The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (28 page)

for the souls that leave no footprints.

Like people who live in the high country:

when they speak, their voices grow more songful

up to the singing of the heavenly angels.

Two disappeared into a house

turn on a light.
Then turn it off.

The stairs go out from the roof into

the space of night

as in a building that was never finished.

I Know a Man

I know a man

who photographed the view he saw

from the window of the room where he made love

and not the face of the woman he loved there.

Between

Where will we be when these flowers turn into fruit

in the narrow between, when the flower is no longer a flower

and the fruit not yet a fruit.
And what a wonderful between we made

for each other between body and body.

A between of eyes, between waking and sleep.

A twilight betweenlight, not day and not night.

How your spring dress so quickly became a flag of summer

that flutters already in the first wind of fall.

How my voice was no longer my voice

but like a prophecy, almost.

What a wonderful between we were, like earth

in the clefts of the wall, a small stubborn earth

for the valiant moss, for the thorny caper bush

whose bitter fruit

sweetened what we ate together.

These are the last days of books.

Next come the last days of words.
Some day

you will understand.

Summer Evening in the Jerusalem Mountains

An empty soda can on a rock

lit by the last rays of the sun.

The child throws stones at it,

the can falls, the stone falls,

the sun goes down.
Among things that go down

and fall, I look like one that rises,

a latter-day Newton who cancels the laws of nature.

My penis like a pine cone

closed on many cells of seed.

I hear the children playing.
Wild grapes too

are children and children’s children.

The voices too are sons and great-grandsons

of voices forever lost in their joy.

Here in these mountains, hope belongs to the landscape

like the water holes.
Even the ones with no water

still belong to the landscape like hope.

So I open my mouth and sing into the world.

I have a mouth, the world doesn’t.

It has to use mine if it wants

to sing into me.
I am equal to the world,

more than equal.

At the Beach

Footprints that met in the sand were erased.

The people who left them were erased as well

by the wind of their being no more.

The few became many and the many will be without end

like the sand on the seashore.
I found an envelope

with an address on the front and the back.

But inside it was empty and silent.
The letter

was read somewhere else, like a soul that left the body.

That happy melody in the big white house last night

is now full of longing and full of sand

like the bathing suits hanging on a line between the wooden poles.

Water birds shriek when they see land

and people when they see tranquillity.

Oh my children, children of my mind

that I made with all my body and all my soul,

now they are only the children of my mind

and I am alone on this beach

with the low shivering grasses of the dunes.

That shiver is their language.
That shiver

is my language.

We have a common language.

The Sea and the Shore

The sea and the shore are always next to each other.

Both want to learn to speak, to learn to say

one word only.
The sea wants to say “shore”

and the shore “sea.”
They draw closer,

millions of years, to speech, to saying

that single word.
When the sea says “shore”

and the shore “sea,”

redemption will come to the world,

the world will return to chaos.

Autumn Is Near and the Memory of My Parents

Soon it will be autumn.
The last fruits ripen

and people walk on roads they haven’t taken before.

The old house begins to forgive those who live in it.

Trees darken with age and people grow white.

Soon the rains will come.
The smell of rust will be fresh

and delight the heart

like the scent of blossoms in spring.

In the northern countries they say, Most of the leaves

are still on the trees.
But here we say,

Most of the words are still on the people.

Our fall season makes other things fall.

Soon it will be autumn.
The time has come

to remember my parents.

I remember them like the simple toys of my childhood,

turning in little circles,

humming softly, raising a leg,

waving an arm, moving their heads

from side to side slowly, in the same rhythm,

the spring in their belly and the key in their back.

Then suddenly they stop moving and remain

forever in their last position.

And that is how I remember my parents

and that is how I remember

their words.

Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur without my father and mother

is no Yom Kippur.

All that’s left of their blessing hands on my head

is the tremor, like the tremor of an engine

that kept going even after they died.

My mother died only five years ago,

her ease is still pending

between the offices up there and the paperwork down here.

My father, who died long ago, has already risen

in some other place,

not in mine.

Yom Kippur without my father and mother

is no Yom Kippur.
Therefore I eat

in order to remember

and drink so I won’t forget,

and I sort out the vows

and classify the oaths by time and size.

During the day we used to shout,
Forgive us,

and in the evening,
Open the gate to us.

But I say, Forget us, forgo us, leave us alone

when your gate closes and clay is gone.

The last sunlight broke

in the stained glass window of the synagogue.

The sunlight didn’t break, we are broken,

the word “broken” is broken.

Beginning of Autumn in the Hills of Ephraim

At the side of the road that is being paved

a group of workers, huddled together

in the cool of twilight.

The last rays of the sun light up the men

who did what they had to do

with the bulldozer and steamroller that did

what they had to do.

Men and machines together in their faith

that they won’t fall off the planet.

Already the squill has come up in the field

and there are still almonds on the almond tree.

The earth is still warm, like the head of a child

under its hair.
A first wind of autumn

passes through Jews and Arabs.

Migratory birds call out to one another:

Look, human beings who stay where they are!

And in the great silence before dark

an airplane crosses the sky

and descends at the edge of the West with a gurgle

like good wine in the throat.

Ruhama

Here in this wadi we lived during the war.

Many years have passed since then, many victories

and many defeats.
I have gathered many consolations in my life

and squandered them, many sorrows

that I spilled in vain.
I’ve said many things, like the waves

of the sea at Ashkelon in the West

that always keep saying the same thing.

But as long as I live, my soul remembers

and my body slowly ripens in the fires of its life story.

The evening sky lowers like a bugle call over us,

and our lips move like the lips of men in prayer

before there was a god in the world.

Here we would lie by day, and at night

we would go to battle.

The smell of the sand is as it was, and the smell

of the eucalyptus leaves

and the smell of the wind.

And I do now what any memory dog does:

I howl quietly

and piss a boundary of remembrance around me

so no one else can enter.

Huleikat—The Third Poem about Dicky

In these hills even the oil rigs

are already a memory.
Here Dicky fell

who was four years older than I and like a father to me

in times of anguish.
Now that I’m older than him

by forty years, I remember him like a young son,

and I an old grieving father.

And you who remember only a face,

don’t forget the outstretched hands

and the legs that run so easily

and the words.

Remember that even the road to terrible battles

always passes by gardens and windows

and children playing and a barking dog.

Remember the fruit that fell and remind it

of the leaves and the branch,

remind the hard thorns

that they were soft and green in springtime,

and don’t forget that the fist, too,

was once the palm of an open hand, and fingers.

The Shore of Ashkelon

Here at the shore of Ashkelon we arrived at

the end of memory

like rivers that reach the sea.

The near past sinks into the far past

and the far past rises from the depths

and overflows the near.

Peace, peace to the near and the far.

Here among the broken idols and pillars,

I wonder how Samson brought down the temple

where he stood blind and said: “Let me die

with the Philistines!”

Did he embrace the pillars as in a last love

or with both arms push them away

to be alone in his death.

Fields of Sunflowers

Fields of sunflowers, ripe and withering,

don’t need the warmth of the sun anymore,

they’re brown and wise already.
They need

sweet shadow, the inwardness

of death, the interior of a drawer, a sack

deep as the sky.
Their world to come

the innermost dark of a dark house,

the inside of a man.

First Rain on a Burned Car

The closeness of life to death

near the corpse of a car at the roadside.

You hear the raindrops on the rusty metal

before you feel them on the skin of your face.

The rains have come, redemption after death.

Rust is more eternal than blood, more beautiful