site, abandoned ruin, town rebuilt as a medieval fortress

Compose yourself as a site we can visit 

Become a tour                           or papers and salary will be withheld 

the Antiquity authorities cannot save 

 

their job, like yours, and that of the guides to 

 

enlist epoxy


 

supply pedigree


 

evidence pardon 

 

archaeologist brigades                  patrol federal family 

festivals of national security 

 

Dug up the said         carries the gravity of the already said    Just like you recognizable only by document        Professional pariah, transient Sayer slip between the accounts to dislodge “...the heart of the state at which language has become static...”             -Ouaknin 

 

Said be unsaid to accuse the listening eye 

 

requite visitation 

 

and its reciprocation 

requirement: 

 

vigorous leverage incursion                 Rogue guide 

disguised              divulge syllabus deviations 

 

in walking shoes


feasts on the unfamiliar 

sated on proof 

 

and barefoot


 

the starved, accused 

 

Defibrillate


seizure skewered on the inert 

 

Cairn kill quandary


said the told who told the told 

Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat). Gevirtz works with Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. In2004 she and Siarita Kouka, Greek poet/restorer of maritime antiquities, founded the Paros Symposium, an annual translation and conversation meeting of Greek andAnglophone poets. She is based in San Francisco.

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