The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (18 page)

Is all of this sorrow?
I guess so.

“May ye find consolation in the building

of the homeland.”
But how long

can you go on building the homeland

and not fall behind in the terrible

three-sided race

between consolation and building and death?

Yes, all of this is sorrow.
But leave

a little love burning always

like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby

that gives him a bit of security and quiet love

though he doesn’t know what the light is

or where it comes from.

7

Memorial Day for the war-dead: go tack on

the grief of all your losses—

including a woman who left you—

to the grief of losing them; go mix

one sorrow with another, like history,

that in its economical way

heaps pain and feast and sacrifice

onto a single day for easy reference.

Oh sweet world, soaked like bread

in sweet milk for the terrible

toothless God.
“Behind all this,

some great happiness is hiding.”
No use

crying inside and screaming outside.

Behind all this, some great happiness may

be hiding.

Memorial day.
Bitter salt, dressed up as

a little girl with flowers.

Ropes are strung out the whole length of the route

for a joint parade: the living and the dead together.

Children move with the footsteps of someone else’s grief

as if picking their way through broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay pursed for many days.

A dead soldier swims among the small heads

with the swimming motions of the dead,

with the ancient error the dead have

about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies away.

A store window decked out with beautiful dresses for women

in blue and white.
And everything

in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great royal beast has been dying all night long

under the jasmine,

with a fixed stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war

walks up the street

like a woman with a dead fetus in her womb.

“Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.”

Like the Inner Wall of a House

Like the inner wall of a house

that after wars and destruction becomes

an outer one—

that’s how I found myself suddenly,

too soon in life.
I’ve almost forgotten what it means

to be inside.
It no longer hurts;

I no longer love.
Far or near—

they’re both very far from me,

equally far.

I’d never imagined what happens to colors.

The same as with human beings: a bright blue drowses

inside the memory of dark blue and night,

a paleness sighs

out of a crimson dream.
A breeze

carries odors from far away

but itself has no odor.
The leaves of the squill die

long before its white flower,

which never knows

the greenness of spring and dark love.

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
Now I understand

what it means to lift up the eyes, what a heavy burden

it is.
But these violent longings, this pain of

never-again-to-be-inside.

Love Song

This is how it started: suddenly it felt

loose and light and happy inside,

like when you feel your shoelaces loosening a bit

and you bend down.

Then came other days.

And now I’m like a Trojan horse

filled with terrible loves.

Every night they break out and run wild

and at dawn they come back

into my dark belly.

I’ve Grown Very Hairy

I’ve grown very hairy all over my body.

I’m afraid they’re going to start hunting me for my fur.

My shirt of many colors isn’t a sign of love:

it’s like an aerial photograph of a railroad station.

At night my body is wide open and awake under the blanket

like the blindfolded eyes of someone who’s about to be shot.

I live as a fugitive and a vagabond, I’ll die

hungry for more—

and I wanted to be quiet, like an ancient mound

whose cities were all destroyed,

and peaceful,

like a full cemetery.

A Dog After Love

After you left me

I had a bloodhound sniff at

my chest and my belly.
Let it fill its nostrils

and set out to find you.

I hope it will find you and rip

your lover’s balls to shreds and bite off his cock—

or at least

bring me one of your stockings between its teeth.

A Bride Without a Dowry

A bride without a dowry, with a deep navel

in her suntanned belly, a little pit

for birdseed and water.

Yes, this is the bride with her big behind,

startled out of her dreams and all her fat

in which she was bathing naked

like Susannah and the Elders.

Yes, this is the serious girl with her

freckles.
What’s the meaning of that upper lip

jutting out over the lower one?

Dark drinking and laughter.

A little sweet animal.
Monique.

And she’s got a will of iron inside

that soft, self-indulgent flesh.

What a terrible bloodbath

she’s preparing for herself.

What a Roman arena streaming with blood.

The Sweet Breakdowns of Abigail

Everyone whacks her with tiny blows

the way you peel an egg.

With desperate bursts of perfume

she strikes back at the world.

With sharp giggles she gets even

for all the sadness,

and with quick little fallings-in-love,

like burps and hiccups of feeling.

A terrorist of sweetness,

she stuffs bombshells with despair and cinnamon,

with cloves, with shrapnel of love.

At night when she tears off her jewelry,

there’s a danger she won’t know when to stop

and will go on tearing and slashing away at her whole life.

To a Convert

A son of Abraham is studying to be a Jew.

He wants to be a Jew in no time at all.

Do you know what you’re doing?

What’s the hurry?
After all, a man isn’t

a fig tree: everything all at once, leaves and fruit

at the same time.
(Even if the fig tree is

a Jewish tree.)

Aren’t you afraid of the pain of circumcision?

Don’t you worry that they’ll cut and cut

till there’s nothing left of you

but sweet Jew pain?

I know: you want to be a baby again,

to be carried around on an embroidered cushion, to be handed

from woman to woman, mothers and godmothers

with their heavy breasts and their wombs.
You want the scent

of perfume in your nostrils, and wine

for your little smacking lips.

Now you’re in the hospital.
You’re resting, recovering.

Women are waiting under the window for your foreskin.

Whoever catches it—you’ll be hers, hers, hers.

My Father in a White Space Suit

My father, in a white space suit,

walks around with the light, heavy steps of the dead

over the surface of my life that doesn’t

hold onto a thing.

He calls out names: This is the Crater of Childhood.

This is an abyss.
This happened at your Bar Mitzvah.
These

are white peaks.
This is a deep voice

from then.
He takes specimens and puts them away in his gear:

sand, words, the sighing stones of my dreams.

He surveys and determines.
He calls me

the planet of his longings, land of my childhood, his

childhood, our childhood.

“Learn to play the violin, my son.
When you are

grown-up, music will help you

in difficult moments of loneliness and pain.”

That’s what he told me once, but I didn’t believe him.

And then he floats, how he floats, into the grief

of his endless white death.

A Letter of Recommendation

On summer nights I sleep naked

in Jerusalem.
My bed

stands on the brink of a deep valley

without rolling down into it.

In the daytime I walk around with the Ten

Commandments on my lips

like an old tune someone hums to himself.

Oh touch me, touch me, good woman!

That’s not a scar you feel under my shirt, that’s

a letter of recommendation, folded up tight,

from my father:

“All the same, he’s a good boy, and full of love.”

I remember my father waking me for early prayers.

He would do it by gently stroking my forehead, not

by tearing away the blanket.

Since then I love him even more.

And as his reward, may he be wakened

gently and with love

on the Day of the Resurrection.

On the Day I Left

On the day I left, spring broke out

to fulfill the saying:
Darkness, darkness.

We had dinner together.
They spread a white tablecloth

for the sake of serenity.
They set out a candle

for candle’s sake.
We ate well

and we knew: the soul of the fish

is its empty bones.

We stood at the sea again:

someone else had already

accomplished everything.

And love—a couple of nights

like rare stamps.
To stroke the heart

without breaking it.

I travel light, like the prayers of Jews.

I lift off as simply as a glance, or a flight

to some other place.

A Letter

To sit on a hotel balcony in Jerusalem

and to write: “Sweetly pass the days

from desert to sea.”
And to write: “Tears

dry quickly here.
This blot is a tear that

made the ink run.”
That’s how they used to write

in the last century.
“I have drawn

a little circle around it.”

Time passes, as when someone’s on the phone

laughing or crying far away from me:

whatever I hear, I can’t see;

what I see, I don’t hear.

We weren’t careful when we said “Next year”

or “A month ago.”
Those words

are like broken glass: you can hurt yourself with them,

even slash an artery, if

that’s what you’re like.