The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by Chana Bloch

  And before I was real and lingering here

  the heart’s shoulders carried an anguish not mine

  and from somewhere else ideas entered, slowed-down

  and with a deep rumble, like a train

  into the hollow, listening station.

  You ate and were filled and recited the blessing

  alone and in company and alone.

  In the bridal chamber after the wedding, and outside

  the bearded witnesses stood and listened

  to the sounds of love, to the sighs and murmurs and screams,

  mine and yours, in that room. And at the door

  wedding gifts piled up like gifts for the

  dead at the mouth of the Pharaohs’ tombs.

  Stone lions from the bridges of my childhood city watched over us

  along with stone lions from the old house in Jerusalem.

  You didn’t eat, weren’t filled. You spoke big words

  with a small mouth. Your heart will never learn to judge distances.

  The farthest distance it knows is the nearest tree,

  the curb of the sidewalk, the face of the belovèd. Like a blind man,

  the blind heart hit against the obstacle with its cane and it still

  hits and gropes, without advancing. Hits and will hit.

  Loneliness is one of the tenses in which an action’s time

  can be conjugated: hits, will hit. Time is a fragrance. For example,

  the fragrance of 1929, when sorrow recited over you the blessing

  of the first fruits. And you didn’t know that you

  were her first fruit.

  You were educated in a Montessori kindergarten. They taught you

  to love doing things alone, with your very own hands,

  they educated you for loneliness. You masturbated

  in secret: nocturnal emissions, diurnal additions. “I’ll tell your father.”

  Rosh Hashanah halls echoey and hollow, and white

  Yom Kippur machines made of bright metal, cogwheels

  of prayers, a conveyor belt of prostrations and bows

  with a menacing buzz. You have sinned, you have gone astray

  inside a dark womb shaped like the dome of a synagogue,

  the round, primordial cave of prayer,

  the holy ark, gaping open, blinded you

  in a third-degree interrogation. Do you confess? Do you confess?

  I confess before Thee in the morning with the sun out. What’s

  your name? Do you surrender? You have transgressed, you are guilty, are you alive?

  How do you? (“Do you love me?”) You have remembered, you have forgotten.

  Oh Montessori, Montessori, with your white hair,

  the first dead woman that I loved. “Hey kid!” Even now

  I turn around in the street if I hear that

  behind me.

  Slowly and with terrible pains the I turns into a he, after

  resting a little in the you. You turns into they. The surgery is performed

  with open eyes, only the place is anesthetized with ice perhaps

  or with a love pill. After you too they will call: Dreamer! Dreamer!

  You won’t be able to. What’s your name now? And not even

  one name did I take in vain. Names are for

  children. An adult gets far away from his name. He is left

  with the name of the family. Afterward father, teacher, uncle, mister, oh mister,

  hey you there! (Do you love me?—That’s different,

  that’s more than a name), afterward numbers and afterward

  perhaps: he, he’s gone out, they’ll be back, they, hey! Hey!

  The forest of names is bare, and the kinder-garden

  has shed the leaves of its trees and is black and will die.

  And on Sabbath eve they sewed my handkerchief

  to the corner of my pants pocket so that I wouldn’t sin by carrying it

  on the Sabbath. And on holy-days kohanim blessed me

  from inside the white caves of their prayer-shawls, with fingers

  twisted like epileptics. I looked at them

  and God didn’t thunder: and since then his thunder has grown

  more and more remote and become a huge

  silence. I looked at them and my eyes weren’t blinded: and since then

  my eyes have grown more and more open from year to year, beyond

  sleep, till pain, beyond eyelids, beyond clouds, beyond years.

  Death is not sleep but gaping eyes, the whole body

  gaping with eyes since there’s not enough space in the narrow world.

  Angels looked like Torah scrolls in velvet dresses and petticoats

  of white silk, with crowns and little silver bells, angels

  fluttered around me and sniffed at my heart and cried ah! ah!

  to one another with adult smiles. “I’ll tell your father.”

  And even now, after thirty-three years, my father’s blessing

  remains in my hair, though it grew desert-wild,

  blood-sticky and dust-yellow, and though I sheared it and shortened it

  to a military brush or a sad urban French pompadour

  stuck to my forehead. Nevertheless

  the blessing remains in the hair of my blessed head.

  You came via Haifa. The harbor was new, the child was new.

  You lay on your belly, so you could kiss the holy ground,

  but to duck from the shots of 1936. British soldiers

  wearing cork sun-helmets of a great empire,

  envoys of a crumbling kingdom, opened for you

  the new kingdom of your life. “What’s your name?” Soldiers

  opened for you with arms of engraved tattoo: a dragon, a woman’s breasts

  and thighs, a knife and a primeval coiled serpent, a large

  rose and a girl’s buttocks. Since then the tattoo’s

  words and pictures have been sinking into you, without being seen

  on the outside. The words sink further and further in a continuous

  engraving and pain, down to your soul, which is itself an inscribed scroll

  rolled up like a mezuzah the whole length of your inner body.

