The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by Chana Bloch

  Thoughts have dropped and fly parallel to the ground, like birds.

  And beside the sea: picnickers sit among friends.

  Their money was brought from far away; their portrait is seen

  on crumpling paper. In their laughter: blossoming clouds.

  Our heart beats in the footsteps that watchmen take, back and forth.

  And if someone should love us, surely the distant snow

  will realize it, a long time before we do.

  4

  The rest is not simply silence. The rest is a screech.

  Like a car shifting gears on a dangerous uphill road.

  Have you listened closely enough to the calls of the children

  at play in the ruined houses, when their voices stop

  short, as they reach the ceiling, out of habit, and later

  burst up to the sky? Oh night without a Jerusalem,

  oh children in the ruins, who will never again be birds,

  oh passing time, when newspapers that have yellowed already

  interest you again: like a document. And the face of last year’s

  woman lights up in the memory of a distant man.

  But the wind keeps forgetting. Because it is always there.

  Should I wait here for God’s voice, or for the scream of a train

  between the hard-pressing hills? Look, children and birds

  were closed and opened, each into song and muteness.

  Or girls on their long road: look as again they turn into

  fig trees; how wonderful they are for love. And the thunder

  of sparrows as they rise from the garbage; see what is written

  on stones. You weren’t the one who wrote it. And yet

  it is always your handwriting. Stay for a while, in the narrow

  place between earth and its short god. Listen as the tin

  gradually matures in its rust, and the voice of alleys

  changes too late: not till death has arrived.

  For only in the half-destroyed do we understand

  the blue that covers the inside of rooms, like doctors

  who learn by the bodies gaping in front of them. But we

  will never know how blood behaves when it’s inside,

  within the whole body, when the heart shines into it, from

  far away, in its dark path. And girls are still

  hidden among the fresh laundry hanging in the air

  that also will turn into rain among the mountains

  sent to scout and uncover the nakedness of the land;

  and uncovered it; and stayed in the valleys, forever.

  The Elegy on the Lost Child

  I can see by their mark how high the waters reached

  last winter; but how can I know what level

  love reached inside me? And perhaps it overflowed my banks.

  For what remained in the wadi?—just congealed mud.

  What remained on my face?—not even a thin white line,

  as above the lips of the child who was drinking milk

  and put down the glass, with a click, on the kitchen table.

  What remained? Perhaps a leaf in the small

  stone that was placed on the windowsill, to watch over us

  like an angel when we were inside. And to love means not

  to remain; means not to leave a trace, but to change

  utterly. To be forgotten. And to understand means to bloom.

  Spring understands. To remember the belovèd means to

  forget the many belongings that piled up.

  Loving means having to forget the other love,

  closing the other doors. Look, we saved a seat,

  we put down a coat or a book on the empty chair

  next to us, perhaps empty forever. And how long

  could we keep it for ourselves? After all, someone will come,

  a stranger will sit beside you. And you turn around,

  impatient, to the door with the red sign over it, you look

  at your watch; that too is a habit of prayer, like bowing

  and kissing. And outside they always invent new thoughts

  and these too are placed on the tired faces of people,

  like colored lights in the street. Or look at the child, whose

  thoughts are painted upon him like a pattern upon

  an ancient urn, for others to see, he still isn’t

  thinking them for himself. The earth wanders, passes

  beneath the soles of our shoes, like a moving stage,

  like your face which I thought was mine and wasn’t. But the child

  got lost. The last scion of his games, the Benjamin

  of colored paper, the grandson of his ancient hiding-places.

  He came and went in the ringing of his toys among

  empty wells, at the ends of holidays and within

  the terrible cycle of cries and silence, in the process

  of hope and death and hope. Everyone searched,

  they were happy to look for some thing in the land of forgetting:

  voices and a plane flying low like thoughts, police dogs

  with philosophers’ faces, question-words hopping on thin legs

  in the grass that gets drier and drier, before our very

  eyes. Words worn out from prayers and talk and newspapers,

  prophecies of Jeremiah down on all fours.

  And in the big cities, protesters blocked the roads like

  a blocked heart, whose master will die. And the dead were already

  hung out like fruit, for eternal ripening within

  the history of the world. They searched for the child; and found

  pairs of lovers, hidden; found ancient urns;

  found everything that sought not to be revealed. For love

  was too short and didn’t cover them all, like a too-short

  blanket. A head or two feet stuck out in the wind

  when the cold night came. Or they found a short-cut of sharp

  brief pain instead of the long, oblivion-causing

  streets of joy and of satiation. And at night

  the names of the world, of foreign cities and dark

  lakes and peoples long vanished. And all the names

  are like my belovèd’s name. She lifted her head

  to listen. She had the feeling that she had been called,

  and she wasn’t the one we meant. But the child disappeared

  and the paths in the distant mountain emerged. Not much time.

