by Chana Bloch
to God: Come home now! Time to come home! “And he is merciful,”
come home, God, be gathered to your people in Jerusalem
so that we can be gathered to you, in mutual death
and mutual prayers, with shaken-out sheets and smoothed pillows
and turning off the bed light and the eternal lamp,
closing the book, and closing the eyes, and turning,
curled-up, to the wall. Here, in the valley, in the house
above whose entrance my birth year is carved with
a verse in German: “Begin with God
and end with God. That is the best way to live.”
A stone lion crouches and watches over the words
and the four-digit number.
On the gatepost the mezuzah, flute of my childhood’s God,
and two columns, a memorial to a temple that never was,
the curtain moves like the curtain in the hotel in Rome
that first morning, moves and is drawn open,
uncovered to me the nakedness of that city,
the roofs and the sky, and I was aroused to
come to her. Please, now, please. My belovèd, your hair
is parted in the middle, you walk proudly, your strong
face carries a heavy weight, heavier than
the urn on the heads of Arab women at the well, and your eyes
are open as if from a nonweight. And outside
cars are wailing. Motors take on
the sound of humans in distress,
in depression, in gasoline shortage, in the great heat and in the cold,
in old age and in loneliness, and they weep and wail.
Josephus Flavius, son of the dead, like me,
son of Matityahu, surrendered his fortresses in Galilee
and threw down his sword on the table in front of me:
a ray of light that penetrated from outside.
He saw my name carved on the door as if on a tombstone,
he thought that my house too was a grave. Son of the dead,
son of dust, son of the streetlamp that shines in the evening
outside. The people in front of the window are the legions
of Titus; they are descending on Jerusalem
now, as this Sabbath ends, on its cafés and on
its movie theaters, on lights and on cakes
and on women’s thighs: surrender of love,
supplication of love. The rustling of trees
in the garden announces a change in my actions, but not
in my dreams. My inner clothes won’t be changed
and the tattoo from my childhood keeps on sinking
inward.
Go, cheerful commander and sad historian,
slumber between the pages of your books, like pressed
flowers you will sleep in them. Go,
my child too is a war orphan of three wars
in which I wasn’t killed and in which he
wasn’t born yet, but he is a war orphan of them all.
Go, white governor of Galilee. I too
am always entering and leaving as if into new apartments,
through iron window-grilles that are of memory.
You must be shadow or water
to pass through all these without breaking,
you are gathered again afterward. A declaration of peace
with yourself, a treaty, conditions, protracted deliberations,
dunes stretching out, rustling of trees
over multitudes of the wounded, as in
a real war. A woman once said to me:
“Everyone goes to his own funeral.” I didn’t
understand then. I don’t understand now, but I’m going.
Death is only a bureaucrat who arranges
our lives by subject and place
in files and in archives. This valley
is the rip God made in his clothes, in the ritual
mourning for the dead, and all that the poet and
the chronicler can do is to hand over their fortresses
and be wailing-women, mourners for a fee or without one.
Yodfat opens her gates wide: a great
light bursts forth, the light of surrender
that should have sufficed for the darkness of millennia.
Ta-da, ta-daaaaaaa, ta-daaa (sadly),
the blower’s lips cracked in the prolonged khamsin, the tongue cleaved
to the roof of his mouth, the right hand forgot its cunning. I
remember only the movement of the woman
pulling her dress over her head:
what a hands-up!, what a blind surrender,
what imploring, what lust, what surrender!
“I’m not a traitor,” and between the columns my brother Josephus
vanished. “I have to write a history.”
The columns are sick, their capital is circled by a leprosy of Greek
ornaments and an insanity of carved flowers and buds.
The home is sick. “Homesick” they say in English
when a man yearns for his home. The home
is man-sick. I yearn. I am sick. Go,
Josephus my brother, flying flags too
are curtains in windows that no longer have a home.
I am a pious Jew, my beard has grown inward,
instead of flesh and blood I’m stuffed with beard-hair
like a mattress. Pain stays in the forehead, under the phylactery box, with
no remedy. My heart fasts almost every week, whether I’ve dropped
a Torah scroll or not, whether the Temple
was destroyed or rebuilt.
I don’t drink wine; but everything the wine doesn’t do to me
is a black abyss without drunkenness, a dark
empty vineyard where they tread and bruise the soles of
their feet on the hard stone. My body is a shipyard
for what is called my soul. My body will be dismantled and my soul
will glide out to sea, and its shape is the shape of my body in which it lay
and its shape is the shape of the sea, and the shape of the sea is like the shape of my body.
