by Chana Bloch
The chain will gradually turn into wings.
How do you explain it?
Ah well, you’ll explain it.
10
Jerusalem is short and crouched among its hills,
unlike New York, for example.
Two thousand years ago she crouched
in the marvelous starting-line position.
All the other cities ran ahead, did long
laps in the arena of time, they won or lost,
and died. Jerusalem remained in the starting-crouch:
all the victories are clenched inside her,
hidden inside her. All the defeats.
Her strength grows and her breathing is calm
for a race even beyond the arena.
11
Loneliness is always in the middle,
protected and fortified. People were supposed
to feel secure in that, and they don’t.
When they go out, after a long time,
caves are formed for the new solitaries.
What do you know about Jerusalem.
You don’t need to understand languages;
they pass through everything as if through the ruins of houses.
People are a wall of moving stones.
But even in the Wailing Wall
I haven’t seen stones as sad as these.
The letters of my pain are illuminated
like the name of the hotel across the street.
What awaits me and what doesn’t await me.
12
Jerusalem stone is the only stone that can
feel pain. It has a network of nerves.
From time to time Jerusalem crowds into
mass protests like the tower of Babel.
But with huge clubs God-the-Police beats her
down: houses are razed, walls flattened,
and afterward the city disperses, muttering
prayers of complaint and sporadic screams from churches
and synagogues and loud-moaning mosques.
Each to his own place.
13
Always beside ruined houses and iron girders
twisted like the arms of the slain, you find
someone who is sweeping the paved path
or tending the little garden, sensitive
paths, square flower-beds.
Large desires for a horrible death are well cared-for
as in the monastery of the White Brothers next to the Lions’ Gate.
But farther on, in the courtyard, the earth gapes:
columns and arches supporting vain land
and negotiating with one another: crusaders and guardian angels,
a sultan and Rabbi Yehuda the Pious. Arched vaults with a
column, ransom for prisoners, and strange conditions in rolled-up
contracts, and sealing-stones. Curved hooks holding
air.
Capitals and broken pieces of columns scattered like chessmen
in a game that was interrupted in anger,
and Herod, who already, two thousand years ago, wailed
like mortar shells. He knew.
14
If clouds are a ceiling, I would like to
sit in the room beneath them: a dead kingdom rises
up from me, up, like steam from hot food.
A door squeaks: an opening cloud.
In the distances of valleys someone rapped iron against stone
but the echo erects large, different things in the air.
Above the houses—houses with houses above them. This is
all of history.
This learning in schools without roof
and without walls and without chairs and without teachers.
This learning in the absolute outside,
a learning short as a single heartbeat. All of it.
15
I and Jerusalem are like a blind man and a cripple.
She sees for me
out to the Dead Sea, to the End of Days.
And I hoist her up on my shoulders
and walk blind in my darkness underneath.
16
On this bright autumn day
I establish Jerusalem once again.
The foundation scrolls
are flying in the air, birds, thoughts.
God is angry with me
because I always force him
to create the world once again
from chaos, light, second day, until
man, and back to the beginning.
17
In the morning the shadow of the Old City falls
on the New. In the afternoon—vice versa.
Nobody profits. The muezzin’s prayer
is wasted on the new houses. The ringing
bells roll like balls and bounce back.
The shout of Holy, Holy, Holy from the synagogues will fade
like gray smoke.
At the end of summer I breathe this air
that is burnt and pained. My thoughts have
the stillness of many closed books:
many crowded books, with most of their pages
stuck together like eyelids in the morning.
18
I climb up the Tower of David
a little higher than the prayer that ascends the highest:
halfway to heaven. A few of
the ancients succeeded: Mohammed, Jesus,
and others. Though they didn’t find rest in heaven;
they just entered a higher excitement. But
the applause for them hasn’t stopped ever since,
down below.
19
Jerusalem is built on the vaulted foundations
of a held-back scream. If there were no reason
for the scream, the foundations would crumble, the city would collapse;
if the scream were screamed, Jerusalem would explode into the heavens.
20
Poets come in the evening into the Old City
and they emerge from it pockets stuffed with images
and metaphors and little well-constructed parables
and crepuscular similes from among columns and crypts,
from within darkening fruit
and delicate filigree of hammered hearts.