  The olives spoke hard stones. In the enormous fear

  between heaven and earth, new houses arose and the glass

  of windowpanes cooled the burning forehead of night.

  The hot wind pounced upon us from a thicket of dry grass,

  the distraction of mutual need erected high bridges

  in the wasteland. Traps were set, spotlights turned on,

  and nets of woven hair were spread out. But they passed

  the place, and didn’t see, for the child bent over

  and hid in the stones of tomorrow’s houses. Eternal

  paper rustled between the feet of the searchers.

  Printed and unprinted. The orders were clearly heard.

  Exact numbers: not ten or fifty or a hundred.

  But twenty-seven, thirty-one, forty-three, so that they would believe us.

  And in the morning the search was renewed: quick, here!

  I saw him among the toys of his wells, the games

  of his stones, the tools of his olive trees. I heard his heartbeat

  under the rock. He’s there. He’s here. And the tree

  stirs. Did you all see? And new calls, like an ancient

  sea bringing new ships with loud calls to the foreign shore.

  We returned to our cities, where a great sorrow is divided among them

  at appropriate intervals, like mailboxes, so that we can drop ours

  into them: name and address, times of pickup. And the
stones

  chanted in the choir of black mouths, into the earth,

  and only the child could hear them; we couldn’t. For he stayed

  longer than we did, pretending from the clouds and already

  known by heart to the children of olive trees,

  familiar and changing and not leaving a trace, as in love,

  and belonged to them completely, without a remnant.

  For to love means not to remain. To be forgotten. But God

  remembers, like a man who returns to the place he once left

  to reclaim a memory he needed. Thus God returns to

  our small room, so that he can remember how much he wanted

  to build his creation with love. And he didn’t forget

  our names. Names aren’t forgotten. We call a shirt

  shirt: even when it’s used as a dustrag, it’s still called shirt,

  perhaps the old shirt. And how long will we go on like this?

  For we are changing. But the name remains. And what right

  do we have to be called by our names, or to call the Jordan

  Jordan after it has passed through the Sea of Galilee

  and has come out at Zemach. Who is it? Is it still the one

  that entered at Capernaum? Who are we after we pass through

  the terrible love? Who is the Jordan? Who

  remembers? Rowboats have emerged. The mountains are mute:

  Susita, Hermon, the terrifying Arbel, painful Tiberias.

  We all turn our backs on names, the rules of the game,

  the hollow calls. An hour passes, hair is cut off

  in the barbershop. The door is opened. What remains is for

  the broom and the street. And the barber’s watch ticking close to

  your ear as he bends over you. This too is time.

  Time’s end, perhaps. The child hasn’t been found.

  The results of rain are seen even now when it’s summer.

  Aloud the trees are talking from the sleep of the earth.

  Voices made out of tin are ringing in the wind

  as it wakes up. We lay together. I walked away:

  the belovèd’s eyes stayed wide open in fear. She sat up

  in bed for a while, leaning on her elbows. The sheet

  was white like the day of judgment, and she couldn’t stay

  alone in the house, she went out into the world

  that began with the stairs near the door. But the child remained

  and began to resemble the mountains and the winds and the trunks

  of olive trees. A family resemblance: as the face of a young man

  who fell in the Negev arises in the face of his cousin

  born in New York. The fracture of a mountain in the Aravah

  reappears in the face of the shattered friend. Mountain range

  and night, resemblance and tradition. Night’s custom that turned

  into the law of lovers. Temporary precautions

  became permanent. The police, the calls outside, the speaking

  inside the bodies. And the fire-engines don’t wail when they come from

  the fire. Silently they return from embers and ashes.

  Silently we returned from the valley after love and searching

  in retrospect: not being paid attention to. But a few of us

  continued to listen. It seemed as if someone was calling.

  We extended the outer ear with the palm of a hand,

  we extended the area of the heart with a further love

  in order to hear more clearly, in order to forget.

  But the child died in the night

  clean and well groomed. Neat and licked by the tongues

  of God and night. “When we got here, it was still daylight.

  Now darkness has come.” Clean and white like a sheet of

  paper in an envelope closed and chanted upon

  in the psalm-books of the lands of the dead. A few went on searching,

  or perhaps they searched for a pain that would fit their tears,

  for a joy that would fit their laughter, though nothing can fit

  anything else. Even hands are from a different body.

