The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by Chana Bloch

as it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses,

  I do each day in haste

  or in sleepless nights, rolling over from side to side.

  The longer you live, the more people there are

  who comment on your actions. Like a worker

  in a manhole: at the opening above him

  people stand around giving free advice

  and yelling instructions,

  but he’s all alone down there in his depths.

  The Box

  Once my salary wasn’t transferred from the place where I work to my bank account. I went to the bank and entered the large hall that looks like a gleaming space station. I approached the pretty clerk and she scrolled the letters and the numerals on the computer screen in front of her. And she said, That’s right, the money wasn’t transferred. So I said, Look, I know that, that’s why I came. So she sent me to the floor below her to a large quiet hall more gleaming than the one before. And a clerk more lovely than the one before scrolled the letters and the numerals on a screen that was larger than the one before, and she said to me, That’s right, the money wasn’t transferred. So I said, But I know that, that’s why I came. So she sent me to the cellar of the bank beneath her. And the cellar doesn’t gleam, and there are no computers, no pretty clerks, and it is lit by a yellow light like the light in my childhood.

  And a soft, aging clerk heard me and went over to the wooden cabinets behind him in which there were many files and cardboard boxes. He searched and took out a cardboard box, put it on the table and took the rubber band off the box. And the rubber band was broad and pink as the elastic on women’s underwear when I was young. And he thumbed through the papers in the box, found the paper, made amends for the money that wasn’t transferred, closed the box, wound the pink rubber band around it and put it back in the cabinet. And I said to myself: That box is like my inner-most heart, and I came up from the cellar and went out into the street.

  The Last Word Is the Captain

  Because my head hasn’t grown

  since I stopped growing, and my memories

  have piled up inside me,

  I have to assume they’re now in my belly

  and my thighs and legs. A sort of walking archive,

  an orderly disorder, a cargo hold weighing down

  an overloaded ship.

  Sometimes I want to lie down on a park bench:

  that would change my status

  from Lost Inside to

  Lost Outside.

  Words have begun to abandon me

  as rats abandon a sinking ship.

  The last word is the captain.

  Statistics

  For every man in a rage there are always

  two or three back-patters who will calm him,

  for every weeper, many more tear-wipers,

  for every happy man, plenty of sad ones

  who want to warm themselves at his happiness.

  And every night at least one man

  can’t find his way home

  or his home has moved to another place

  and he runs around in the streets,

  superfluous.

  Once I was waiting with my little son at the station

  as an empty bus went by. My son said:

  “Look, a bus full of empty people.”

  The Hour of Grace

  I used to think it could be solved this way:

  like people gathering in the station at midnight

  for the last bus that will not come,

  at first just a few, then more and more.

  That was a chance to be close to one another,

  to change everything, together

  to start a new world.

  But they disperse.

  (The hour of grace has passed. It won’t

  come again.) Each one will go his own way.

  Each will be a domino again

  with one side up, looking

  for another piece to match it

  in games that go on and on.

  What a Complicated Mess

  What a complicated mess in this little country,

  what confusion! “The second son of the first husband

  is off to fight his third war. The Second Temple

  of God the First is destroyed again every year.”

  My doctor treats the intestines

  of the shoemaker who mends the shoes of the man

  who defended me in my fourth trial.

  In my comb there’s hair that’s not mine,

  and in my handkerchief, someone else’s sweat.

  Other people’s memories cling to me

  like dogs, drawn by the smell,

  and I have to drive them away

  with scolding and a stick.

  And each one’s infected by the others, and each one

  keeps touching the others, leaving

  his fingerprints. The Angel of Death

  must be an expert detective

  to tell them apart.

  Once I knew a soldier who was killed in the war.

  Three or four women mourned him:

  He loved me. I loved him.

  I was his. He was mine.

  Soltam makes cannons together with cooking pots

  and I don’t make anything.

  I Lost My Identity Card

  I lost my identity card.

  I have to write out the story of my life

  all over again for many offices, one copy to God

  and one to the devil.

  I remember the photo taken thirty-three years ago

  at a wind-scorched junction in the Negev.

  My eyes were prophets then, but my body had no idea

  what it was going through or where it belonged.

  You often say, “This is the place,

  this happened right here,” but its not the place,

  you just think so and live in error,

  an error whose eternity is greater

  than the eternity of truth.

