by Chana Bloch
in blue and white. And everything
in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.
A great royal beast has been dying all night long
under the jasmine,
with a fixed stare at the world.
A man whose son died in the war
walks up the street
like a woman with a dead fetus in her womb.
“Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.”
Like the Inner Wall of a House
Like the inner wall of a house
that after wars and destruction becomes
an outer one—
that’s how I found myself suddenly,
too soon in life. I’ve almost forgotten what it means
to be inside. It no longer hurts;
I no longer love. Far or near—
they’re both very far from me,
equally far.
I’d never imagined what happens to colors.
The same as with human beings: a bright blue drowses
inside the memory of dark blue and night,
a paleness sighs
out of a crimson dream. A breeze
carries odors from far away
but itself has no odor. The leaves of the squill die
long before its white flower,
which never knows
the greenness of spring and dark love.
I lift up my eyes to the hills. Now I understand
what it means to lift up the eyes, what a heavy burden
it is. But these violent longings, this pain of
never-again-to-be-inside.
Love Song
This is how it started: suddenly it felt
loose and light and happy inside,
like when you feel your shoelaces loosening a bit
and you bend down.
Then came other days.
And now I’m like a Trojan horse
filled with terrible loves.
Every night they break out and run wild
and at dawn they come back
into my dark belly.
I’ve Grown Very Hairy
I’ve grown very hairy all over my body.
I’m afraid they’re going to start hunting me for my fur.
My shirt of many colors isn’t a sign of love:
it’s like an aerial photograph of a railroad station.
At night my body is wide open and awake under the blanket
like the blindfolded eyes of someone who’s about to be shot.
I live as a fugitive and a vagabond, I’ll die
hungry for more—
and I wanted to be quiet, like an ancient mound
whose cities were all destroyed,
and peaceful,
like a full cemetery.
A Dog After Love
After you left me
I had a bloodhound sniff at
my chest and my belly. Let it fill its nostrils
and set out to find you.
I hope it will find you and rip
your lover’s balls to shreds and bite off his cock—
or at least
bring me one of your stockings between its teeth.
A Bride Without a Dowry
A bride without a dowry, with a deep navel
in her suntanned belly, a little pit
for birdseed and water.
Yes, this is the bride with her big behind,
startled out of her dreams and all her fat
in which she was bathing naked
like Susannah and the Elders.
Yes, this is the serious girl with her
freckles. What’s the meaning of that upper lip
jutting out over the lower one?
Dark drinking and laughter.
A little sweet animal. Monique.
And she’s got a will of iron inside
that soft, self-indulgent flesh.
What a terrible bloodbath
she’s preparing for herself.
What a Roman arena streaming with blood.
The Sweet Breakdowns of Abigail
Everyone whacks her with tiny blows
the way you peel an egg.
With desperate bursts of perfume
she strikes back at the world.
With sharp giggles she gets even
for all the sadness,
and with quick little fallings-in-love,
like burps and hiccups of feeling.
A terrorist of sweetness,
she stuffs bombshells with despair and cinnamon,
with cloves, with shrapnel of love.
At night when she tears off her jewelry,
there’s a danger she won’t know when to stop
and will go on tearing and slashing away at her whole life.
To a Convert
A son of Abraham is studying to be a Jew.
He wants to be a Jew in no time at all.
Do you know what you’re doing?
What’s the hurry? After all, a man isn’t
a fig tree: everything all at once, leaves and fruit
at the same time. (Even if the fig tree is
a Jewish tree.)
Aren’t you afraid of the pain of circumcision?
Don’t you worry that they’ll cut and cut
till there’s nothing left of you
but sweet Jew pain?
I know: you want to be a baby again,
to be carried around on an embroidered cushion, to be handed
from woman to woman, mothers and godmothers
with their heavy breasts and their wombs. You want the scent
of perfume in your nostrils, and wine
for your little smacking lips.
Now you’re in the hospital. You’re resting, recovering.
Women are waiting under the window for your foreskin.
Whoever catches it—you’ll be hers, hers, hers.
