by Chana Bloch
Yehuda Ha-Levi
The soft hairs on the back of his neck
are the roots of his eyes.
His curly hair is
the sequel to his dreams.
His forehead: a sail; his arms: oars
to carry the soul inside his body to Jerusalem.
But in the white fist of his brain
he holds the black seeds of his happy childhood.
When he reaches the belovèd, bone-dry land—
he will sow.
Ibn Gabirol
Sometimes pus,
sometimes poetry—
always something is excreted,
always pain.
My father was a tree in a grove of fathers,
covered with green moss.
Oh widows of the flesh, orphans of the blood,
I’ve got to escape.
Eyes sharp as can-openers
pried open heavy secrets.
But through the wound in my chest
God peers into the universe.
I am the door
to his apartment.
When I Was a Child
When I was a child
grasses and masts stood at the seashore,
and as I lay there
I thought they were all the same
because all of them rose into the sky above me.
Only my mother’s words went with me
like a sandwich wrapped in rustling waxpaper,
and I didn’t know when my father would come back
because there was another forest beyond the clearing.
Everything stretched out a hand,
a bull gored the sun with its horns,
and in the nights the light of the streets caressed
my cheeks along with the walls,
and the moon, like a large pitcher, leaned over
and watered my thirsty sleep.
Look: Thoughts and Dreams
Look: thoughts and dreams are weaving over us
their warp and woof, their wide camouflage-net,
and the reconnaissance planes and God
will never know
what we really want
and where we are going.
Only the voice that rises at the end of a question
still rises above the world and hangs there,
even if it was made by
mortar shells, like a ripped flag,
like a mutilated cloud.
Look, we too are going
in the reverse-flower-way:
to begin with a calyx exulting toward the light,
to descend with the stem growing more and more solemn,
to arrive at the closed earth and to wait there for a while,
and to end as a root, in the darkness, in the deep womb.
From We Loved Here
1
My father spent four years inside their war,
and did not hate his enemies, or love.
And yet I know that somehow, even there,
he was already forming me, out of
his calms, so few and scattered, which he gleaned
among the bombs exploding and the smoke,
and put them in his knapsack, in between
the remnants of his mother’s hardening cake.
And in his eyes he took the nameless dead,
he stored them, so that someday I might know
and love them in his glance—so that I would
not die in horror, as they all had done. . . .
He filled his eyes with them, and yet in vain:
to all my wars, unwilling, I must go.
3
The lips of dead men whisper where they lie
deep down, their innocent voices hushed in earth,
and now the trees and flowers grow terribly
exaggerated, as they blossom forth.
Bandages are again torn off in haste,
the earth does not want healing, it wants pain.
And spring is not serenity, not rest,
ever, and spring is enemy terrain.
With the other lovers, we were sent to learn
about the strange land where the rainbow ends,
to see if it was possible to advance.
And we already knew: the dead return,
and we already knew: the fiercest wind
comes forth now from inside a young girl’s hand.
6
In the long nights our room was closed off and
sealed, like a grave inside a pyramid.
Above us: foreign silence, heaped like sand
for aeons at the entrance to our bed.
And when our bodies lie stretched out in sleep,
upon the walls, again, is sketched the last
appointment that our patient souls must keep.
Do you see them now? A narrow boat drifts past;
two figures stand inside it; others row.
And stars peer out, the stars of different lives;
are carried by the Nile of time, below.
And like two mummies, we have been wrapped tight
in love. And after centuries, dawn arrives;
a cheerful archaeologist—with the light.
18
A preface first: the two of them, the brittle
calm, necessity, and sun, and shade,
an anxious father, cities braced for battle,
and from afar, unrecognizable dead.
The story’s climax now—the war. First leave,
and smoke instead of streets, and he and she
together, and a mother from her grave
comforting: It’ll be all right, don’t worry.
And the last laugh is this: the way she put
his army cap on, walking to the mirror.
And was so lovely, and the cap just fit.
And then, behind the houses, in the yard,
a separation like cold-blooded murder,
and night arriving, like an afterword.