I lifted my hand to my forehead
to wipe off the sweat
and found I had accidentally raised up
the ghost of Else Lasker-Schüler.
Light and tiny as she was
in her life, all the more so in her death. Ah, but
her poems.
21
Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.
The Temple Mount is a huge ship, a magnificent
luxury liner. From the portholes of her Western Wall
cheerful saints look out, travelers. Hasidim on the pier
wave goodbye, shout hooray, hooray, bon voyage! She is
always arriving, always sailing away. And the fences and the piers
and the policemen and the flags and the high masts of churches
and mosques and the smokestacks of synagogues and the boats
of psalms of praise and the mountain-waves. The shofar blows: another one
has just left. Yom Kippur sailors in white uniforms
climb among ladders and ropes of well-tested prayers.
And the commerce and the gates and the golden domes:
Jerusalem is the Venice of God.
22
Jerusalem is Sodom’s sister-city,
but the merciful salt didn’t have mercy on her
and didn’t cover her with a silent whiteness.
Jerusalem is an unconsenting Pompeii.
History books that were thrown into the fire,
their pages are strewn about, stiffening in red.
An eye whose color is too light, blind,
always shattered in a sieve of veins.
Many births gaping below,
a womb w
ith numberless teeth,
a double-edged woman and the holy beasts.
The sun thought that Jerusalem was a sea
and set in her: a terrible mistake.
Sky fish were caught in a net of alleys,
tearing one another to pieces.
Jerusalem. An operation that was left open.
The surgeons went to take a nap in faraway skies,
but her dead gradually
formed a circle, all around her,
like quiet petals.
My God.
My stamen.
Amen.
The Bull Returns
The bull returns from his day of work in the ring
after a cup of coffee with his opponents,
having left them a note with his address and
the exact location of the red scarf.
The sword remains in his stiff-necked neck.
And when he’s usually at home. Now
he sits on his bed, with his heavy
Jewish eyes. He knows
that the sword too is hurt when it pierces flesh.
In his next incarnation he’ll be a sword: the hurt will remain.
(“The door is open. If not, the key is under
the mat.”)
He knows about the mercy of twilight and about the final
mercy. In the Bible, he’s listed with the clean animals.
He’s very kosher: chews his cud,
and even his heart is divided and cloven like a hoof.
From his chest, hairs burst forth
dry and gray, as though from a split mattress.
A Luxury
My uncle is buried at Sheikh Badr, my other uncle
is scattered in the Carpathians, my father is buried in Sanhedria,
my grandmother on the Mount of Olives, and all their forefathers
are buried in a half-destroyed Jewish graveyard
among the villages of Lower Franconia,
near rivers and forests that are not Jerusalem.
Grandfather, Grandfather, who converted heavy-eyed cows
in his barn underneath the kitchen and got up at four in the morning.
I inherited this earliness from him. With a mouth
bitter from nightmares, I go out to feed my bad dreams.
Grandfather, Grandfather, chief rabbi of my life,
sell my pains the way you used to sell
khametz on Passover eve: so that they stay in me and even go on hurting
but won’t be mine. Won’t belong to me.
So many tombstones are scattered in the past of my life,
engraved names like the names of stations
where the train doesn’t stop any more.
How will I cover all the distances on my own routes,
how will I make connections among them all? I can’t afford
to maintain such an expensive railway system. It’s a luxury.
To Bake the Bread of Yearning
The last time I went to see my child
he was still eating pablum. Now, sadly,
bread and meat, with knife and fork,
with manners that are already preparing him
to die quietly, politely.
He thinks I’m a sailor, knows I don’t have a ship
or a sea; only great distances and winds.
The movements of my father’s body in prayer
and mine in lovemaking
are already folded in his small body.
To be an adult means
to bake the bread of yearning
all night long, with reddened face
in front of the fire. My child sees.
And the powerful spell See you soon
which he’s learned to say
works only among the dead.
National Thoughts
A woman, caught in a homeland-trap of the Chosen People: you.
Cossack’s fur hat on your head: you the
offspring of their pogroms. “After these things had come to pass,”
always.
Or, for example, your face: slanting eyes,
eyes descended from massacre. High cheekbones
of a hetman, head of murderers.
