by Chana Bloch
today he will put on trial all the creatures in the world.
Synagogues like bunkers aimed toward Jerusalem,
the gun-slits of their windows facing the holy east.
The shofar forgot my lips,
the words forgot my mouth,
the sweat steamed from my skin,
the blood congealed and flaked off,
the hand forgot my hand,
the blessing evaporated from the hair of my head,
the radio is still warm,
the bed cooled before it did.
The seam between day and night
unraveled, now you’re liable to slip
out of your life and vanish without anyone noticing.
Sometimes you need several days
to get over a single night.
History is a eunuch,
it’s looking for mine too
to castrate, to cut off with paper pages
sharper than any knife; to crush
and to stuff my mouth forever
with what it cut off,
as in the mutilation of war-dead,
so that I won’t sing except in a sterile chirp,
so that I’ll learn many languages
and not one of them mine,
so that I’ll be scattered and dispersed,
so that I won’t be like a tower of Babel rising heavenward.
Not to understand is my happiness,
to be like stupid angels,
eunuchs soothing with their psalms.
The time has come to engage in technological
games, machines and their accessories,
toys that are kinetic, automatic,
spring-operated, doing it themselves, in their sleep,
wheels that make things revolve, switches that turn on,
everything that moves and jumps and emits
pleasant sounds, slaves and concubines,
a he-appliance and a she-appliance,
eunuchs and the eunuchs of eunuchs.
My life is spiced with heavy
lies, and the longer I live, the bigger
the art of forgery keeps growing inside me
and the more real. The artificial flowers
seem more and more natural
and the growing ones seem artificial.
Who ultimately will be able to tell the difference
between a real bank note and a forged one?
Even the watermarks
imprinted in me
can be forged: my heart.
The subconscious has gotten used to the light
like bacteria that after a while
get used to a new antibiotic.
A new underground is being established,
lower than the very lowest.
Forty-two light-years and forty-two
dark-years. Gourmand and glutton,
guzzling and swilling like the last Roman emperors
in the secondhand history books, scrawls of demented painting
and the writing on the wall in bathrooms,
chronicles of heroism and conquest and decline
and vain life and vain death.
Coups and revolts and the suppression of revolts
during the banquet. In a nightgown, transparent
and waving, you rose in revolt against me, hair
flying like a flag above and hair bristling below.
Ta-da, ta-daaaaaaa! Broken pieces of a bottle
and a shofar’s long blast. Suppression of the revolt with
a garter belt, strangulation with sheer stockings,
stoning with the sharp heels of evening shoes.
Battles of a gladiator armed with a broken bottle neck
against a net of delicate petticoats, shoes
against treacherous organdy, tongue against prong,
half a fish against half a woman. Straps and buttons,
the tangle of bud-decorated bras with buckles
and military gear. Shofar-blast and the suppression of it.
Soccer shouts from the nearby field,
and I was placed upon you, heavy and quiet
like a paperweight, so that time and the wind
wouldn’t be able to blow you away from here
and scatter you like scraps of paper, like hours.
“Where do you feel your soul inside you?”
Stretched between my mouth-hole and my asshole,
a white thread, not transparent mist,
cramped in some corner between two bones,
in pain.
When it is full it disappears, like a cat.
I belong to the last generation of
those who know body and soul separately.
“What do you think you’ll do tomorrow?”
I can’t kick the habit of myself. I gave up
smoking and drinking and my father’s God:
I gave up everything that might accelerate my end.
The smell of the new bicycle I was given
when I was a child is still in my nostrils, the blood
hasn’t dried yet and already I’m searching for calm, for other gods,
gods of order, as in the order of Passover night: the four
questions and their ready-made answer, reward and punishment,
the ten plagues, the four mothers, egg, shankbone, bitter herbs,
everything in order, the one kid, the familiar soup, the reliable
matzohballs, nine months of pregnancy, forty
plagues on the sea. And the heart trembling a little
like the door for Elijah the Prophet,
neither open nor closed. “And it came to pass at midnight.” Now
the children have been put to bed. In their sleep
they still hear the sounds
of chewing and grinding: the world’s big eat.
The sound of swallowing is the sound of history,
belch and hiccup and gnawing of bones are the sounds of history,
bowel-movements are its movements. The digestion. In the digestion
everything begins to look like everything else:
brother and sister, a man and his dog, good people and bad people,
flower and cloud, shepherd and sheep, ruler and ruled
descend into likeness. My experimental life also is descending. Everything
descends into the terrible likeness. Everything is the fruit of the bowels.