My belovèd is Jobesque. It happened in summer, and the elastic straps
of her clothing snapped with the twang of a taut string. The wailings of
labor pains and rattle of death-agony already in a first night of love.
Rip, riiiiiip of light clothing,
because it was summer, the end of a heavy summer of
thin, light clothing. A shofar like the hiccup
of a sick man. And in the beginning of the month of Elul
the blower blew the ram’s horn and his face was sheepish
like a ram’s face and his eye was bulging and glassy and rolled
in its socket like the eye of a closed tank. And his mouth was caught in the shofar,
with no way to escape.
Jobesque: we met in the flight of the hemlock. With legs spread apart
wider than the spreading of wings, beyond the borders of your body.
In love always, despair lies with you now
and your movements and the writhing of your limbs and your screams with him
are the same as with me.
Sometimes I feel my soul rolling
as if it were inside an empty barrel. In the dull sound
of a barrel pushed from place to place. Sometimes
I see Jerusalem between two people
who stand in front of a window, with a space
between them. The fact that they aren’t close and loving
allows me to see my life, between them.
“If only it were possible to grasp the moment
when two people first become strangers to each other.”
This could have been a song of praise to
the sweet, imaginary God of my childhood.
It happened on Friday, and black angels
filled the Valley o
f the Cross, and their wings
were black houses and abandoned quarries.
Sabbath candles bobbed up and down like ships
at the entrance to a harbor. “Come O bride,”
wear the clothes of your mourning and your splendor
from the night when you thought I wouldn’t come to you
and I came. The room was drenched in the fragrance
of syrup from black, intoxicating cherries.
Newspapers, scattered on the floor, rustled below
and the flapping wings of the hemlock above.
Love with parting, like a record
with applause at the end of the music, love
with a scream, love with a mumble of despair
at walking proudly into exile from each other.
Come O bride, hold in your hand something made of clay
at the hour of sunset, because flesh vanishes
and iron doesn’t keep. Hold clay in your hand
for future archaeologists to find and remember.
They don’t know that anemones after the rain
are another archaeological find, a document of major importance.
The time has come for the canon of my life to be closed,
as the rabbis closed the canon of the Bible.
There will be a final decision, chapters and books will remain outside,
will be declared apocryphal, some days won’t be counted with the rest,
they will be examples and exegeses and interpretations of interpretations
but not the essence, not holy.
I imagine matches that were moistened with tears
or with blood, and can no longer be lit. I imagine
a shofar blowing in the assault upon an empty objective.
Jewish shofar-bagpipes, Jeremiah of Anatot
assaulting an empty place with a troop of weepers running behind him.
But last Yom Kippur, at the close of the final
prayer, when everyone was waiting for the shofar
in great silence, after the shouts of “Open the gate for us,”
his voice was heard like the thin squeal of an infant,
his first cry. My life, the beginning of my life.
I chose you, love, I was Ahasuerus who sat
on his throne and chose. Through the splendorous clothing
I saw you and the signs of mutability on your body
and the arch of curling apocalyptic hair
above the vagina. You wore black stockings,
but I knew that you were the opposite. You wore black dresses
as if in mourning, but I saw red on your body
like a mouth. As if the tongue of a red velvet gown were sticking out from
an antique trunk that didn’t close tight.
I was your Purim bull, your Kippurim bull,
dressed in a shroud that had the two colors of a clown.
Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da, ta-da, love and its long shofar-blasts.
Sit down. Today is the world-pregnant day of judgment. Who raped
the world and made the day pregnant?
Today is the day of judgment, today you, today war.
Tanks from America, fighter planes from France, Russian
jet-doves, armored chariots from England, Sisera’s regiments
who dried the swamps with their corpses, a flying Massada,
Beitar slowly sinking, Yodfat on wheels, the Antonia, ground-to-ground
ground, ground-to-air air, ground-to-sky sky. Massada won’t fall again, won’t fall again,
won’t fall again, Massada, won’t. Multiple automatic
prayer beads and also in single shots. Muezzins armed with
three-stage missiles, paper-rips and battle-cries
of holy wars in all seven kinds,
shtreimls like mines in the road and in the air, deep philosophical
depth charges, a heart lit up with a green light inside
the engine of a red-hot bomber, Elijah’s ejection-seat leaping up
at a time of danger, hurling circumcision knives, thundering
dynamite fuses from heart to heart, a Byzantine tank
with a decorated window in which an icon appears
lit up in purity and softness, mezuzahs filled with
explosives, don’t kiss them or they’ll blow up, dervishes
with powdered rococo curls, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
consisting of Job, his friends, Satan, and God, around a sand-table.