  You have become a collector of pains in the tradition of this land.

  “My God, my God, why?” Hast Thou forsaken me. My God, my God. Even then

  he had to be called twice. The second call

  was already like a question, out of a first doubt: my God?

  I haven’t said the last word yet. I haven’t

  eaten yet and already I’m filled. My cough isn’t

  from smoke or from illness. It is a concentrated

  and time-saving form of question.

  Whatever happened is as though it never happened and all the rest

  I don’t know. Perhaps it is written in the difficult books on the shelf,

  in the concordances of pain and in the dictionaries of joy,

  in the encyclopedias with pages stuck together like eyes that don’t want

  to let go of their dream at dawn, in the terrible volumes of correspondence

  between Marx/Engels, I/you, God/he,

  in the Book of Job, in the difficult words. Verses

  that are deep cuts in my flesh. Wounds long

  and red from whip lashes, wounds filled with white salt, like the meat

  that my mother would salt and kosher so that there wouldn’t be any blood,

  just pink blood-soaked salt, just pains that are

  a searing knowledge, kashrut and purity.

  The rest—unknown and estrangement in the dark. Like the brothers in Egypt

  we will wait, bending down in the darkness of our knees, hiding

  submissive faces, till the world can’t hold back any longer

  and weeps and cries out: I am Joseph your brother! I am the world!

  In the year the war broke out I passed by your mother’s belly

 
in which you were sitting already then curled up as in the nights with me.

  The rhythm of orange-grove pumps and the rhythm of shots were our rhythm.

  It’s starting! Light and pain, iron and dust and stones.

  Stones and flesh and iron in changing combinations

  of matter. Render unto matter that which is matter’s. Dust, dust,

  from man thou art and unto man shalt thou return. It’s starting!

  My blood flows in many colors and pretends to be red

  when it bursts outside. The navel of the belovèd, also,

  is an eye to foresee the End of Days. End and beginning in her body.

  Two creases in the right buttock, one crease in the left,

  glittering eyeglasses next to white skin of belly, an eyebrow

  arched in the scream of the eye, black soft silk over

  taut skin of heavy thighs. Shoulder distinct

  and prominent, crossed by a strap of strict black cloth.

  Shoulder and shoulder, flesh and flesh, dust and dust.

  Like a legend and a child, love and fro, world and ear,

  time within the snailshell of a smile, love and open up:

  the house to the night, the earth to the dead and to the rain,

  the morning after the gift of sun. Spring raised in us

  green words, and summer bet that we would be first to

  arrive, and love burst out from inside us, all at once,

  all over our bodies, like sweat, in the fear of our lives, in the race of our lives, in the game.

  And children grew up and matured, for the surface of the waters

  constantly rises in the terrible flood, and all their growing

  is because of the rising flood, so they won’t drown.

  And still, his fingers stained with moon, like a teacher’s with chalk,

  God strokes our head, and already his wrists

  are poetry and angels! And what his elbows are! And the face

  of the woman, already turned toward something else. A profile in the window.

  The veins in my legs are beginning to swell, because my legs think

  a lot, and their walk is thinking. Into the abandoned wasteland

  in my emotions the wild beasts return, who had abandoned it when I cleared

  and drained and made my life a settled civilization. Long

  rows of books, calm rooms and corridors.

  My body is constructed for good resonance like a concert hall,

  the sound of weeping and screams won’t penetrate. The walls are absorbent

  and impermeable, waves of memories rebound. And above me, on the ceiling,

  objects of childhood, soft words, women’s dresses, my father’s prayer shawl,

  half bodies, big wooly toys, clouds,

  good-night chunks, heavy hair: to increase the resonance inside me.

  Dust, dust, my body, the installation of half my life. Still

  bold scaffoldings of hopes, trembling ladders that lean

  against what is unfinished from the outside, even the head is nothing but

  the lowest of the additional floors that were planned.

  My eyes, one of them awake and interested, the other indifferent

  and far away, as if receiving everything from within, and my hands

  that pull sheets over the faces of the dead and the living. Finis.

  My face, when I shave, is the face of a white-foamed clown, the only foam

  that isn’t from wrath. My face is something between

  a mad bull and a migratory bird that has lost the direction of

  its flight, and lags behind the flock,

  but sees slow good things before it dies in the sea.

  Even then, and ever since then, I met

  the stagehands of my life, moving the walls

  and the furniture and the people, putting up and taking down

  new illusions of new houses,

  different landscapes, distances

  seen in perspective, not real distances,

  closeness and not true closeness. All of them,

  my lovers and my haters, are directors and stagehands,

  electricians to light up with a different light, making distant

  and bringing close, changers, hangers and hanged.