[Turn around now.] Ladies and gentlemen, observe the hollow
passing down the back and deepening between the buttocks. Who
can say where these begin and where
the thighs end; here are the bold buttresses
of the pelvis, columns of legs,
and the curlicues of a Hellenistic gate
above the vagina. The Gothic arch that reaches
toward the heart and like a reddish Byzantine flame between
her legs. [Bend down into a perfect arabesque.]
A Crusader influence is evident in the hard jawbones,
in the prominent chin. She touches the earth with both palms
without bending her knees, she touches
the earth that I didn’t kiss when I was brought to it
as a child. Come again, ladies and gentlemen, visit
the promised land, visit my tears and the east wind,
which is the true Western Wall. It’s made of
huge wind-stones, and the weeping is the wind’s, and the papers
whirling in the air are the supplications that I stuck between
the cracks. Visit the land. On a clear day,
if the visibility is good, you can see
the great miracle of my child
holding me in his arms, though he is four
and I am forty-four.
And here is the zoo of the great belovèd,
acres of love. Hairy animals breathing
in cages of net underwear, feathers and brown
hair, red fish with green eyes,
hearts isolated behind the bars of ribs
and jumping around like monkeys, hairy fish,
snakes in the shape of a round fat thigh.
And a body burning with a reddish glow, covered
with a damp raincoat. That is soothing.
This earth speaks only if
they beat her, if hail and rain and bombs beat her,
like Balaam’s ass who spoke only when
her master gave her a sound beating. I speak
and speak: I’ve been beaten. Sit
down. Today is the day of judgment.
I want to make a bet with Job,
about how God and Satan will behave.
Who will be the first to curse man.
Like the red of sunset in Job’s mouth,
they beat him and his last word
sets in redness into his last face.
That’s how I left him in the noisy station
in the noise, among the loudspeaker’s voices.
“Go to hell, Job. Cursed be the day
when you were created in my image. Go fuck your mother, Job.”
God cursed, God blessed. Job won. And I
have to kill myself with the toy pistol
of my small son.
My child blossoms sad,
he blossoms in the spring without me,
he’ll ripen in the sorrow-of-my-not-being-with-him.
I saw a cat playing with her kittens,
I won’t teach my son war,
I won’t teach him at all. I won’t exist.
He puts sand into a little pail.
He makes a sand-cake.
I put sand into my body.
The cake crumbles. My body.
I ate and was filled. While this one is still coming there comes
yet another, while this one is still speaking there speaks yet another.
Birthdays came to me standing up,
in a hurry. A quiet moment on a floating plank.
The forty-third birthday. Anniversary
of a wedding with yourself—and no possibility of divorce.
Separate beds for dream and day,
for your desire and your love.
I live outside my mother’s instruction and in the lands
that are not my father’s teaching. The walls of my house
were built by stonemasons, not prophets, and on the arch
of the gate I discovered that the year of my birth is carved.
(“What’s become of the house and what’s become of me!”)
In the afternoon hours I take a quiet stroll
among the extraterritorial wounds of
my life: a lit-up window behind which you are perhaps undressing.
A street where we were. A black door
that’s there. A garden that’s next to it. A gate through which. A dress
like yours on a body that’s not like yours. A mouth that sings like,
a word that’s almost. All these are outdoor wounds in a large
wound-garden.
I wear colorful clothes,
I’m a colorful male bird.
Too late I discovered that this is the natural order of things.
The male dresses up. A pink shirt, a green
sport jacket. Don’t see me this way, my son!
Don’t laugh. You’re not seeing me. I’m part of
the city wall. My shirt collar blackens.
Under my eyes there’s a black shadow. Black is the leftover
coffee and black the mourning in my fingernails. Don’t see me
this way, my son. With hands smelling of tobacco
and strange perfume, I knead your future
dreams, I prepare your subconscious.
My child’s first memory is the day
when I left his home, my home. His memories
are hard as gems inside a watch that hasn’t stopped
since. Someday, when a woman asks him on the first night
of love, as they lie awake on their backs,
he will tell her: “When my father left for the first time.”
And my childhood, of blessed memory. I filled my quota
of rebelliousness, I did my duty as a disobedient son,
I made my contribution to the war of the generations and to the wildness
of adolescence. Therefore I have little time left
for rest and fulfillment. Such
is man, and my childhood of blessed memory.
Insomnia has turned me into a night watchman
without a definite assignment about what to watch.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” understanding
and heroism, wisdom and age, knowledge and death
came to me all at once. My childhood of blessèd. Memory.
I returned home, a big-game hunter of emotions.
