The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (24 page)

puts his head down on the old man’s knees

and doesn’t understand.

Beyond them, some pretty girls are sitting on a rock

like severe lawyers

to defend the summer and administer its estate.

And a bit farther, near a dark cave there’s a fig tree,

that brothel where ripe figs

couple with wasps and are split to death.

There is laughter that isn’t burnt, weeping that isn’t dried out,

and a deep stillness everywhere.

But a great love begins here, sometimes,

with the sound of dry branches snapping in the dead forest.

Relativity

There are toy ships with waves painted on them

and dresses with a print of ships at sea.

There’s the effort of remembering and the effort of blossoming,

the ease of love and the ease of death.

A four-year-old dog corresponds to a man of thirty-five

and a one-day fly, at twilight, to a ripe old man

full of memories.
Three hours of thought equal

two minutes of laughter.

In a game, a crying child gives away his hiding-place

but a silent child will be forgotten.

It’s a long time since black stopped being the color of mourning:

a young girl defiantly squeezes herself

into a black bikini.

A painting of a volcano on the wall

makes the people in the room feel secure,

and a cemetery is soothing

because of all the dead.

Someone told me he’s going down to Sinai because

he wants to be alone with his God:

I warned him.

Poem Without an End

Inside the brand-new museum

there’s an old synagogue.

Inside the synagogue

is me.

Inside me

my heart.

Inside my heart

a museum.

Inside the museum

a synagogue,

inside it

me,

inside me

my heart,

inside my heart

a museum

A Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers

The people in the painfully bright auditorium

spoke about religion

in the life of contemporary man

and about God’s place in it.

People spoke in excited voices

as they do at airports.

I walked away from them:

I opened an iron door marked “Emergency”

and entered into

a great tranquillity: Questions and Answers.

1924

I was born in 1924.
If I were a violin my age

I wouldn’t be one of the best.
As a wine I’d be first-rate

or I’d be vinegar.
As a dog I’d be dead.
As a book

I’d just be getting expensive, or be thrown away by now.

As a forest I’d be young; as a machine, ridiculous.

As a human being, I’m tired, very tired.

I was born in 1924.
When I think about human beings,

I see only those who were born the same year as I,

whose mothers lay in labor with mine

wherever they were, in hospitals or dark houses.

Today, on my birthday, I would like to say

a solemn prayer for you

whose lives are already pulled down by the weight

of hopes and disappointments,

whose deeds grow smaller, and whose gods multiply—

you are all brothers of my hope, companions

of my despair.

May you find lasting peace,

the living in their lives, the dead

in being dead.

And whoever remembers his childhood best

is the winner,

if there are any winners.

Half-Sized Violin

I sat in the playground where I played as a child.

The child went on playing in the sand.
His hands went on

making
pat-pat,
then dig then destroy,

then
pat-pat
again.

Between the trees that little house is still standing

where the high-voltage hums and threatens.

On the iron door a skull-and-crossbones: another

old childhood acquaintance.

When I was nine they gave me

a half-sized violin and half-sized feelings.

Sometimes I’m still overcome by pride

and a great joy: I already know

how to dress and undress

all by myself.

A Pace Like That

I’m looking at the lemon tree I planted.

A year ago.
I’d need a different pace, a slower one,

to observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open.

I want a pace like that.

Not like reading a newspaper

but the way a child learns to read,

or the way you quietly decipher the inscription

on an ancient tombstone.

And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do

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