A pricking with bannered pins in the live flesh
of hills and valleys made of naked
humans lying in front of them,
underwater synagogues, periscope rabbis,
cantors out of the depths, jeeps armed with women’s hair
and with wild girls’ fingernails, ripping their
clothes in rage and mourning. Supersonic angels
with wings of women’s fat thighs,
letters of a Torah scroll in ammunition straps, machine guns,
flowers in the pattern of a fortified bunker,
fingers of dynamite, prosthetic legs of dynamite,
eight empty bullet-shells for a Hanukkah menorah,
explosives of eternal flame, the cross of a crossfire,
a submachine gun carried in phylactery straps,
camouflage nets of thin lacy material
from girlfriends’ panties, used women’s dresses
and ripped diapers to clean the cannon mouth,
offensive hand-grenades in the shape of bells,
defensive hand-grenades in the shape of a spice box
for the close of the Sabbath, sea mines
like the prickly apples used as smelling-salts on Yom Kippur
in case of fainting, half my childhood in
a whole armored truck, a grandmother clock
for starting a time-egg filled with
clipped fingernails of bad boys
with a smell of cinnamon, Dürer’s
praying hands sticking up
like a vertical land mine, arms with an attachment
for a bayonet, a good-night fortified with sand bags,
the twelve little minor prophets
in a night ambush with warm breath,
cannon barrels climbing like ivy, shooting
cuckoo shells every fifteen minutes: cuckoo,
boom-boom. Barbed-wire testicles,
eye-mines bulging and hurting,
aerial bombs with the heads of
beautiful women like the ones that used to be carved
on ships’ prows, the mouth of a cannon
open like flower petals,
M.I.R.V., S.W.A.T., I.C.B.M., I.B.M.,
P.O.W., R.I.P., A.W.O.L.,
S.N.A.F.U., I.N.R.I., J.D.L., L.B.J.,
E.S.P., I.R.S., D.N.A., G.O.D.
Sit down. Today is the day of judgment. Today there was war.
The terrible angel pulled back his arm like a spring
to his side, to rest it or to strike
again. Keep this arm
busy, distract its muscles! Hang
heavy ornaments on it, gold and silver, necklaces
and diamonds, so that it’s weighed down, so that it will sink and
not strike again. Again Massada won’t fall, won’t fall.
In the mists that came from below and in the holy
bluish light, inside his huge hollow dome,
I saw the lord of all the earth in all his sadness,
a radar god lonely and turning
with his huge wings, in the sad circles
of a doubt as ancient as the world,
yes yes and no no, with the sadness of a god who realizes
there is no answer and no decision aside from that turning.
Whatever he sees is sad. And whatever
he doesn’t see is sad, whatever he writes down
is a code of sadness for humans to decipher.
I love the bluish light and the white of h
is eyes
which are blind white screens
on which humans read what will befall them.
Again Massadah. Again Massada. Again won’t.
On one of these evenings I tried
to remember the name of the one who was killed beside me
in the pale sands of Ashod. He was a foreigner,
perhaps one of the wandering sailors, who thought that the Jewish people
was a sea and those deadly sands were waves. The tattoo
didn’t reveal his name, just a flower and
a dragon and fat women. I could have
called him Flower or Fat Women. In the first
light of retreat and dawn he died. “In his arms
he was dead.” Just as in the poem by Goethe. All evening
beside windows and desks I was immersed in the effort of remembering,
like the effort of prophecy. I knew that if I didn’t
remember his name I’d forget my own name, it would wither,
“the grass rises again.” This too by Goethe. The grass
doesn’t rise again, it remains trampled,
remains alive and whispering to itself. It won’t rise,
but will never die and will not fear sudden death
under the heavy hobnailed boots.
The year the world’s condition improved
my heart got sick. Should I conclude from this
that my life falls apart without
the sweet suffocating barrel-hoops of danger?
I’m forty-three years old. And my father died at sixty-three.
After summer’s end comes a summer and a summer and a summer, as
on a broken record. Dying is when the last season
never changes again.
And the body is the wax of the soul’s memorial candle
that drips and gathers and piles up inside me. And paradise
is when the dead remember only the
beautiful things: as when, even after the war, I remembered
only the beautiful days.
Last spring my child began
to be afraid—for the first time,
too early—of death.
Flowers grow from the earth,
fear blossoms in his heart,
a fragrant smell for someone who enjoys
a fragrance like that.
And in the summer I tried to engage in politics, in the questions of my time,
an attempt that has the same fragrance
of flowers and their withering,
the attempt of a man to stage-manage and move
the furniture in his house into a new arrangement,
to participate: as in a movie theater
when someone moves his head
and asks the people in front of him to move
their heads too, just a bit,
so that he’ll have at least
