The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (11 page)

Jewish eyes.
He knows

that the sword too is hurt when it pierces flesh.

In his next incarnation he’ll be a sword: the hurt will remain.

(“The door is open.
If not, the key is under

the mat.”)

He knows about the mercy of twilight and about the final

mercy.
In the Bible, he’s listed with the clean animals.

He’s very kosher: chews his cud,

and even his heart is divided and cloven like a hoof.

From his chest, hairs burst forth

dry and gray, as though from a split mattress.

A Luxury

My uncle is buried at Sheikh Badr, my other uncle

is scattered in the Carpathians, my father is buried in Sanhedria,

my grandmother on the Mount of Olives, and all their forefathers

are buried in a half-destroyed Jewish graveyard

among the villages of Lower Franconia,

near rivers and forests that are not Jerusalem.

Grandfather, Grandfather, who converted heavy-eyed cows

in his barn underneath the kitchen and got up at four in the morning.

I inherited this earliness from him.
With a mouth

bitter from nightmares, I go out to feed my bad dreams.

Grandfather, Grandfather, chief rabbi of my life,

sell my pains the way you used to sell

khametz
on Passover eve: so that they stay in me and even go on hurting

but won’t be mine.
Won’t belong to me.

So many tombstones are scattered in the past of my life,

engraved names like the names of stations

where the train doesn’t stop any more.

How will I cover all the distances on my own routes,

how will I make connections among them all?
I can’t afford

to maintain such an expensive railway system.
It’s a luxury.

To Bake the Bread of Yearning

The last time I went to see my child

he was still eating pablum.
Now, sadly,

bread and meat, with knife and fork,

with manners that are already preparing him

to die quietly, politely.

He thinks I’m a sailor, knows I don’t have a ship

or a sea; only great distances and winds.

The movements of my father’s body in prayer

and mine in lovemaking

are already folded in his small body.

To be an adult means

to bake the bread of yearning

all night long, with reddened face

in front of the fire.
My child sees.

And the powerful spell
See you soon

which he’s learned to say

works only among the dead.

National Thoughts

A woman, caught in a homeland-trap of the Chosen People: you.

Cossack’s fur hat on your head: you the

offspring of their pogroms.
“After these things had come to pass,”

always.

Or, for example, your face: slanting eyes,

eyes descended from massacre.
High cheekbones

of a hetman, head of murderers.

But a mitzvah dance of Hasidim,

naked on a rock at twilight,

beside the water canopies of Ein Gedi,

with eyes closed and body open like hair.
After

these things had come to pass.
“Always.”

People caught in a homeland-trap:

to speak now in this weary language,

a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled,

it wobbles from mouth to mouth.
In a language that once described

miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.

Square letters want to stay

closed; each letter a closed house,

to stay and to close yourself in

and to sleep inside it, forever.

A Pity.
We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated

your thighs from my hips.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re always

doctors.
All of them.

They dismantled us

from each other.
As far as I’m concerned,

they’re engineers.

A pity.
We were such a good and loving

invention: an airplane made of a man and a woman,

wings and all:

we even got off

the ground a little.

We even flew.

Elegy

The wind won’t come to draw smiles in the sand of dreams.

The wind will be strong.

And people are walking without flowers,

unlike their children in the festival of the first fruits.

And a few of them are victors and most of them are vanquished,

passing through the arch of others’ victories

and as on the Arch of Titus everything appears, in bas-relief:

the warm and belovéd bed, the faithful and much-scrubbed pot,

and the lamp, not the one with the seven branches, but the simple one,

the good one, which didn’t fail even on winter nights,

and the table, a domestic animal that stands on four legs and keeps

silent.
.
.
.

And they are brought into the arena to fight with wild beasts

and they see the heads of the spectators in the stadium

and their courage is like the crying of their children,

persistent, persistent and ineffectual.

And in their back pocket, letters are rustling,

and the victors put the words into their mouths

and if they sing, it is not their own song,

and the victors set large yearnings inside them

like loaves of dough

and they bake these in their love

and the victors will eat the warm bread and
they
won’t.