  All the days of his life my father tried to make a man of me,

  so that I’d have a hard face like Kosygin and Brezhnev,

  like generals and admirals and stockbrokers and financiers,

  all the unreal fathers I’ve established

  instead of my father, in the soft land of the “seven kinds”

  (not just two, male and female, but seven kinds

  beyond us, more lustful, harder and more deadly than we are).

  I have to screw onto my face the expression of a hero

  like a lightbulb screwed into the grooves of its hard socket,

  to screw in and to shine.

  All the days of his life my father tried to make

  a man of me, but I always slip back

  into the softness of thighs and the yearning to say the daily blessing

  who hath made me according to his will. And his will is woman.

  My father was afraid to say a wasted blessing.

  To say who hath created the fruit of the tree and not eat the apple.

  To bless without loving. To love without being filled.

  I ate and wasn’t filled and didn’t say the blessing.

  The days of my life spread out and separate from one another:

  in my childhood there were still stories of kings and demons

  and blacksmiths; now, glass houses and sparkling

  spaceships and radiant silences that have no hope.

  My arms are stretched out to a past not mine and a future not mine.

  It’s hard to love, its hard to embrace

  with arms like that.

  Like a butcher sharpening knife on knife,

  I sharpen heart on heart inside me. The hearts

  get sharper and sharper until they vanish, but the movement of my soul

  remains the movement of the sharpener, and my voice is lost

  in the sound of metal.

  And on Yom Kippur, in rubber-soled shoes, you ran.

  And at Holy, Holy, Holy you high-jumped

  higher than all of them, almost up to the angels of the ceiling,

  and around the racecourse of Simchat Torah you circled

  seven times and seven

  and you arrived breathless.

  Like a weight-lifter you pressed up

  the Torah scroll above your head

  with two trembling arms

  so that all of them could see the writing and the strength of your hands.

  At the kneeling and bowing, you dropped into a crouch

  as if at the starting-line of a long jump into your life.

  And on Yom Kippur you went out for a boxing match

  against yourself: we have sinned, we have transgressed,

  with hard fists and no gloves,

  nervous feather-weight against heavy- and sad- and

  defeated-weight. The prayers trickled from a corner of the mouth

  in very thin red drops. With a prayer shawl they wiped off

  the sweat of your brow between rounds.

  The prayers that you prayed in your childhood

  now return and fall from above

  like bullets that missed their mark and are returning

  long afterward to the ground,

  without arousing attention, without causing damage.

  When you’re lying with your belovèd

  they return. “I love you,” “You’re

  mine.” I confess before Thee. “And you shall love”

  the Lord your God. “With all my might” stand in awe

  and sin not, and be still, selah. Silence.

  Reciting the Hear O Israel in bed. In bed

  without reciting the Hear O Israel. In the d
ouble bed,

  the double burial cave of a bed. Hear. O hear.

  Now hear one more time, my love,

  without Hear. Without you.

  Not just one finger of God but all ten of them

  strangle me. “I won’t let you

  let me leave you.” This too is

  one of the interpretations of death.

  You forget yourself as you were.

  Don’t blame the Chief Butler for forgetting

  Joseph’s dreams! Hands

  that are still sticky with candle wax

  forgot Hanukkah. The wrinkled masks of my face forgot

  the gaiety of Purim. The body mortifying itself on Yom Kippur

  forgot the High Priest—as beautiful

  as you, love, tonight—, forgot the song

  in praise of him: the appearance of the Priest is like a sun, a diamond,

  a topaz, the appearance of a Priest. And your body too, love,

  is Urim and Thummim: the nipples, the eye,

  the nostrils, dimple, navel, my mouth, your mouth,

  all these shone for me like the Breastplate of Judgment,

  all these spoke to me and prophesied what I should do.

  I’m running away, before your body

  prophesies a future. I’m running away.

  Sometimes I want to go back

  to everything I had, as in a museum,

  when you go back not in the order

  of the eras, but in the opposite direction, against the arrow,

  to look for the woman you loved.

  Where is she? The Egyptian Room,

  the Far East, the Twentieth Century, Cave Art,

  everything jumbled together, and the worried

  guards calling after you:

  You can’t go against the eras! Stop!

  The exit’s over here! You won’t learn from this,

  you know you won’t. You’re searching, you’re forgetting.

  As when you hear a military band

  marching in the street and you stand there and hear it moving

  farther and farther away. Slowly, slowly its sounds

  fade in your ears: first the cymbals, then

  the trumpets hush,

  then the oboes set in the distance,

  then the sharp flutes and the

  little drums; but for a very long time

  the deep drums remain,

  the tune’s skeleton and heartbeat, until

  they too. And be still, selah. Amen, selah.

  On Rosh Hashanah you give an order

  to the shofar-blower. Ta-da, ta-da, ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da,

  wrath, great wrath, ta-daaaaaaa,

  fire at any target in front of you, fire!

  Cease fire. It’s over, sit down. Today is the day of judgment,