Haifa in winter is a Japanese woodcut.
Silken rain, the softest of rains, waits for me there,
the white moth sleeps in the damp bushes
and from the puddles a fountain of fantasies rises like a mist.
Haifa in winter floats on air with the buoyancy of clouds
and sometimes the horizon is a rice paper sail.
Then the sun-stained evening comes
like a gash in the belly of the city.
Translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut