The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
Page 17
the young man tanned and pampered in his jazzy suit
and beside him the angel, dressed for a formal reception
in a long silk gown,
both of them looking with empty eyes
at two empty places,
and behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,
caught in the thicket before the slaughter,
the thicket his last friend.
The angel went home.
Isaac went home.
Abraham and God had gone long before.
But the real hero of The Binding of Isaac
is the ram.
At the Maritime Museum
I saw clay jars covered with barnacles
that were saved from the ocean bottom,
and thought about the sailors of ancient times
who gave half their lives to sail to those jars,
and the other half to bring them back here.
They did what they had to do, and drowned near the shore.
A woman beside me said, “Aren’t they
beautiful!” and was startled by her words and by me.
Then she walked away into her life,
which is also half a setting out
and half a returning.
Try to Remember Some Details
Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing
of the one you love
so that on the day of disaster you’ll be able to say: last seen
wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.
Try to remember some details. For they have no face
and their soul is hidden and their crying
is the same as their laughter,
and their silence and their shouting rise to one height
and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees
and they have no life outside this narrow space
and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory
and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing
and disposable paper plates.
Try to remember some details. For the world
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep
with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live
each in his lonely hiding place and they die
together on battlefields
and in hospitals.
And the earth will swallow all of them,
good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,
all of them in their rebellion against death,
their mouths open till the last moment,
and blessing and cursing are a single
howl. Try, try
to remember some details.
A Man in His Life
A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and in its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches already pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.
My Mother Comes from the Days
My mother comes from the days when they made
paintings of beautiful fruit in silver bowls
and didn’t ask for more.
People moved through their lives
like ships, with the wind or against it, faithful
to their course.
I ask myself which is better,
dying old or dying young.
As if I’d asked which is lighter,
a pound of feathers or a pound of iron.
I want feathers, feathers, feathers.
Now She’s Breathing
Now she’s breathing quietly, I said. No, she’s
screaming inside because of a great pain, the doctor said.
He asked my permission
to remove the wedding ring from her finger
because it was very swollen. I gave permission in the name of
the pain and in the name of my father
who never left her in his life. We kept turning the ring
like the magic ring in a fairy tale, but
it didn’t come off and there was
no miracle. The doctor asked permission to cut
the ring, and he cut it with the gentleness
of careful forceps.
Now she’s laughing, practicing the laughter of over there.
Now she’s crying, weaning herself
from the crying of here.
The photo on her passport was taken many years ago.
After she came to the land of Israel, she never
went abroad. A death certificate
doesn’t need a photo.
My Mother Died on Shavuot
My mother died on Shavuot, at the end of
the Counting of the Omer.
Her oldest brother died in 1916; he fell in the war.
I almost fell in 1948, and my mother died in 1983.
Everyone dies at the end of some counting, long or short,
everyone falls in a war and deserves
a wreath, a ceremony, an official letter.
When I stand at my mother’s grave
its as if I’m saluting,
and the hard words of the Kaddish are like a gun salute
into the bright summer sky.
We buried her in Sanhedria next to my father’s grave,
we’d saved a place for her
the way people do on a bus or at the movies:
we left flowers and little stones, so that no one
would take her place.
(Twenty years ago the graveyard
was on the border, facing the enemy positions.
The tombstones were a good defense against tanks.)
But when I was a child, there was a botanical garden here,
all sorts of plants and shabby wooden signs
with names in Hebrew and Latin:
the Common Rose, Mediterranean Sage,
the Common Shriek, the Tufted Lamentation,
the Annual Lamentation, the Perennial Grief,
the Crimson Remembrance, the Sweet Remembrance,
the remembrance and the forgetting.
The Body Is the Cause of Love
The body is the cause of love;
after that, the fortress that protects it;
after that, loves prison.
But when the body dies, love is set free
in wild abundance,
like a slot machine that breaks down
and with a furious ringing pours out all at once
all the coins of
all the generations of luck.
Orchard
Here they stand, a living tree next to a dead one
and a sick tree next to one with sweet fruit,
and none of them knows what happened.
And all of
them together, not like human beings
who are separated from one another.
And there is a tree that holds onto the earth with its roots
as if with despairing fingers, so the earth won’t sink down,
and beside it a tree pulled down by the same earth,
and both are one height, you can’t tell the difference.
And a wild pigeon cries out a wild hope,
and the whirr of quail in their low flight
brings tidings of things I don’t want to know.
And there are mounds of stones for remembrance
and hedges of stones for forgetting,
that’s how I mark the boundary between the plots of my life,
and that’s how the stones will be scattered again over the field.
O bliss of the earth swept out to sea in winter
freed of roots and the dead.
O holy erosion that makes us forget.
The cassia gives off its fragrance, and the fragrance
gives back the cassia. That’s how imagination
turns a great wheel in my life,
a wheel that won’t stop.
Soon my son will rebel against me
even before I am able to tell him
what to do, what path to take.
But peace returns to my heart.
Not peace as it used to be
before it left me years ago. It went away to school,
matured as I did,
and came back looking like me.
Late Marriage
I sit in a waiting room with bridegrooms
much younger than me. If I had lived in ancient times
I would be a prophet. But now I wait quietly
to register my name along with the name of my beloved
in the big book of marriages,
and to answer the questions I still
can answer. I’ve filled my life with words,
I’ve gathered enough data in my body to supply
the intelligence services of several nations.
With heavy steps I carry light thoughts
as in my youth I carried thoughts heavy with destiny
on light feet that almost danced from so much future.
