In our hanging house, one wall sheer to the dry riverbank,
rooms staggering across split levels, the hours are sticky

with fever and all I see of you is a passing shadow climbing
the stairs opposite my open door. We spend our days apart

but in the evenings we walk and distribute our greetings, Hola,
Buenos Noches, to the people in the street, or exchange

Farsi for Hebrew: Laila Tov, we say to each other, Shabékheyr.
Last night we talked of Córdoba, alliance of Muslim and Jew,

and you pulled me back for a moment – this is how it was, this! –
when we strolled past a woman cooking barbeque on the steps

of the village square, a man (her man?) humming a cante jondo
to his father. You were wearing my gipsy shawl and I,

slipping back to the Golden Age, began to compose a gacela
as Lorca called them. How easily it built in my sleep, couplets

folding into themselves like accordion scales, rising from kitchen
to living room to the vine shaded terrace where you lay

on the rattan chair, smoking, always smoking, and in my sleep
we became Al-Ghazali and Halevi, dreaming of this: a new Jerusalem.