The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (20 page)

The house I lived in gets farther and farther away

but a light was left burning in the window

so that people would only see and not hear.

This is the end.

And how to start loving again is like the problem

of architects in an old city: how to build

where houses once stood, so it will look like

those days, yet also like now.

23

Nineteen years this city was divided—

the lifetime of a young man who might have fallen in the war.

I long for the serenity and for the old longing.

Crazy people would cross through the fence that divided it,

enemies breached it,

lovers went up to it, testing,

like circus acrobats who try out the net

before they dare to jump.

The patches of no-man’s-land were like placid bays.

Longing floated overhead in the sky

like ships whose anchors stuck deep in us, and sweetly

ached.

27

The toys of an only God

who is rich and spoiled:

dolls, angels, marbles, a bell and glass,

golden wheels, bundles of flutes.

But the toys of the poor children

of a poor God: prayer rattles, dry

palm branches, matzohs.
And at the very most,

a Havdoleh box for cheap spices

with a little flag on top that goes round and round.

29

People travel a long distance to be able to say: This reminds me

of some other place.

It’s like that time, it’s similar.
But

I knew a man who traveled all the way to New York

to commit suicide.
He claimed that the buildings in Jerusalem

were too low and besides, everyone knew him here.

I remember him fondly because once

he called me out of the classroom in the middle of a lesson:

“A beautiful woman is waiting for you outside, in the garden.”

And he quieted the noisy children.

Whenever I think about the woman and the garden,

I remember him up on that high roof:

the loneliness of his death, the death of his loneliness.

31

Four synagogues are entrenched together

against bombardments from God.

In the first, Holy Arks with candies hidden away,

and sweet preserves of God’s Word from a blessed season,

all in beautiful jars, for children

to stand on tiptoe and lick with a golden finger.

Also ovens with
cholent
and oatmeal running over.

In the second, four strong pillars for an everlasting

wedding canopy.
The result

of love.

The third, an old Turkish bathhouse with small, high windows

and Torah scrolls, naked

or taking off their robes.
Answer, answer us

in clouds of vapor and white steam,

Answer, answer
till the senses swoon.

The fourth:

part of God’s bequest.

Yes.
These are thy tents, O Jacob,
in profundis.

“From here we begin the descent.
Please remain seated

till the signal lights up.”
As on a flight

that will never land.

32

In the lot through which lovers took a short-cut

the Rumanian circus is parked.

Clouds mill around the setting sun like refugees

in a strange city of refuge.

A man of the twentieth century

casts a dark purple Byzantine shadow.

A woman shades her eyes with a raised hand, ringing

a bunch of lifted grapes.

Pain found me in the street

and whistled to his companions: Here’s another one.

New houses flooded my father’s grave

like tank columns.
It stayed proud and didn’t surrender.

A man who has no portion in the world to come

sleeps with a woman who does.

Their lust is reinforced by the self-restraint

in the monasteries all around.

This house has love carved on its gate

and loneliness for supports.

“From the roof you can see” or “Next year”—

between these two a whole life goes on.

In this city, the water level

is always beneath the level of the dead.

34

Let the memorial hill remember instead of me,

that’s what it’s here for.
Let the park in-memory-of remember,

let the street that’s-named-for remember,

let the famous building remember,

let the synagogue that’s named after God remember,

let the rolling Torah scroll remember, let the prayer

for the memory of the dead remember.
Let the flags remember,

those multicolored shrouds of history: the bodies they wrapped

have long since turned to dust.
Let the dust remember.

Let the dung remember at the gate.
Let the afterbirth remember.

Let the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens

eat and remember.

Let all of them remember so that I can rest.

35

In the summer whole peoples visit one another

to spy out each other’s nakedness.

Hebrew and Arabic, that are like guttural

stones, like sand on the palate,

grow soft as oil for the tourists’ sake.

Jihad and Jehovah’s wars

burst like ripe figs.

Jerusalem’s water pipes protrude

like the veins and sinews of a tired old man.

