The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (25 page)

for the very first time.
Since then I listen to it

alone.
Your sobbing remained

in the valley near Sheikh Abrek.
Our joy

was up on the mountain.
We trampled spring flowers

with our heavy love: the flowers will have their revenge

someday, when they grow over us.

The wind opened our souls

like a secret last will.

And Gods wild laughter was translated into

the oily whine of a cantor.

Not to see you ever again was manageable,

as it turned out: look, we went on living.

But not to see you the very next day

was impossible,

you see: we died.

Summer Begins

Summer begins.
In the old cemetery

the tall grass has already grown dry and once again

you can read the words on the tombstones.

The western winds have returned to the west like expert sailors.

The eastern winds lie in wait for their moment

like Essene monks in the caves of the Judean desert.

And in the silence between the winds you can hear once again

the voices defining you and your actions

like the voices in a museum or in school.

You’re not any better understood, and you don’t

understand any better.

Mortality is not death, birthrate

is not children,

and life, perhaps, is not life—

A little rosemary, a little basil, some

hope, some marjoram for the heart, a little mint

for the nostrils, joy for the pupils of the eyes

and a little

consolation, warm.

Hamadiya

Hamadiya, memory of pleasures.
The forties

and love on the threshing floor.
The chaff

pricks me even now, though my body

has washed many times since then and my clothes

have been changed again and again and the girl left for

the fifties and vanished inside the sixties and was lost forever

in the seventies—the chaff pricks me even now,

my throat is hoarse from so much shouting:

Come back one more time you

come back to me come back time come back loquat tree!

Love used to be the raw material of this poor country,

real life and dream joined to make the climate,

here joy and sorrow were still

weather conditions.

Dangers pounded all around like water-pumps

hidden in orchards, and the voice

that began as a cry for help

became a calming song.

We didn’t know then that the debris of joy

is like the debris of any wreckage:

you have to clear it away to start over again.

At the Seashore

The pain-people think that God is the god of joy,

the joy-people think that God is the god of pain.

The coast-people think that love is in the mountains,

and the mountain-people think that love is at the seashore

so they go down to the sea.

The waves bring back even things we haven’t lost.

I choose a smooth pebble and say over it,

“I’lI never see that one again.”

Eternity makes more sense

in the negative:

“I’ll never see.
I’ll never come back.”

So what good will it do you to get a tan?
You’ll be

a sadness, roasted and beautiful, an enticing scent.

When we came up from the seashore, we didn’t see the water

but near the new road we saw a deep pit

and beside it a huge wooden spool wound with heavy cable:

all the conversations of the future, all the silences.

On Some Other Planet You May Be Right

“On some other planet you may be right,

but not here.”
In the middle of talking you shifted

to a silent weeping, as people shift from blue to black

in the middle of a letter when a pen goes dry,

or as they used to change horses during a journey.

Talk grew tired, tears

are fresh.

Seeds of summer flew into the room

we were sitting in.
In front of the window

there was an almond tree growing black:

one more warrior in the eternal battle

of the sweet against the bitter.

Look, just as time isn’t inside clocks

love isn’t inside bodies:

bodies only tell the love.

But we will remember this evening

the way swimmers remember the strokes

from one summer to the next.
“On some other planet

you may be right, but not here.”

Autumn Rain in Tel Aviv

A proud, very beautiful woman sold me

a piece of sweet cake

across the counter.
Her eyes hard, her back to the sea.

Black clouds on the horizon

forecast storm and lightning

and her body answered them from inside

her sheer dress,

still a summer dress,

like fierce dogs awakening.

That night, among friends in a closed room,

I listened to the heavy rain pelting the window

and the voice of a dead man on tape:

the reel was turning

against the direction of time.

A Flock of Sheep Near the Airport

A flock of sheep near the airport

or a high voltage generator beside the orchard:

these combinations open up my life

like a wound, but they also heal it.

That’s why my feelings always come in twos.

That’s why I’m like a man who tears up a letter

and then has second thoughts,

picking up the pieces and pasting them together again

with great pains, sometimes

for the rest of his life.

But once I went looking for my son at night

and found him in an empty basketball court

lit by a powerful floodlight.

He was playing all alone,

and the sound of the ball bouncing

was the only sound in the world.

Almost a Love Poem

If my parents and yours

hadn’t emigrated to the Land of Israel

in 1936,

we would have met in 1944

there.
On the ramp at Auschwitz.

I at twenty,

you at five.

Where’s your
mameh,

your
tateh?

What’s your name?

Hanaleh.

They Are All Dice

With great love the people

stand beside the lowered barrier.

In each of their minds a single thought,

licked clean as a bone.

From her small booth,

the lottery woman leans out to watch.

The non-train passes by,

the non-expected arrives.

With great love, afterward,

the people disperse.

With hair loose and eyes

shut tight, they sleep:

They are all dice

that landed on the lucky side.

A Precise Woman

A precise woman with a short haircut brings order

to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,

moves feelings around like furniture

into a new arrangement.

A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided

into upper and lower,

with weather-forecast eyes

of shatterproof glass.

Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,

one after the other:

tame dove, then wild dove,

then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,

then wild dove, tame dove, dove dove

thrush, thrush, thrush.

A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet

her shoes always point away from the bed.

(My own shoes point toward it.)

Jasmine

The jasmine came upon us, as always, from behind,

when we were drunk and vulnerable.

All evening we spoke about the armor of perfume

that will be pierced by pain, the security

candy provides, about brown

chocolate insulation,

about old disappointments that become

the hope of the young

like clothes that went out of fashion

and now are worn again.

At night I dreamed about jasmine.

And the next day the scent of jasmine penetrated

even the interpretations of the dream.

Kibbutz Gevaram

In these low hills, lives that were meant to endure

came to an end, and what we thought was smoke

proved more steady than our ephemeral lives.

Even the abandoned oil rigs became a part

of this pretty landscape, marking

the settings of love and death like the trees

and the water towers.

This winter the river gouged out the almond grove

and left it in tatters.
The roots of the trees were exposed,

beautiful as branches in the sunlight,

but for a few days only.

Here the sand dunes hand down to the limestone

and the limestone to the loam, and the loam

to the heavy soil, and the heavy soil to the boulders

at the edge of the coastal plain.
Handing-down and continuity,

tradition and change without human beings,

abundance and abyss.
And the droning of the bees

and the droning of time are one.

(In Gevaram, in a wooden shack, I once saw

books by Buber and Rilke on the shelf

and prints of Van Gogh and Modigliani.

It was on the eve of deadly battles.)

And there’s a grove of eucalyptus trees,

pale, as if sick with longing.

They don’t know what they’re longing for

and I tell them now in a quiet voice:

Australia, Australia.

History

A man all alone in an empty room

practices on a drum.
That, too, is history.

His wife irons a flag for the holiday

and his son cries out in his dream.

A man discovers his name in a phone book

and is terrified.

A great man subdues his desire,

and his desire dies.

A wise man sees the future,

but the future sees him and yearns

to go back into the womb.

A man who is content with his lot
weeps into

a sophisticated network of pipes, nicely concealed.

A foreign language passes by in the street

like three angels from long, long ago.

The Real Hero

The real hero of The Binding of Isaac was the ram,

who didn’t know about the collusion between the others.

He was volunteered to die instead of Isaac.

I want to sing a memorial song about him—

about his curly wool and his human eyes,

about the horns that were so silent on his living head,

and how they made those horns into shofars when he was slaughtered

to sound their battle cries

or to blare out their obscene joy.