But a mitzvah dance of Hasidim,
naked on a rock at twilight,
beside the water canopies of Ein Gedi,
with eyes closed and body open like hair. After
these things had come to pass. “Always.”
People caught in a homeland-trap:
to speak now in this weary language,
a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled,
it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described
miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.
Square letters want to stay
closed; each letter a closed house,
to stay and to close yourself in
and to sleep inside it, forever.
A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention
They amputated
your thighs from my hips.
As far as I’m concerned, they’re always
doctors. All of them.
They dismantled us
from each other. As far as I’m concerned,
they’re engineers.
A pity. We were such a good and loving
invention: an airplane made of a man and a woman,
wings and all:
we even got off
the ground a little.
We even flew.
Elegy
The wind won’t come to draw smiles in the sand of dreams.
The wind will be strong.
And people are walking without flowers,
unlike their children in the festival of the first fruits.
And a few of them are victors and most of them are vanquished,
passing through the arch of others’ victories
and as on the Arch of Titus everything appears, in bas-relief:
the warm and belovéd bed, the faithful and much-scrubbed pot,
and the lamp, not the one with the seven branches, but the simple one,
the good one, which didn’t fail even on winter nights,
and the table, a domestic animal that stands on four legs and keeps
silent. . . .
And they are brought into the arena to fight with wild beasts
and they see the heads of the spectators in the stadium
and their courage is like the crying of their children,
persistent, persistent and ineffectual.
And in their back pocket, letters are rustling,
and the victors put the words into their mouths
and if they sing, it is not their own song,
and the victors set large yearnings inside them
like loaves of dough
and they bake these in their love
and the victors will eat the warm bread and they won’t.
But a bit of their love remains on them
like the primitive decorations on ancient urns:
the first, modest line of emotion all around
and then the swirl of dreams
and then two parallel lines,
mutual love,
or a pattern of small flowers, a memory of childhood, high-stalked
and thin-legged.
Threading
Loving each other began this way: threading
loneliness into loneliness
patiently, our hands trembling and precise.
Longing for the past gave our eyes
the double security of what won’t change
and of what can’t be returned to.
But the heart must kill one of us
on one of its forays,
if not you—me,
when it comes back empty-handed,
like Cain, a boomerang from the field.
Now in the Storm
Now in the storm before the calm
I can tell you what
in the calm before the storm I didn’t say
because they would have heard us and discovered our hiding-place.
That we were just neighbors in the fierce wind,
brought together in the ancient hamsin from Mesopotamia.
And the Latter Prophets of my veins’ kingdom
prophesied into the firmament of your flesh.
And the weather was good for us and for the heart,
and the sun’s muscles were flexed inside us and golden
in the Olympiad of emotions, on the faces of thousands of spectators,
so that we would know, and remain, and there would again be clouds.
Look, we met in a protected place, in the angle
where history began to arise, quiet
and safe from all the hasty events.
And the voice began to tell stories in the evening, by the children’s bed.
And now it’s too early for archaeology
and too late to repair what has been done.
Summer will arrive, and the clop, clop of the hard sandals
will sink in the soft sand, forever.
Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela
You ate and were filled, you came
in your twelfth year, in the Thirties
of the world, with short pants that reached down to your knees,
tassels dangling from your undershawl
sticky between your legs in the sweltering land.
Your skin still smooth, without protective hair.
The brown, round eyes you had, according
to the pattern of ripe cherries, will get used to
oranges. Orange scents. Innocence.
Clocks were set, according
to the beats of the round heart, train tracks
according to the capacity of children’s feet.
And silently, like a doctor and mother, the days bent over me
and started to whisper to one another, while the grass
already was laid flat by the bitter wind
on the slope of hills I will never walk on again.
Moon and stars and ancient deeds of grownups
were placed on a high shelf beyond
my arm’s reach;
and I stood in vain underneath the forbidden bookshelves.
But even then I was marked for annihilation like an orange scored
for peeling, like chocolate, like a hand-grenade for explosion and death.
The hand of fate held me, aimed. My skies were the
inside of the soft palm wrapped around me, and on the outside:
rough skin, hard stars, protruding veins,
airplane routes, black hairs, mortar-shell trajectories
in silence or in wailing, in black or in radiant flares.