Its houses are like the teeth of a lower jaw,

grinding in vain

because the skies above it are empty.

Perhaps Jerusalem is a dead city

with people

swarming like maggots.

Sometimes they celebrate.

36

Every evening God takes his glittery merchandise

out of the shop window:

chariot works, tablets of law, fancy beads,

crosses and gleaming bells,

and puts them back into dark boxes

inside, and closes the shutter: “Another day,

and still not one prophet has come to buy.”

37

All these stones, all this sorrow, all this

light, rubble of night hours and noon-dust,

all the twisted pipework of sanctity,

Wailing Wall, towers, rusty halos,

all the prophecies that—like old men—couldn’t hold it in,

all the sweaty angels’ wings,

all the stinking candles, all the prosthetic tourism,

dung of deliverance, bliss-and-balls,

dregs of nothingness, bomb and time.

All this dust, all these bones

in the process of resurrection and of the wind,

all this love, all these

stones, all this sorrow—

Go heap them into the valleys all around

so Jerusalem will be level

for my sweet airplane

that will come and carry me up.

Songs of Continuity

Songs of continuity, land mines and graves:

that’s what turns up when you’re making a house or a road.

Then come the black crow people from Meah She’arim

with their bitter screeching: “A body!
A dead body!”

Then the young soldiers with their hands

of the night before,

dismantling iron to decipher death.

So come on, let’s not build a house, let’s not pave a road!

Let’s make a house that’s folded inside the heart,

a road wound up on a spool in the soul, deep inside,

and we won’t die, ever.

People here live inside prophecies that have come true

as inside a heavy cloud that didn’t disperse

after an explosion.

And so in their lonely blindness they touch one another

between the legs, between day and night,

because they have no other time and they

have no other place, and the prophets

died a long time ago.

At the Monastery of Latroun

At the monastery of Latroun, waiting for the wine

to be wrapped for me inside the cool building,

all the laziness of this land came over me:

Holy, Holy, Holy.

I was lying on my back in the dry grass

watching the summer clouds high up in the sky,

motionless, like me down here.

Rain in another country, peace in my heart.

And white seeds will fly from my penis

as from a dandelion.

Come on, now:
Poof, poof.

When I Was Young, the Whole Country Was Young

When I was young, the whole country was young.
And my father

was everyone’s father.
When I was happy, the country

was happy too, and when I jumped on her, she jumped

under me.
The grass that covered her in spring

softened me too, and the dry earth of summer hurt me

like my own cracked footsoles.

When I first fell in love, they proclaimed

her independence, and when my hair

fluttered in the breeze, so did her flags.

When I fought in the war, she fought, when I got up

she got up too, and when I sank

she began to sink with me.

Now I’m beginning to come apart from all that:

like something that’s glued, after the glue dries out,

I’m getting detached and curling into myself.

The other day I saw a clarinet player in the Police Band

that was playing at David’s Citadel.

His hair was white and his face calm: a face

of 1946, the one and only year

between famous and terrible years

when nothing happened except for a great hope and his music

and my loving a girl in a quiet room in Jerusalem.

I hadn’t seen him since then, but the hope for a better world

never left his face.

Afterward I bought myself some non-kosher salami

and two bagels, and I walked home.

I managed to hear the evening news

and ate and lay down on the bed

and the memory of my first love came back to me

like the sensation of falling

just before sleep.

I Walked Past a House Where I Lived Once

I walked past a house where I lived once:

a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there.

Many years have passed with the quiet hum

of the staircase bulb going on

and off and on again.

The keyholes are like little wounds

where all the blood seeped out.
And inside,

people pale as death.

I want to stand once again as I did

holding my first love all night long in the doorway.

When we left at dawn, the house

began to fall apart and since then the city and since then

the whole world.

I want to be filled with longing again

till dark burn marks show on my skin.

I want to be written again

in the Book of Life, to be written every single day

till the writing hand hurts.

To My Love, Combing Her Hair

To my love, combing her hair