But a bit of their love remains on them

like the primitive decorations on ancient urns:

the first, modest line of emotion all around

and then the swirl of dreams

and then two parallel lines,

mutual love,

or a pattern of small flowers, a memory of childhood, high-stalked

and thin-legged.

Threading

Loving each other began this way: threading

loneliness into loneliness

patiently, our hands trembling and precise.

Longing for the past gave our eyes

the double security of what won’t change

and of what can’t be returned to.

But the heart must kill one of us

on one of its forays,

if not you—me,

when it comes back empty-handed,

like Cain, a boomerang from the field.

Now in the Storm

Now in the storm before the calm

I can tell you what

in the calm before the storm I didn’t say

because they would have heard us and discovered our hiding-place.

That we were just neighbors in the fierce wind,

brought together in the ancient
hamsin
from Mesopotamia.

And the Latter Prophets of my veins’ kingdom

prophesied into the firmament of your flesh.

And the weather was good for us and for the heart,

and the sun’s muscles were flexed inside us and golden

in the Olympiad of emotions, on the faces of thousands of spectators,

so that we would know, and remain, and there would again be clouds.

Look, we met in a protected place, in the angle

where history began to arise, quiet

and safe from all the hasty events.

And the voice began to tell stories in the evening, by the children’s bed.

And now it’s too early for archaeology

and too late to repair what has been done.

Summer will arrive, and the
clop, clop
of the hard sandals

will sink in the soft sand, forever.

Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela

You ate and were filled, you came

in your twelfth year, in the Thirties

of the world, with short pants that reached down to your knees,

tassels dangling from your undershawl

sticky between your legs in the sweltering land.

Your skin still smooth, without protective hair.

The brown, round eyes you had, according

to the pattern of ripe cherries, will get used to

oranges.
Orange scents.
Innocence.

Clocks were set, according

to the beats of the round heart, train tracks

according to the capacity of children’s feet.

And silently, like a doctor and mother, the days bent over me

and started to whisper to one another, while the grass

already was laid flat by the bitter wind

on the slope of hills I will never walk on again.

Moon and stars and ancient deeds of grownups

were placed on a high shelf beyond

my arm’s reach;

and I stood in vain underneath the forbidden bookshelves.

But even then I was marked for annihilation like an orange scored

for peeling, like chocolate, like a hand-grenade for explosion and death.

The hand of fate held me, aimed.
My skies were the

inside of the soft palm wrapped around me, and on the outside:

rough skin, hard stars, protruding veins,

airplane routes, black hairs, mortar-shell trajectories

in silence or in wailing, in black or in radiant flares.

And before I was real and lingering here

the heart’s shoulders carried an anguish not mine

and from somewhere else ideas entered, slowed-down

and with a deep rumble, like a train

into the hollow, listening station.

You ate and were filled and recited the blessing

alone and in company and alone.

In the bridal chamber after the wedding, and outside

the bearded witnesses stood and listened

to the sounds of love, to the sighs and murmurs and screams,

mine and yours, in that room.
And at the door

wedding gifts piled up like gifts for the

dead at the mouth of the Pharaohs’ tombs.

Stone lions from the bridges of my childhood city watched over us

along with stone lions from the old house in Jerusalem.

You didn’t eat, weren’t filled.
You spoke big words

with a small mouth.
Your heart will never learn to judge distances.

The farthest distance it knows is the nearest tree,

the curb of the sidewalk, the face of the belovèd.
Like a blind man,

the blind heart hit against the obstacle with its cane and it still

hits and gropes, without advancing.
Hits and will hit.

Loneliness is one of the tenses in which an action’s time

can be conjugated: hits, will hit.
Time is a fragrance.
For example,

the fragrance of 1929, when sorrow recited over you the blessing

of the first fruits.
And you didn’t know that you

were her first fruit.

You were educated in a Montessori kindergarten.
They taught you

to love doing things alone, with your very own hands,

they educated you for loneliness.
You masturbated

in secret: nocturnal emissions, diurnal additions.
“I’ll tell your father.”