The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (13 page)

The days of my life spread out and separate from one another:

in my childhood there were still stories of kings and demons

and blacksmiths; now, glass houses and sparkling

spaceships and radiant silences that have no hope.

My arms are stretched out to a past not mine and a future not mine.

It’s hard to love, its hard to embrace

with arms like that.

Like a butcher sharpening knife on knife,

I sharpen heart on heart inside me.
The hearts

get sharper and sharper until they vanish, but the movement of my soul

remains the movement of the sharpener, and my voice is lost

in the sound of metal.

And on Yom Kippur, in rubber-soled shoes, you ran.

And at
Holy, Holy, Holy
you high-jumped

higher than all of them, almost up to the angels of the ceiling,

and around the racecourse of Simchat Torah you circled

seven times and seven

and you arrived breathless.

Like a weight-lifter you pressed up

the Torah scroll above your head

with two trembling arms

so that all of them could see the writing and the strength of your hands.

At the kneeling and bowing, you dropped into a crouch

as if at the starting-line of a long jump into your life.

And on Yom Kippur you went out for a boxing match

against yourself: we have sinned, we have transgressed,

with hard fists and no gloves,

nervous feather-weight against heavy- and sad- and

defeated-weight.
The prayers trickled from a corner of the mouth

in very thin red drops.
With a prayer shawl they wiped off

the sweat of your brow between rounds.

The prayers that you prayed in your childhood

now return and fall from above

like bullets that missed their mark and are returning

long afterward to the ground,

without arousing attention, without causing damage.

When you’re lying with your belovèd

they return.
“I love you,” “You’re

mine.”
I confess before Thee.
“And you shall love”

the Lord your God.
“With all my might” stand in awe

and sin not, and be still, selah.
Silence.

Reciting the
Hear O Israel
in bed.
In bed

without reciting the
Hear O Israel.
In the double bed,

the double burial cave of a bed.
Hear.
O hear.

Now hear one more time, my love,

without
Hear.
Without you.

Not just one finger of God but all ten of them

strangle me.
“I won’t let you

let me leave you.”
This too is

one of the interpretations of death.

You forget yourself as you were.

Don’t blame the Chief Butler for forgetting

Joseph’s dreams!
Hands

that are still sticky with candle wax

forgot Hanukkah.
The wrinkled masks of my face forgot

the gaiety of Purim.
The body mortifying itself on Yom Kippur

forgot the High Priest—as beautiful

as you, love, tonight—, forgot the song

in praise of him: the appearance of the Priest is like a sun, a diamond,

a topaz, the appearance of a Priest.
And your body too, love,

is Urim and Thummim: the nipples, the eye,

the nostrils, dimple, navel, my mouth, your mouth,

all these shone for me like the Breastplate of Judgment,

all these spoke to me and prophesied what I should do.

I’m running away, before your body

prophesies a future.
I’m running away.

Sometimes I want to go back

to everything I had, as in a museum,

when you go back not in the order

of the eras, but in the opposite direction, against the arrow,

to look for the woman you loved.

Where is she?
The Egyptian Room,

the Far East, the Twentieth Century, Cave Art,

everything jumbled together, and the worried

guards calling after you:

You can’t go against the eras!
Stop!

The exit’s over here!
You won’t learn from this,

you know you won’t.
You’re searching, you’re forgetting.

As when you hear a military band

marching in the street and you stand there and hear it moving

farther and farther away.
Slowly, slowly its sounds

fade in your ears: first the cymbals, then

the trumpets hush,

then the oboes set in the distance,

then the sharp flutes and the

little drums; but for a very long time

the deep drums remain,

the tune’s skeleton and heartbeat, until

they too.
And be still, selah.
Amen, selah.

On Rosh Hashanah you give an order

to the shofar-blower.
Ta-da, ta-da, ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da,

wrath, great wrath, ta-daaaaaaa,

fire at any target in front of you, fire!

Cease fire.
It’s over, sit down.
Today is the day of judgment,

today he will put on trial all the creatures in the world.

Synagogues like bunkers aimed toward Jerusalem,

the gun-slits of their windows facing the holy east.