  But it seemed to us that something had fallen. We heard

  a ringing, like a coin that fell. We stood for a moment.

  We turned around. We bent down. We didn’t find

  anything, and we went on walking. Each to his own.

  Jerusalem, 1967

  To my friends Dennis, Arieh, and Harold

  1

  This year I traveled a long way

  to view the silence of my city.

  A baby calms down when you rock it, a city calms down

  from the distance. I dwelled in longing. I played the hopscotch

  of the four strict squares of Yehuda Ha-Levi:

  My heart. Myself. East West.

  I heard bells ringing in the religions of time,

  but the wailing that I heard inside me

  has always been from my Yehudean desert.

  Now that I’ve come back, I’m screaming again.

  And at night, stars rise like the bubbles of the drowned,

  and every morning I scream the scream of a newborn baby

  at the tumult of houses and at all this huge light.

  2

  I’ve come back to this city where names

  are given to distances as if to human beings

  and the numbers are not of bus routes

  but: 70 After, 1917, 500

  B.C., Forty-eight. These are the lines

  you really travel on.

  And already the demons of the past are meeting

  with the demons of the future and negotiating about me

  above me, their give-and-take neither giving nor taking,

  in the high arches of shell-orbits above my head.

  A man who comes back to Jerusalem is aware that the places

  that used to hurt don’t hurt anymore.

  But a light warning remains in everything,

  like the movement of a light veil: warning.

  3

  Illuminated is the Tower of David, illuminated is the Church of Maria,

  illuminated the patriarchs sleeping in their burial cave, illuminated

  are the faces from inside, illuminated the translucent

  honey cakes, illuminated the clock and illuminated the time

  passing through your thighs as you take off your dress.

  Illuminated illuminated. Illuminated are the cheeks of my childhood,

  illuminated the stones that wanted to be illuminated

  along with those that wanted to sleep in the darkness of squares.

  Illuminated are the spiders of the banister and the cobwebs of churches

  and the acrobats of the stairs. But more than all these, and in them all,

  illuminated is the terrible, true X-ray writing

  in letters of bones, in white and lightning: MENE

  MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN.

  4

  In vain you will look for the fences of barbed wire.

  You know that such things

  don’t disappear. A different city perhaps

  is now being cut in two; two lovers

  separated; a different flesh is tormenting itself now

  with these thorns, refusing to be stone.

  In vain you will look. You lift up your eyes unto the hills,

  perhaps there? Not these hills, accidents of geology,

  but The Hills. You ask

  questions without a rise in your voice, without a question mark,

  only because you’re supposed to ask them; and they

  don’t exist. But a great weariness wants you with all your might

  and gets you. Like death.

  Jerusalem, the only city in the world

  where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.

  5

  On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on

&
nbsp; my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of Jerusalem.

  For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,

  not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with

  buttons and zippers and spools of thread

  in every color and snaps and buckles.

  A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.

  I told him in my heart that my father too

  had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.

  I explained to him in my heart about all the decades

  and the causes and the events, why I am now here

  and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

  When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates prayer.

  He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate

  and I returned, with all the worshipers, home.

  6

  It’s not time that keeps me far away from my childhood,

  it’s this city and everything in it. Now

  I’ve got to learn Arabic too, to reach all the way to Jericho

  from both ends of time; and the length of walls has been added

  and the height of towers and the domes of prayer houses

  whose area is immeasurable. All these

  really broaden my life and force me

  always to emigrate once more from the smell

  of river and forest.

  My life is stretched out this way; it grows very thin

  like cloth, transparent. You can see right through me.

  7

  In this summer of wide-open-eyed hatred

  and blind love, I’m beginning to believe again

  in all the little things that will fill

  the holes left by the shells: soil, a bit of grass,

  perhaps, after the rains, small insects of every kind.

  I think of children growing up half in the ethics of their fathers

  and half in the science of war.

  The tears now penetrate into my eyes from the outside

  and my ears invent, every day, the footsteps of

  the messenger of good tidings.

  8

  The city plays hide-and-seek among her names:

  Yerushalayim, Al-Quds, Salem, Jeru, Yeru, all the while

  whispering her first, Jebusite name: Y’vus,

  Y’vus, Y’vus, in the dark. She weeps

  with longing: Ælia Capitolina, Ælia, Ælia.

  She comes to any man who calls her

  at night, alone. But we know

  who comes to whom.

  9

  On an open door a sign hangs: Closed.

  How do you explain it? Now

  the chain is free at both ends: there is no

  prisoner and no warden, no dog and no master.