God’s Hand in the World
1
God’s hand is in the world
like my mother’s hand in the guts of the slaughtered chicken
on Sabbath eve.
What does God see through the window
while his hands reach into the world?
What does my mother see?
2
My pain is already a grandfather:
it has begotten two generations
of pains that look like it.
My hopes have erected white housing projects
far away from the crowds inside me.
My girlfriend forgot her love on the sidewalk
like a bicycle. All night outside, in the dew.
Children mark the eras of my life
and the eras of Jerusalem
with moon chalk on the street.
God’s hand in the world.
Sort of an Apocalypse
The man under his fig tree telephoned the man under his vine:
“Tonight they definitely might come. Assign
positions, armor-plate the leaves, secure the tree,
tell the dead to report home immediately.”
The white lamb leaned over, said to the wolf:
“Humans are bleating and my heart aches with grief.
I’m afraid they’ll get to gunpoint, to bayonets in the dust.
At our next meeting this matter will be discussed.”
All the nations (united) will flow to Jerusalem
to see if the Torah has gone out. And then,
inasmuch as it’s spring, they’ll come down
and pick flowers from all around.
And they’ll beat swords into plowshares and plowshares into swords,
and so on and so on, and back and forth.
Perhaps from being beaten thinner and thinner,
the iron of hatred will vanish, forever.
And That Is Your Glory
(Phrase from the liturgy of the Days of Awe)
I’ve yoked together my large silence and my small outcry
like an ox and an ass. I’ve been through low and through high.
I’ve been in Jerusalem, in Rome. And perhaps in Mecca anon.
But now God is hiding, and man cries Where have you gone.
And that is your glory.
Underneath the world, God lies stretched on his back,
always repairing, always things get out of whack.
I wanted to see him all, but I see no more
than the soles of his shoes and I’m sadder than I was before.
And that is his glory.
Even the trees went out once to choose a king.
A thousand times I’ve given my life one more fling.
At the end of the street somebody stands and picks:
this one and this one and this one and this one and this.
And that is your glory.
Perhaps like an ancient statue that has no arms
our life, without deeds and heroes, has greater charms.
Ungird my T-shirt, love; this was my final bout.
I fought all the knights, until the electricity gave out.
And that is my glory.
Rest your mind, it ran with me all the way,
it’s exhausted now and needs to knock off for the day.
I see you standing by the wide-open fridge door, revealed
from head to toe in a light from another world.
And that is my glory
and that is his glory
and that is your glory.
Of Three or Four in a Room
Of three or four in a room
there is always one who stands beside the window.
He must see the evil among thorns
and the fires on the hill.
And how people who went out of their houses whole
are given back in the evening like small change.
Of three or four in a room
there is always one who stands beside the window,
his dark hair above his thoughts.
Behind him, words.
And in front of him, voices wandering without a knapsack,
hearts without provisions, prophecies without water,
large stones that have been returned
and stay sealed, like letters that have no
address and no one to receive them.
Not Like a Cypress
Not like a cypress,
not all at once, not all of me,
but like the grass, in thousands of cautious green exits,
to be hiding like many children
while one of them seeks.
And not like the single man,
like Saul, whom the multitude found
and made king.
But like the rain in many places
from many clouds, to be absorbed, to be drunk
by many mouths, to be breathed in
like the air all year long
and scattered like blossoming in springtime.
Not the sharp ring that wakes up
the doctor on call,
but with tapping, on many small windows
at side entrances, with many heartbeats.
And afterward the quiet exit, like smoke
without shofar-blasts, a statesman resigning,
children tired from play,
a stone as it almost stops rolling
down the steep hill, in the place
where the plain of great renunciation begins,
from which, like prayers that are answered,
dust rises in many myriads of grains.
Through Two Points Only One Straight Line Can Pass
(Theorem in geometry)
A planet once got married to a star,
and inside, voices talked of future war.
I only know what I was told in class:
through two points only one straight line can pass.
A stray dog chased us down an empty street.
I threw a stone; the dog would not retreat.
The king of Babel stooped to eating grass.
Through two points only one straight line can pass.