My Father in a White Space Suit
My father, in a white space suit,
walks around with the light, heavy steps of the dead
over the surface of my life that doesn’t
hold onto a thing.
He calls out names: This is the Crater of Childhood.
This is an abyss. This happened at your Bar Mitzvah. These
are white peaks. This is a deep voice
from then. He takes specimens and puts them away in his gear:
sand, words, the sighing stones of my dreams.
He surveys and determines. He calls me
the planet of his longings, land of my childhood, his
childhood, our childhood.
“Learn to play the violin, my son. When you are
grown-up, music will help you
in difficult moments of loneliness and pain.”
That’s what he told me once, but I didn’t believe him.
And then he floats, how he floats, into the grief
of his endless white death.
A Letter of Recommendation
On summer nights I sleep naked
in Jerusalem. My bed
stands on the brink of a deep valley
without rolling down into it.
In the daytime I walk around with the Ten
Commandments on my lips
like an old tune someone hums to himself.
Oh touch me, touch me, good woman!
That’s not a scar you feel under my shirt, that’s
a letter of recommendation, folded up tight,
from my father:
“All the same, he’s a good boy, and full of love.”
I remember my father waking me for early prayers.
He would do it by gently stroking my forehead, not
by tearing away the blanket.
Since then I love him even more.
And as his reward, may he be wakened
gently and with love
on the Day of the Resurrection.
On the Day I Left
On the day I left, spring broke out
to fulfill the saying: Darkness, darkness.
We had dinner together. They spread a white tablecloth
for the sake of serenity. They set out a candle
for candle’s sake. We ate well
and we knew: the soul of the fish
is its empty bones.
We stood at the sea again:
someone else had already
accomplished everything.
And love—a couple of nights
like rare stamps. To stroke the heart
without breaking it.
I travel light, like the prayers of Jews.
I lift off as simply as a glance, or a flight
to some other place.
A Letter
To sit on a hotel balcony in Jerusalem
and to write: “Sweetly pass the days
from desert to sea.” And to write: “Tears
dry quickly here. This blot is a tear that
made the ink run.” That’s how they used to write
in the last century. “I have drawn
a little circle around it.”
Time passes, as when someone’s on the phone
laughing or crying far away from me:
whatever I hear, I can’t see;
what I see, I don’t hear.
We weren’t careful when we said “Next year”
or “A month ago.” Those words
are like broken glass: you can hurt yourself with them,
even slash an artery, if
that’s what you’re like.
But you were beautiful as the commentary
on an ancient text.
The surplus of women in your distant country
brought you to me, but
another law of probability
has taken you away again.
To live is to build a ship and a harbor
at the same time. And to finish the harbor
long after the ship has gone down.
And to conclude: I remember only
that it was foggy. And if that’s the way you remember—
what do you remember?
In a Leap Year
In a leap year the date of your death gets closer
to the date of your birth,
or is it farther away?
The grapes are aching,
their juice thick and heavy, a kind of sweet semen.
And I’m like a man who in the daytime passes
the places he’s dreamed about at night.
An unexpected scent brings back
what long years of silence
have made me forget. Acacia blossoms
in the first rains, and sand dunes
buried years ago under the houses.
Now all I know how to do
is to grow dark in the evening. I’m happy
with what I’ve got. And all I wish to say is
my name and address, and perhaps my father’s name,
like a prisoner of war
who, according to the Geneva Convention,
is not required to say a single word more.
A Quiet Joy
I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible.
I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the windowpane,
and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.
Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.
And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.
A Mutual Lullaby
For a while I’ve been meaning to tell you to sleep
but your eyes won’t let sleep in, and your thighs
won’t either. Your belly when I touch it—perhaps.
Count backward now, as if at a rocket launching,
and sleep. Or count forward,
as if you were starting a song. And sleep.
Let’s compose sweet eulogies for each other
as we lie together in the dark. Tears
remain longer than whatever caused them.
My eyes have burned this newspaper to a mist
but the wheat goes on growing in Pharaoh’s dream.