The pressure of my life brings my date of birth closer
to the date of my death, as in history books
where the pressure of history has brought
those two numbers together next to the name of a dead king
with only a hyphen between them.
I hold onto that hyphen with all my might
like a lifeline, I live on it,
and on my lips the vow not to be alone,
the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride,
the sound of children laughing and shouting
in the streets of Jerusalem
and the cities of Yehuda.
Inside the Apple
You visit me inside the apple.
Together we can hear the knife
paring around and around us, carefully,
so the peel won’t tear.
You speak to me. I trust your voice
because it has lumps of hard pain in it
the way real honey
has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.
I touch your lips with my fingers:
that too is a prophetic gesture.
And your lips are red, the way a burnt field
is black.
Its all true.
You visit me inside the apple
and you’ll stay with me inside the apple
until the knife finishes its work.
North of Beersheba
The soil is ploughed up. Inside
has turned into outside now
like a man who’s confessed.
And all the crumbling things
are on their way to becoming one again
like the long resounding “One”
at the end of Shema Yisrael.
In Jerusalem my children roll over in their sleep
in the direction of my travels
into the past and the future.
Dry riverbeds think I’m water,
a cloud, the shadow of a cloud,
and I think: Don’t count on me.
I have two friends left, a geologist
and a biologist.
The terrain between them is mine.
I Guard the Children
I guard the children in the schoolyard.
The dog is part of me,
from inside me I hear the echo of his barking.
And the shouts of the children like wild birds
rising up. Not a single shout
will return to the mouth it came from.
I’m an old father keeping watch in place of the great god
who struts around forever in his eternal youth.
I ask myself, during the Shoah
did a father beat his son behind the barbed wire,
did a mother and daughter quarrel in the huts
of annihilation? Was there a stubborn rebellious son
in the transport wagons, a generation gap on the ramp,
an Oedipus in the death cells?
I guard the children as they play.
Sometimes the ball leaps over the fence
and skips and bounces on the slope from yard to yard
and rolls over into another reality.
I lift up my face to a hideous vision:
the honorable men
of power, vaunted and vaunting,
clerks of war, merchants of peace,
treasurers of fate, ministers and presidents
flaunting their colors.
I see them pass over us like death-angels
stalking the firstborn,
their wide-open groin dripping
a honeyed drool like lubricant,
the soles of their clawed feet like the feet of Ashmedai,
their heads up in the sky, foolish as flags.
North of San Francisco
Here the soft hills touch the ocean
like one eternity touching another
and the cows grazing on them
ignore us, like angels.
Even the scent of ripe melon in the cellar
is a prophecy of peace.
The darkness doesn’t war against the light,
it carries us forward
to another light, and the only pain
is the pain of not staying.
In my land, called holy,
they won’t let eternity be:
they’ve divided it into little religions,
zoned it for God-zones,
broken it into fragments of history,
sharp and wounding unto death.
And they’ve turned its tranquil distances
into a closeness convulsing with the pain of the present.
On the beach at Bolinas, at the foot of the wooden steps,
I saw some girls lying in the sand bare-bottomed,
their heads bowed, drunk
on the kingdom everlasting,
their souls like doors
closing and opening,
closing and opening inside them
to the rhythm of the surf.
Fall in Connecticut
Leaves fall from the trees
but words multiply on people.
Small red fruits prepare
to stay under the snow and stay red.
The wild games of children
have been domesticated.
On the wall, pictures of winners and losers,
you can’t tell them apart.
The rhythmical strokes of the swimmers
have gone back into the stopwatches.
On the deserted shore, folded beach chairs
chained to each other, the slaves of summer.
The suntanned lifeguard will grow pale inside his house
like a prophet of wrath in peacetime.
I shift me
ntal states
like the gears of a car,
from animal to vegetable
and then to stone.
Sandals
Sandals are the skeleton of a whole shoe,
the skeleton, and its only true spirit.
Sandals are the reins of my galloping feet
and the tefillin straps
of a tired foot, praying.
Sandals are the patch of private land I walk on
everywhere I go, ambassadors of my homeland,
my true country, the sky
to small swarming creatures of the earth
and their day of destruction that’s sure to come.
Sandals are the youth of the shoe
and a memory of walking in the wilderness.
I don’t know when they’ll lose me
or when I’ll lose them, but they will
be lost, each in a different place:
one not far from my house
among rocks and shrubs, the other
sinking into the dunes near the Great Sea
like a setting sun,
facing a setting sun.
Jerusalem, 1985
Scribbled wishes stuck between the stones
of the Wailing Wall:
bits of crumpled, wadded paper.
And across the way, stuck in an old iron gate
half-hidden by jasmine:
“Couldn’t make it,
I hope you’ll understand.”
Evidence
An abandoned tractor stuck in the mud,
a shirt tossed on the seat and some crushed grass
testify to a great love, nearby
among the thick bushes, oleander and reed.
There is always more evidence than necessary.
I think of what people buy in a store
in different combinations.
I saw soap, a pack of matches and two apples
in one shopping basket, and some other things
whose combination I can’t decipher.
I think about the effort of history
to make connections and to remember,
and about the loneliness of an ancient clay jar
in a glass case in the museum, all lit-up,
rescued from forgetting and prevented from death.
I think of the basalt stones in the old Roman bridge:
they too are evidence
for things I don’t know.
Round time and square time
travel at the same speed,
but their sound as they pass is different.
And many memorial candles together