Your small sob is enough for many pains,
as locomotive-power can pull long trains.
When will we step inside the looking-glass?
Through two points only one straight line can pass.
At times I stands apart, at times it rhymes
with you, at times we’s singular, at times
plural, at times I don’t know what. Alas,
through two points only one straight line can pass.
Our life of joy turns to a life of tears,
our life eternal to a life of years.
Our life of gold became a life of brass.
Through two points only one straight line can pass.
Half the People in the World
Half the people in the world
love the other half,
half the people
hate the other half.
Must I because of this half and that half
go wandering and changing ceaselessly
like rain in its cycle,
must I sleep among rocks,
and grow rugged like the trunks of olive trees,
and hear the moon barking at me,
and camouflage my love with worries,
and sprout like frightened grass between the railroad tracks,
and live underground like a mole,
and remain with roots and not with branches,
and not feel my cheek against the cheek of angels,
and love in the first cave,
and marry my wife beneath a canopy
of beams that support the earth,
and act out my death, always
till the last breath and the last
words and without ever understanding,
and put flagpoles on top of my house
and a bomb shelter underneath. And go out on roads
made only for returning and go through
all the appalling stations—
cat, stick, fire, water, butcher,
between the kid and the angel of death?
Half the people love,
half the people hate.
And where is my place between such well-matched halves,
and through what crack will I see
the white housing projects of my dreams
and the barefoot runners on the sands
or, at least, the waving
of a girl’s kerchief, beside the mound?
For My Birthday
Thirty-two times I went out into my life,
each time causing less pain to my mother,
less to other people,
more to myself.
Thirty-two times I have put on the world
and still it doesn’t fit me.
It weighs me down,
unlike the coat that now takes the shape of my body
and is comfortable
and will gradually wear out.
Thirty-two times I went over the account
without finding the mistake,
began the story
but wasn’t allowed to finish it.
Thirty-two years I’ve been carrying along with me
my father’s traits
and most of them I’ve dropped along the way,
so I could ease the burden.
And weeds grow in my mouth. And I wonder,
and the beam in my eyes, which I won’t be able to remove,
has started to blossom with the trees in springtime.
And my good deeds grow smaller
and smaller. But
the interpretations around them have grown huge, as in
an obscure passage of the Talmud
where the text takes up less and less of the page
and Rashi and the other commentators
close in on it from every side.
And now, after thirty-two times,
I am still a parable
with no chance to become its meaning.
And I stand without camouflage before the enemy’s eyes,
with outdated maps in my hand,
in the resistance that is gathering strength and between towers,
and alone, without recommendations
in the vast desert.
Two Photographs
1. Uncle David
When Uncle David fell in the First World War,
the high Carpathians buried him in snow.
And just as buried: his hard questions. So
I never found out what the answers were.
But somehow the brass buttons on his coat
opened for me. My life began far from
the pure white of his death, and like a gate
his face swung open, and because of him
I live my answer, as a part of all
that did survive, after the deep snow fell.
And he, still posing sadly as before,
dressed in the antique uniform and the
sharp helmet, seems like an ambassador
from some strange land a hundred years away.
2. Passport Photograph of a Young Woman
Pinned to the paper like a butterfly.
How is it your identity’s still breathing
between the pages? Your mouth was set to cry
till you found out that tears spoil everything.
And held yourself, unmoved, like a death mask
or a watch no one had bothered to repair
for a long time. Did you go on living, past
that moment? For not a single person here
knows you. Well, perhaps a prince will call,
will arrive on his white horse to whisk you off,
soaring high up, above the white canal
that stretches out between your photograph
and signed name; or the embossed official stamp
will bridge that gap and be your exit-ramp.
Poems for a Woman
1
Your body is white like sand
that children have never played in.
Your eyes are sad and beautiful
like the pictures of flowers in a textbook.
Your hair hangs down
like the smoke from Cain’s altar:
I have to kill my brother.
My brother has to kill me.
2
All the miracles in the Bible and all the legends
happened between us when we were together.
On God’s quiet slope
we were able to rest awhile.
The womb’s wind blew for us everywhere.
We always had time.