Time isn’t inside the clock
but love, sometimes, is inside our bodies.
Words that escape you in your sleep
are food and drink for the wild angels,
and our rumpled bed
is the last nature preserve
with shrieking laughter and lush green weeping.
For a while I’ve been meaning to tell you
that you should sleep
and that the black night will be cushioned
with soft red velvet—as in a case
for geometrical instruments—
around everything that’s hard in you.
And that I’ll keep you, as people keep the Sabbath,
even on weekdays, and that we’ll stay together always
as on one of those New Year’s cards
with a dove and a Torah, sprinkled with silver glitter.
And that we are still less expensive
than a computer. So they’ll let us be.
From Songs of Zion the Beautiful
1
Our baby was weaned during the first days
of the war. And I rushed out to stare
at the terrifying desert.
At night I came home again to watch him
sleeping. He is starting to forget
his mother’s nipples, and he’ll go on forgetting
until the next war.
And that’s how, while he was still an infant,
his hopes closed and his complaints
opened—
never to close again.
2
The war broke out in the fall, at the empty border
between grapes and citrus fruit.
The sky blue as the veins
in the thighs of a tormented woman.
The desert, a mirror for those who look into it.
Somber males carry the memory of their families, hunchback
in their gear, in knapsacks, kit bags,
soul-pouches, heavy eye-bladders.
The blood froze in its veins. So
it can’t spill now, it can only
shatter to bits.
3
The October sun warms our faces.
A soldier is filling bags with the soft sand
he used to play in.
The October sun warms our dead.
Grief is a heavy wooden board,
tears are nails.
4
I have nothing to say about the war, nothing
to add. I’m ashamed.
All the knowledge I’ve absorbed in my life I now
give up, like a desert
that has given up water.
I’m forgetting names that I never thought
I’d forget.
And because of the war
I repeat, for the sake of a last, simple sweetness:
The sun goes around the earth, yes.
The earth is flat as a lost drifting plank, yes.
There’s a God in Heaven. Yes.
5
I’ve closed myself up, now I’m like
a dull heavy swamp. I sleep war,
hibernating.
They’ve made me commander of the dead
on the Mount of Olives.
I always lose, even
in victory.
8
What did the man who burned to death
ask of
us?
What the water would have us do:
not to make noise, not to make a mess,
to be very quiet at its side,
to let it flow.
11
The city where I was born was destroyed by gunfire.
The ship that brought me here was later sunk, in the war.
The barn in Hamadiya where I made love was burnt down,
the kiosk in Ein Gedi was blown up by the enemy,
the bridge in Ismailiya that I crossed
back and forth on the eve of all my loves
was torn to tatters.
My life is being blotted out behind me according to a precise map.
How much longer can those memories hold out?
They killed the little girl from my childhood and my father is dead.
So don’t ever choose me for a lover or a son,
a tenant, a crosser of bridges, a citizen.
12
On the last words of Trumpeldor,
It is good to die for our country, they built
the new homeland, like hornets in crazy nests.
And even if those were not the words,
or he never said them, or if he did and they drifted away,
they are still there, vaulted like a cave. The cement
has become harder than stone. This is my homeland
where I can dream without stumbling,
do bad deeds without being damned,
neglect my wife without feeling lonely,
cry without shame, lie and betray
without going to hell for it.
This is the land we covered with field and forest
but we had no time to cover our faces
so they are naked in the grimace of sorrow and the ugliness of joy.
This is the land whose dead lie in the ground
instead of coal and iron and gold:
they are fuel for the coming of messiahs.
14
Because of the will of the night, I left the land
of the setting sun.
I came too late for the cedars, there weren’t any more.
I also came too late for A. D. Gordon, and most of the swamps
were already drained when I was a child.
But my held-back weeping
hardened the foundations. And my feet, moving
in desperate joy, did what ploughs do,
and pavers of roads.
And when I became a man, the voice
of Rachel-weeping-for-her-children broke too.
My thoughts come back to me toward evening
like those who harvested in the days of Degania, in dust and joy.