The shofar forgot my lips,

the words forgot my mouth,

the sweat steamed from my skin,

the blood congealed and flaked off,

the hand forgot my hand,

the blessing evaporated from the hair of my head,

the radio is still warm,

the bed cooled before
it
did.

The seam between day and night

unraveled, now you’re liable to slip

out of your life and vanish without anyone noticing.

Sometimes you need several days

to get over a single night.

History is a eunuch,

it’s looking for mine too

to castrate, to cut off with paper pages

sharper than any knife; to crush

and to stuff my mouth forever

with what it cut off,

as in the mutilation of war-dead,

so that I won’t sing except in a sterile chirp,

so that I’ll learn many languages

and not one of them mine,

so that I’ll be scattered and dispersed,

so that I won’t be like a tower of Babel rising heavenward.

Not to understand is my happiness,

to be like stupid angels,

eunuchs soothing with their psalms.

The time has come to engage in technological

games, machines and their accessories,

toys that are kinetic, automatic,

spring-operated, doing it themselves, in their sleep,

wheels that make things revolve, switches that turn on,

everything that moves and jumps and emits

pleasant sounds, slaves and concubines,

a he-appliance and a she-appliance,

eunuchs and the eunuchs of eunuchs.

My life is spiced with heavy

lies, and the longer I live, the bigger

the art of forgery keeps growing inside me

and the more real.
The artificial flowers

seem more and more natural

and the growing ones seem artificial.

Who ultimately will be able to tell the difference

between a real bank note and a forged one?

Even the watermarks

imprinted in me

can be forged: my heart.

The subconscious has gotten used to the light

like bacteria that after a while

get used to a new antibiotic.

A new underground is being established,

lower than the very lowest.

Forty-two light-years and forty-two

dark-years.
Gourmand and glutton,

guzzling and swilling like the last Roman emperors

in the secondhand history books, scrawls of demented painting

and the writing on the wall in bathrooms,

chronicles of heroism and conquest and decline

and vain life and vain death.

Coups and revolts and the suppression of revolts

during the banquet.
In a nightgown, transparent

and waving, you rose in revolt against me, hair

flying like a flag above and hair bristling below.

Ta-da, ta-daaaaaaa!
Broken pieces of a bottle

and a shofar’s long blast.
Suppression of the revolt with

a garter belt, strangulation with sheer stockings,

stoning with the sharp heels of evening shoes.

Battles of a gladiator armed with a broken bottle neck

against a net of delicate petticoats, shoes

against treacherous organdy, tongue against prong,

half a fish against half a woman.
Straps and buttons,

the tangle of bud-decorated bras with buckles

and military gear.
Shofar-blast and the suppression of it.

Soccer shouts from the nearby field,

and I was placed upon you, heavy and quiet

like a paperweight, so that time and the wind

wouldn’t be able to blow you away from here

and scatter you like scraps of paper, like hours.

“Where do you feel your soul inside you?”

Stretched between my mouth-hole and my asshole,

a white thread, not transparent mist,

cramped in some corner between two bones,

in pain.

When it is full it disappears, like a cat.

I belong to the last generation of

those who know body and soul separately.

“What do you think you’ll do tomorrow?”

I can’t kick the habit of myself.
I gave up

smoking and drinking and my father’s God:

I gave up everything that might accelerate my end.

The smell of the new bicycle I was given

when I was a child is still in my nostrils, the blood

hasn’t dried yet and already I’m searching for calm, for other gods,

gods of order, as in the order of Passover night: the four

questions and their ready-made answer, reward and punishment,

the ten plagues, the four mothers, egg, shankbone, bitter herbs,

everything in order, the one kid, the familiar soup, the reliable

matzohballs, nine months of pregnancy, forty

plagues on the sea.
And the heart trembling a little

like the door for Elijah the Prophet,

neither open nor closed.
“And it came to pass at midnight.”
Now

the children have been put to bed.
In their sleep

they still hear the sounds

of chewing and grinding: the world’s big eat.

The sound of swallowing is the sound of history,

belch and hiccup and gnawing of bones are the sounds of history,

bowel-movements are its movements.
The digestion.
In the digestion

everything begins to look like everything else:

brother and sister, a man and his dog, good people and bad people,

flower and cloud, shepherd and sheep, ruler and ruled

descend into likeness.
My experimental life also is descending.
Everything