The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (19 page)

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.

On top of the hay wagon.

Now I live in a city of hills where it gets dark

before it does at the seashore.

And I live in a house that gets dark before it does outside.

But in my heart, where I really live,

it’s always dark.

Perhaps one day there will finally be light

as in the far North.

15

Even my loves are measured by wars.

I say, “That happened after

the Second World War.”
“We met

a day before the Six Day War.”
I would never say

“before the peace of ’45-’48” or “in the middle of

the peace of ’56-’67.”

Yet the knowledge of peace

makes its way from one place to another

like children’s games,

which are so much alike everywhere you go.

17

An Armenian funeral on Mount Zion: the coffin

is carried, wobbling, like a bit of straw

in a procession of black ants.

The widow’s black purse gleams

in the setting sun.
That you are

Our Father, that he is Our King, that we have

no Savior in our time.

18

The graves in Jerusalem are the openings

of deep tunnels

on the day of the ground-breaking ceremonies.

After that they stop digging.

The gravestones are magnificent

cornerstones of buildings

that will never get built.

21

Jerusalem’s a place where everyone remembers

he’s forgotten something

but doesn’t remember what it is.

And for the sake of remembering

I wear my father’s face over mine.

This is the city where my dream containers fill up

like a diver’s oxygen tanks.

Its holiness

sometimes turns into love.

And the questions that are asked in these hills

are the same as they’ve always been: “Have you

seen my sheep?”
“Have you seen

my shepherd?”

And the door of my house stands open

like a tomb

where someone was resurrected.

22

This is the end of the landscape.
Among blocks

of concrete and rusting iron

there’s a fig tree with heavy fruit

but even kids don’t come around to pick it.

This is the end of the landscape.

Inside the carcass of a mattress rotting in the field

the springs stay put, like souls.