  As the years go by, my life keeps filling up with names

  like abandoned cemeteries

  or like an empty history class

  or a telephone book in a foreign city.

  And death is when someone behind you keeps calling

  and calling

  and you no longer turn around to see

  who.

  On Mount Muhraka

  Here where the laurel grows

  as magnificent trees, not as shrubs anymore,

  we heard our last tune

  for the very first time. Since then I listen to it

  alone. Your sobbing remained

  in the valley near Sheikh Abrek. Our joy

  was up on the mountain. We trampled spring flowers

  with our heavy love: the flowers will have their revenge

  someday, when they grow over us.

  The wind opened our souls

  like a secret last will.

  And Gods wild laughter was translated into

  the oily whine of a cantor.

  Not to see you ever again was manageable,

  as it turned out: look, we went on living.

  But not to see you the very next day

  was impossible,

  you see: we died.

  Summer Begins

  Summer begins. In the old cemetery

  the tall grass has already grown dry and once again

  you can read the words on the tombstones.

  The western winds have returned to the west like expert sailors.

  The eastern winds lie in wait for their moment

  like Essene monks in the caves of the Judean desert.

  And in the silence between the winds you can hear once again

  the voices defining you and your actions

  like the voices in a museum or in school.

  You’re not any better understood, and you don’t

  understand any better.

  Mortality is not death, birthrate

  is not ch
ildren,

  and life, perhaps, is not life—

  A little rosemary, a little basil, some

  hope, some marjoram for the heart, a little mint

  for the nostrils, joy for the pupils of the eyes

  and a little

  consolation, warm.

  Hamadiya

  Hamadiya, memory of pleasures. The forties

  and love on the threshing floor. The chaff

  pricks me even now, though my body

  has washed many times since then and my clothes

  have been changed again and again and the girl left for

  the fifties and vanished inside the sixties and was lost forever

  in the seventies—the chaff pricks me even now,

  my throat is hoarse from so much shouting:

  Come back one more time you

  come back to me come back time come back loquat tree!

  Love used to be the raw material of this poor country,

  real life and dream joined to make the climate,

  here joy and sorrow were still

  weather conditions.

  Dangers pounded all around like water-pumps

  hidden in orchards, and the voice

  that began as a cry for help

  became a calming song.

  We didn’t know then that the debris of joy

  is like the debris of any wreckage:

  you have to clear it away to start over again.

  At the Seashore

  The pain-people think that God is the god of joy,

  the joy-people think that God is the god of pain.

  The coast-people think that love is in the mountains,

  and the mountain-people think that love is at the seashore

  so they go down to the sea.

  The waves bring back even things we haven’t lost.

  I choose a smooth pebble and say over it,

  “I’lI never see that one again.”

  Eternity makes more sense

  in the negative:

  “I’ll never see. I’ll never come back.”

  So what good will it do you to get a tan? You’ll be

  a sadness, roasted and beautiful, an enticing scent.

  When we came up from the seashore, we didn’t see the water

  but near the new road we saw a deep pit

  and beside it a huge wooden spool wound with heavy cable:

  all the conversations of the future, all the silences.

  On Some Other Planet You May Be Right

  “On some other planet you may be right,

  but not here.” In the middle of talking you shifted

  to a silent weeping, as people shift from blue to black

  in the middle of a letter when a pen goes dry,

  or as they used to change horses during a journey.

  Talk grew tired, tears

  are fresh.

  Seeds of summer flew into the room

  we were sitting in. In front of the window

  there was an almond tree growing black:

  one more warrior in the eternal battle

  of the sweet against the bitter.

  Look, just as time isn’t inside clocks

  love isn’t inside bodies:

  bodies only tell the love.

  But we will remember this evening

  the way swimmers remember the strokes

  from one summer to the next. “On some other planet

  you may be right, but not here.”

  Autumn Rain in Tel Aviv

  A proud, very beautiful woman sold me

  a piece of sweet cake

  across the counter. Her eyes hard, her back to the sea.

  Black clouds on the horizon

  forecast storm and lightning

  and her body answered them from inside

  her sheer dress,

  still a summer dress,

  like fierce dogs awakening.

  That night, among friends in a closed room,

  I listened to the heavy rain pelting the window

  and the voice of a dead man on tape:

  the reel was turning

  against the direction of time.

