by Chana Bloch
a narrow path for seeing. I tried
to go out into my time and to know, but I couldn’t get any farther
than the body of the woman beside me.
And there’s no escape. Don’t go to the ant, thou sluggard!
It will depress you to see that blind
diligence racing around beneath the shoe that is lifted to trample.
No escape. As in a modern chess set
which the craftsman shaped differently from the pieces you grew up with:
the king looks like a queen, the pawns are like knights,
the knights are barely horses and are as smooth as rooks. But the game
remains with its rules. Sometimes you long for
the traditional pieces, a king with a crown,
a castle that is round and turreted, a horse that is a horse.
The players sat inside, the talkers sat out on the balcony:
half of my belovèd, my left hand, a quarter of a friend,
a man half-dead. The click of the massacred pieces
tossed into the wooden box
is like a distant, ominous thunder.
I am a man approaching his end.
What seems like youthful vitality in me
isn’t vitality but craziness,
because only death can put an end to this craziness.
And what seem like deep roots that I put down
are only complications on
the surface: a disease of knots, hands cramped in spasm,
tangled ropes, and demented chains.
I am a solitary man, a lonely man. I’m not a democracy.
The executive and the loving and the judicial powers
in one body. An eating and swilling and a vomiting power,
a hating power and a hurting power,
a blind power and a mute power.
I wasn’t elected. I’m a political demonstration, I carry
my face above me, like a placard. Everything is written on it. Everything,
please, there’s no need to use tear gas,
I’m already crying. No need to disperse me,
I’m dispersed,
and the dead too are a demonstration.
When I visit my father’s grave,
I see the tombstones lifted up by
the dust underneath:
they are a mass demonstration.
Everyone hears footsteps at night,
not just the prisoner: everyone hears.
Everything at night is footsteps,
receding or approaching, but never
coming close enough
to touch. This is man’s mistake
about his God, and God’s mistake about man.
Oh this world, which everyone fills
to the brim. And bitterness will come to shut
your mouth like a stubborn, resistant spring
so that it will open wide, wide, in death,
what are we, what is our life. A child who got hurt
or was hit, as he was playing, holds back his tears
and runs to his mother, on a long road of backyards
and alleys and only beside her will he cry.
That’s how we, all our lives, hold back
our tears and run on a long road
and the tears are stifled and locked
in our throats. And death is just a good
everlasting cry. Ta-daaaaaa, a long blast of the shofar,
a long cry, a long silence. Sit down. Today.
And the silver hand pointing for the reader of the Torah scroll
passes along the hard lines
like an arm on a large holy machine
with its oversized, bent, hard finger,
passes and points and hits against things that
can’t be changed. Here thou shalt read. Here thou shalt die, here.
And this is the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not wish.
I think about forgetting as about a fruit that grows larger and larger,
and when it ripens it won’t be eaten,
because it won’t exist and won’t be remembered:
its ripening is its forgetting. When I lie on my back,
the bones of my legs are filled
with the sweetness
of my little son’s breath.
He breathes the same air as I do,
sees the same things,
but my breath is bitter and his is sweet
like rest in the bones of the weary,
and my childhood of blessèd memory. His childhood.
I didn’t kiss the ground
when they brought me as a little boy
to this land. But now that I’ve grown up on her,
she kisses me,
she holds me,
she clings to me with love,
with grass and thorns, with sand and stone,
with wars and with this springtime
until the final kiss.
Jews in the Land of Israel
We forget where we came from. Our Jewish
names from the Exile give us away,
bring back the memory of flower and fruit, medieval cities,
metals, knights who turned to stone, roses,
spices whose scent drifted away, precious stones, lots of red,
handicrafts long gone from the world
(the hands are gone too).
Circumcision does it to us,
as in the Bible story of Shechem and the sons of Jacob,
so that we go on hurting all our lives.
What are we doing, coming back here with this pain?
Our longings were drained together with the swamps,
the desert blooms for us, and our children are beautiful.
Even the wrecks of ships that sunk on the way
reached this shore,
even winds did. Not all the sails.
What are we doing
in this dark land with its
yellow shadows that pierce the eyes?
(Every now and then someone says, even after forty
or fifty years: “The sun is killing me.”)
What are we doing with these souls of mist, with these names,
with our eyes of forests, with our beautiful children,
with our quick blood?
Spilled blood is not the roots of trees
but it’s the closest thing to roots
we have.
Wildpeace
Not the peace of a cease-fire,
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill,
that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds—
who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
The Way It Was
The way it was.
When the water we drank at night, afterwards,
was all the wine in the world.
And doors, I never remember
if they open in or out,
and if those buttons in the entrance to your building
are for switching on the light, for ringing the bell
or ringing in silence.
That’s the way we wanted it. Was that
the way we want
ed it?
In our three rooms,
at the open window,
you promised me there wouldn’t be a war.
I gave you a watch instead of
a wedding ring: good round time,
the ripest fruit
of sleeplessness and forever.
Instead of Words
My love has a very long white gown
of sleep, of sleeplessness, of weddings.
In the evening she sits at a small table,
puts a comb down on it, two tiny bottles
and a brush, instead of words.
Out of the depths of her hair she fishes many pins
and puts them in her mouth, instead of words.
I dishevel her, she combs.
I dishevel again. What’s left?
She falls asleep instead of words,
and her sleep already knows me,
wags her woolly dreams.
Her belly easily absorbs
all the wrathful prophecies of
the End of Days.
I wake her: we
are the instruments of a hard love.
Gifts of Love
I gave them to you
for your earlobes, your fingers. I gilded
the time on your wrist,
I hung lots of glittery things on you
so you’d sway for me in the wind, so you’d
chime softly over me
to soothe my sleep.
I comforted you with apples, as it says
in the Song of Songs,
I lined your bed with them,
so we could roll smoothly on red apple-bearings.
I covered your skin with a pink chiffon,
transparent as baby lizards—the ones with
black diamond eyes on summer nights.
You helped me to live for a couple of months
without needing religion
or a point of view.
You gave me a letter opener made of silver.
Real letters aren’t opened that way;
they’re torn open,
torn, torn.
Ballad in the Streets of Buenos Aires
And a man waits in the street and meets a woman
precise and beautiful as the clock on the wall of her room
and sad and white as the wall that holds it
And she doesn’t show him her teeth
and she doesn’t show him her belly
but she shows him her time, precise and beautiful
And she lives on the ground floor next to the pipes
and the water that rises begins there in her wall
and he has decided on tenderness
And she knows the reasons for weeping
and she knows the reasons for holding back
and he begins to be like her, like her
And his hair will grow long and soft, like her hair
and the hard words of his language dissolve in her mouth
and his eyes will be filled with tears, like her eyes
And the traffic lights are reflected in her face
and she stands there amid the permitted and the forbidden
and he has decided on tenderness
And they walk in the streets that will soon appear in his dreams
and the rain weeps into them silently, as into a pillow,
and impatient time has made them both into prophets
And he will lose her at the red light
and he will lose her at the green and the yellow
and the light is always there to serve every loss
And he won’t be there when soap and lotion run out
and he won’t be there when the clock is set again
and he won’t be there when her dress unravels to threads in the wind
And she will lock his wild letters away in a quiet drawer
and lie down to sleep beside the water in the wall
and she will know the reasons for weeping and for holding back
and he has decided on tenderness
Psalm
A psalm on the day
a building contractor cheated me. A psalm of praise.
Plaster falls from the ceiling, the wall is sick, paint
cracking like lips.
The vines I’ve sat under, the fig tree—
it’s all just words. The rustling of the trees
creates an illusion of God and justice.
I dip my dry glance like bread
into the death that softens it,
always on the table in front of me.
Years ago, my life
turned my life into a revolving door.
I think about those who, in joy and success,
have gotten far ahead of me,
carried between two men for all to see
like that bunch of shiny pampered grapes
from the Promised Land,
and those who are carried off, also
between two men: wounded or dead. A psalm.
When I was a child I sang in the synagogue choir,
I sang till my voice broke. I sang
first voice and second voice. And I’ll go on singing
till my heart breaks, first heart and second heart.
A psalm.
Seven Laments for the War-Dead
1
Mr. Beringer, whose son
fell at the Canal that strangers dug
so ships could cross the desert,
crosses my path at Jaffa Gate.
He has grown very thin, has lost
the weight of his son.
That’s why he floats so lightly in the alleys
and gets caught in my heart like little twigs
that drift away.
2
As a child he would mash his potatoes
to a golden mush.
And then you die.
A living child must be cleaned
when he comes home from playing.
But for a dead man
earth and sand are clear water, in which
his body goes on being bathed and purified
forever.
3
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
across there. On the enemy’s side. A good landmark
for gunners of the future.
Or the war monument in London
at Hyde Park Corner, decorated
like a magnificent cake: yet another soldier
lifting head and rifle,
another cannon, another eagle, another
stone angel.
And the whipped cream of a huge marble flag
poured over it all
with an expert hand.
But the candied, much-too-red cherries
were already gobbled up
by the glutton of hearts. Amen.
4
I came upon an old zoology textbook,
Brehm, Volume II, Birds:
in sweet phrases, an account of the life of the starling,
swallow, and thrush. Full of mistakes in an antiquated
Gothic typeface, but full of love, too. “Our feathered
friends.” “Migrate from us to the warmer climes.”
Nest, speckled egg, soft plumage, nightingale,
stork. “The harbingers of spring.” The robin,
red-breasted.
Year of publication: 1913, Germany,
on the eve of the war that was to be
the eve of all my wars.
My good friend who died in my arms, in
his blood,
on the sands of Ashdod. 1948, June.
Oh my friend,
red-breasted.
5
Dicky was hit.
Like the water tower at Yad Mordechai.
Hit. A hole in the belly. Everything
came flooding out.
But he has remained standing like that
in the landscape of my memory
like the water tower at Yad Mordechai.
a little to the north, near Huleikat.
6
Is all of this
sorrow? I don’t know.
I stood in the cemetery dressed in
the camouflage clothes of a living man: brown pants
and a shirt yellow as the sun.
Cemeteries are cheap; they don’t ask for much.
Even the wastebaskets are small, made for holding
tissue paper
that wrapped flowers from the store.
Cemeteries are a polite and disciplined thing.
“I shall never forget you,” in French
on a little ceramic plaque.
I don’t know who it is that won’t ever forget:
he’s more anonymous than the one who died.
Is all of this sorrow? I guess so.
“May ye find consolation in the building
of the homeland.” But how long
can you go on building the homeland
and not fall behind in the terrible
three-sided race
between consolation and building and death?
Yes, all of this is sorrow. But leave
a little love burning always
like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby
that gives him a bit of security and quiet love
though he doesn’t know what the light is
or where it comes from.
7
Memorial Day for the war-dead: go tack on
the grief of all your losses—
including a woman who left you—
to the grief of losing them; go mix
one sorrow with another, like history,
that in its economical way
heaps pain and feast and sacrifice
onto a single day for easy reference.
Oh sweet world, soaked like bread
in sweet milk for the terrible
toothless God. “Behind all this,
some great happiness is hiding.” No use
crying inside and screaming outside.
Behind all this, some great happiness may
be hiding.
Memorial day. Bitter salt, dressed up as
a little girl with flowers.
Ropes are strung out the whole length of the route
for a joint parade: the living and the dead together.
Children move with the footsteps of someone else’s grief
as if picking their way through broken glass.
The flautist’s mouth will stay pursed for many days.
A dead soldier swims among the small heads
with the swimming motions of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.
A flag loses contact with reality and flies away.
A store window decked out with beautiful dresses for women