On the walls, antlers and wings and heads,
stuffed emotions everywhere on the wall.
I sit and look at them calmly, don’t
see me this way, my son. Even my laughter shows
that I no longer know how to laugh, and the mirror
has long since known that I am its reflection,
don’t see me like this, my son, your eyes are darker than my eyes,
perhaps you’re already sadder than I am.
My heavy body shakes its hearts, like the hand of a gambler
shaking the dice before he throws them onto the table.
That is the movement of my body, that is its game, and that is my fate.
Bialik, a bald knight among olive trees,
didn’t write poems in the land of Israel, because he kissed
the ground and shooed flies and mosquitoes with his
writing hands and wiped sweat from his rhyming brain
and in the hamsin put over his head a handkerchief from the Diaspora.
Richard, his lion heart peeping and sticking out a long
tongue between his ribs. He too was brought
with the traveling circus to the Holy Land. He was the heart
of a lion and I am the heart of a kicking donkey.
All of them in a death-defying leap, clowns painted
and smeared with white blood, feathers and armor, swallowers of
swords and sharpened crosses,
bell-acrobats. Saladin
sallied in, with fire-swallowers and baptismal-water-sprinklers,
ballerinas with male genitals.
The King David Hotel flying in the air,
its guests asked for milk, were given dynamite in cans:
to destroy, to destroy, blood and fire in the candy stalls,
you can also get fresh foaming blood from the juice-squeezers
of heroism, war-dead twisted
and stiff like bagels on a string.
Yehuda Ha-Levi, bound up in his books, caught in the web
of his longings which he himself had excreted. He was held
in pawn, a dead poet in Alexandria. I don’t remember
his death, just as I don’t remember my death,
but Alexandria I remember: 66, Street of
the Sisters. General Shmuel Ha-Nagid on his burnt
black horse like the burnt trunks of olive trees
riding around the round Abyssinian Church,
that’s how he imagined the Temple.
Napoleon, his hand on his heart comparing the rhythm of his heartbeats
to the rhythm of his cannons.
And small, triangular panties on a clothesline on
a roof in Jerusalem signal to the tired old
sailor from Tudela, the last Benjamin.
I lived for two months in Abu Tor inside the silence,
I lived for two weeks in the Valley of Gehenna,
in a house that was destroyed after me and in another house
that had an additional story built on it, and in a house whose
collapsing walls were supported, as I
wa
s never supported. A house hath preeminence over a man.
Sit shiva now, get used to a low seat
from which all the living will seem to you like towers.
A eulogy is scattered in the wind-cursed city, old
Jerusalem clamors in the stillness of evil gold. Incantations
of yearning. The air of the valleys is lashed by olive branches
to new wars, olives black and
hard as the knots in a whip, there is no hope between
my eyes, there is no hope between my legs in the double
domes of my lust. Even the Torah portion for my Bar Mitzvah
was double, Insemination / Leprosy, and tells
of skin diseases shining with wounded colors,
with death-agony red and the Sodom-sulfur yellow of pus.
Muttered calculations of the apocalypse, numerology of tortures,
sterile acrostics of oblivion, a chess game
with twenty-four squares of lust and
twenty-four squares of disgust.
And Jerusalem too is like a cauldron cooking up a swampy
porridge, and all her buildings are swollen bubbles,
eyeballs bulging from their sockets,
the shape of a dome, of a tower, of a flat or sloping roof,
all are bubbles before bursting. And God
takes the prophet who happens to be near him at the moment,
and as if with a wooden spoon he stirs it up, stirs and stirs.
I’m sitting here now with my father’s eyes
and with my mothers graying hair on my head, in a house
that belonged to an Arab, who bought it
from an Englishman, who took it from a German,
who hewed it out of the stones of Jerusalem, which is my city;
I look at the world of the god of others
who received it from others. I’ve been patched together
from many things, I’ve been gathered in different times,
I’ve been assembled from spare parts, from disintegrating
materials, from decomposing words. And already now,
in the middle of my life, I’m beginning to return them, gradually,
because I want to be a good and orderly person
at the border, when they ask me: “Do you have anything to declare?”
So that there won’t be too much pressure at the end,
so that I won’t arrive sweating and breathless and confused.
So that I won’t have anything left to declare.
The red stars are my heart, the distant Milky Way
is the blood in it, in me. The hot
hamsin breathes in huge lungs,
my life is close to a huge heart, always inside.
I’m sitting in the German Colony, which is
the Valley of the Ghosts. Outside they call to one another,
a mother to her children, a child to a child, a man
