The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (12 page)

Rosh Hashanah halls echoey and hollow, and white

Yom Kippur machines made of bright metal, cogwheels

of prayers, a conveyor belt of prostrations and bows

with a menacing buzz.
You have sinned, you have gone astray

inside a dark womb shaped like the dome of a synagogue,

the round, primordial cave of prayer,

the holy ark, gaping open, blinded you

in a third-degree interrogation.
Do you confess?
Do you confess?

I confess before Thee
in the morning with the sun out.
What’s

your name?
Do you surrender?
You have transgressed, you are guilty, are you alive?

How do you?
(“Do you love me?”) You have remembered, you have forgotten.

Oh Montessori, Montessori, with your white hair,

the first dead woman that I loved.
“Hey kid!”
Even now

I turn around in the street if I hear that

behind me.

Slowly and with terrible pains the I turns into a he, after

resting a little in the you.
You turns into they.
The surgery is performed

with open eyes, only the place is anesthetized with ice perhaps

or with a love pill.
After you too they will call: Dreamer!
Dreamer!

You won’t be able to.
What’s your name now?
And not even

one name did I take in vain.
Names are for

children.
An adult gets far away from his name.
He is left

with the name of the family.
Afterward father, teacher, uncle, mister, oh mister,

hey you there!
(Do you love me?—That’s different,

that’s more than a name), afterward numbers and afterward

perhaps: he, he’s gone out, they’ll be back, they, hey!
Hey!

The forest of names is bare, and the kinder-garden

has shed the leaves of its trees and is black and will die.

And on Sabbath eve they sewed my handkerchief

to the corner of my pants pocket so that I wouldn’t sin by carrying it

on the Sabbath.
And on holy-days
kohanim
blessed me

from inside the white caves of their prayer-shawls, with fingers

twisted like epileptics.
I looked at them

and God didn’t thunder: and since then his thunder has grown

more and more remote and become a huge

silence.
I looked at them and my eyes weren’t blinded: and since then

my eyes have grown more and more open from year to year, beyond

sleep, till pain, beyond eyelids, beyond clouds, beyond years.

Death is not sleep but gaping eyes, the whole body

gaping with eyes since there’s not enough space in the narrow world.

Angels looked like Torah scrolls in velvet dresses and petticoats

of white silk, with crowns and little silver bells, angels

fluttered around me and sniffed at my heart and cried ah!
ah!

to one another with adult smiles.
“I’ll tell your father.”

And even now, after thirty-three years, my father’s blessing

remains in my hair, though it grew desert-wild,

blood-sticky and dust-yellow, and though I sheared it and shortened it

to a military brush or a sad urban French pompadour

stuck to my forehead.
Nevertheless

the blessing remains in the hair of my blessed head.

You came via Haifa.
The harbor was new, the child was new.

You lay on your belly, so you could kiss the holy ground,

but to duck from the shots of 1936.
British soldiers

wearing cork sun-helmets of a great empire,

envoys of a crumbling kingdom, opened for you

the new kingdom of your life.
“What’s your name?”
Soldiers

opened for you with arms of engraved tattoo: a dragon, a woman’s breasts

and thighs, a knife and a primeval coiled serpent, a large

rose and a girl’s buttocks.
Since then the tattoo’s

words and pictures have been sinking into you, without being seen

on the outside.
The words sink further and further in a continuous

engraving and pain, down to your soul, which is itself an inscribed scroll

rolled up like a mezuzah the whole length of your inner body.

You have become a collector of pains in the tradition of this land.

“My God, my God, why?”
Hast Thou forsaken me.
My God, my God.
Even then

he had to be called twice.
The second call

was already like a question, out of a first doubt: my God?

I haven’t said the last word yet.
I haven’t

eaten yet and already I’m filled.
My cough isn’t

from smoke or from illness.
It is a concentrated

and time-saving form of question.

Whatever happened is as though it never happened and all the rest

I don’t know.
Perhaps it is written in the difficult books on the shelf,

in the concordances of pain and in the dictionaries of joy,

in the encyclopedias with pages stuck together like eyes that don’t want

to let go of their dream at dawn, in the terrible volumes of correspondence

between Marx/Engels, I/you, God/he,

in the Book of Job, in the difficult words.
Verses

that are deep cuts in my flesh.
Wounds long

and red from whip lashes, wounds filled with white salt, like the meat

that my mother would salt and kosher so that there wouldn’t be any blood,

just pink blood-soaked salt, just pains that are

a searing knowledge,
kashrut
and purity.

The rest—unknown and estrangement in the dark.
Like the brothers in Egypt

we will wait, bending down in the darkness of our knees, hiding

submissive faces, till the world can’t hold back any longer

and weeps and cries out: I am Joseph your brother!
I am the world!

In the year the war broke out I passed by your mother’s belly

in which you were sitting already then curled up as in the nights with me.

The rhythm of orange-grove pumps and the rhythm of shots were our rhythm.

It’s starting!
Light and pain, iron and dust and stones.

Stones and flesh and iron in changing combinations

of matter.
Render unto matter that which is matter’s.
Dust, dust,

from man thou art and unto man shalt thou return.
It’s starting!

My blood flows in many colors and pretends to be red

when it bursts outside.
The navel of the belovèd, also,

is an eye to foresee the End of Days.
End and beginning in her body.

Two creases in the right buttock, one crease in the left,

glittering eyeglasses next to white skin of belly, an eyebrow

arched in the scream of the eye, black soft silk over

taut skin of heavy thighs.
Shoulder distinct

and prominent, crossed by a strap of strict black cloth.

Shoulder and shoulder, flesh and flesh, dust and dust.

Like a legend and a child, love and fro, world and ear,

time within the snailshell of a smile, love and open up:

the house to the night, the earth to the dead and to the rain,

the morning after the gift of sun.
Spring raised in us

green words, and summer bet that we would be first to

arrive, and love burst out from inside us, all at once,

all over our bodies, like sweat, in the fear of our lives, in the race of our lives, in the game.

And children grew up and matured, for the surface of the waters

constantly rises in the terrible flood, and all their growing

is because of the rising flood, so they won’t drown.

And still, his fingers stained with moon, like a teacher’s with chalk,

God strokes our head, and already his wrists

are poetry and angels!
And what his elbows are!
And the face

of the woman, already turned toward something else.
A profile in the window.

The veins in my legs are beginning to swell, because my legs think

a lot, and their walk is thinking.
Into the abandoned wasteland

in my emotions the wild beasts return, who had abandoned it when I cleared

and drained and made my life a settled civilization.
Long

rows of books, calm rooms and corridors.

My body is constructed for good resonance like a concert hall,

the sound of weeping and screams won’t penetrate.
The walls are absorbent

and impermeable, waves of memories rebound.
And above me, on the ceiling,

objects of childhood, soft words, women’s dresses, my father’s prayer shawl,

half bodies, big wooly toys, clouds,

good-night chunks, heavy hair: to increase the resonance inside me.

Dust, dust, my body, the installation of half my life.
Still

bold scaffoldings of hopes, trembling ladders that lean

against what is unfinished from the outside, even the head is nothing but

the lowest of the additional floors that were planned.

My eyes, one of them awake and interested, the other indifferent

and far away, as if receiving everything from within, and my hands

that pull sheets over the faces of the dead and the living.
Finis.

My face, when I shave, is the face of a white-foamed clown, the only foam

that isn’t from wrath.
My face is something between

a mad bull and a migratory bird that has lost the direction of

its flight, and lags behind the flock,

but sees slow good things before it dies in the sea.

Even then, and ever since then, I met

the stagehands of my life, moving the walls

and the furniture and the people, putting up and taking down

new illusions of new houses,

different landscapes, distances

seen in perspective, not real distances,

closeness and not true closeness.
All of them,

my lovers and my haters, are directors and stagehands,

electricians to light up with a different light, making distant

and bringing close, changers, hangers and hanged.

All the days of his life my father tried to make a man of me,

so that I’d have a hard face like Kosygin and Brezhnev,

like generals and admirals and stockbrokers and financiers,

all the unreal fathers I’ve established

instead of my father, in the soft land of the “seven kinds”

(not just two, male and female, but seven kinds

beyond us, more lustful, harder and more deadly than we are).

I have to screw onto my face the expression of a hero

like a lightbulb screwed into the grooves of its hard socket,

to screw in and to shine.

All the days of his life my father tried to make

a man of me, but I always slip back

into the softness of thighs and the yearning to say the daily blessing

who hath made me according to his will.
And his will is woman.

My father was afraid to say a wasted blessing.

To say
who hath created the fruit of the tree
and not eat the apple.

To bless without loving.
To love without being filled.

I ate and wasn’t filled and didn’t say the blessing.