  A Flock of Sheep Near the Airport

  A flock of sheep near the airport

  or a high voltage generator beside the orchard:

  these combinations open up my life

  like a wound, but they also heal it.

  That’s why my feelings always come in twos.

  That’s why I’m like a man who tears up a letter

  and then has second thoughts,

  picking up the pieces and pasting them together again

  with great pains, sometimes

  for the rest of his life.

  But once I went looking for my son at night

  and found him in an empty basketball court

  lit by a powerful floodlight.

  He was playing all alone,

  and the sound of the ball bouncing

  was the only sound in the world.

  Almost a Love Poem

  If my parents and yours

  hadn’t emigrated to the Land of Israel

  in 1936,

  we would have met in 1944

  there. On the ramp at Auschwitz.

  I at twenty,

  you at five.

  Where’s your mameh,

  your tateh?

  What’s your name?

  Hanaleh.

  They Are All Dice

  With great love the people

  stand beside the lowered barrier.

  In each of their minds a single thought,

  licked clean as a bone.

  From her small booth,

  the lottery woman leans out to watch.

  The non-train passes by,

  the non-expected arrives.

  With great love, afterward,

  the people disperse.

  With hair loose and eyes

  shut tight, they sleep:

  They are all dice

  that landed on the lucky side.

  A Precise Woman

  A precise woman with a short haircut brings order

  to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,

  moves feelings around like furniture

  into a new arrangement.

  A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided

  into upper and lower,

  with weather-forecast eyes

  of shatterproof glass.

  Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,

  one after the other:

  tame dove, then wild dove,

  then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,

  then wild dove, tame dove, dove dove

  thrush, thrush, thrush.

  A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet

  her shoes always point away from the bed.

  (My own shoes point toward it.)

  Jasmine

  The jasmine came upon us, as always, from behind,

  when we were drunk and vulnerable.

  All evening we spoke about the armor of perfume

  that will be pierced by pain, the security

  candy provides, about brown

  chocolate insulation,

  about old disappointments that become

  the hope of the young

  like clothes that went out of fashion

  and now are worn again.

  At night I dreamed about jasmine.

  And the next day the scent of jasmine penetrated

  even the interpretations of the dream.

  Kibbutz Gevaram

  In these low hills, lives that were meant to endure

  came to an end, and what we thought was smoke

  proved more steady than our ephemeral lives.

  Even the abandoned oil rigs became a part

  of this pretty landscape, marking

  the settings of love and death like the trees

  and the water towers.

  This winter the
river gouged out the almond grove

  and left it in tatters. The roots of the trees were exposed,

  beautiful as branches in the sunlight,

  but for a few days only.

  Here the sand dunes hand down to the limestone

  and the limestone to the loam, and the loam

  to the heavy soil, and the heavy soil to the boulders

  at the edge of the coastal plain. Handing-down and continuity,

  tradition and change without human beings,

  abundance and abyss. And the droning of the bees

  and the droning of time are one.

  (In Gevaram, in a wooden shack, I once saw

  books by Buber and Rilke on the shelf

  and prints of Van Gogh and Modigliani.

  It was on the eve of deadly battles.)

  And there’s a grove of eucalyptus trees,

  pale, as if sick with longing.

  They don’t know what they’re longing for

  and I tell them now in a quiet voice:

  Australia, Australia.

  History

  A man all alone in an empty room

  practices on a drum. That, too, is history.

  His wife irons a flag for the holiday

  and his son cries out in his dream.

  A man discovers his name in a phone book

  and is terrified.

  A great man subdues his desire,

  and his desire dies.

  A wise man sees the future,

  but the future sees him and yearns

  to go back into the womb.

  A man who is content with his lot weeps into

  a sophisticated network of pipes, nicely concealed.

  A foreign language passes by in the street

  like three angels from long, long ago.

  The Real Hero

  The real hero of The Binding of Isaac was the ram,

  who didn’t know about the collusion between the others.

  He was volunteered to die instead of Isaac.

  I want to sing a memorial song about him—

  about his curly wool and his human eyes,

  about the horns that were so silent on his living head,

  and how they made those horns into shofars when he was slaughtered

  to sound their battle cries

  or to blare out their obscene joy.

  I want to remember the last frame

  like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine: