The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (5 page)

dressed in the antique uniform and the

sharp helmet, seems like an ambassador

from some strange land a hundred years away.

2.
Passport Photograph of a Young Woman

Pinned to the paper like a butterfly.

How is it your identity’s still breathing

between the pages?
Your mouth was set to cry

till you found out that tears spoil everything.

And held yourself, unmoved, like a death mask

or a watch no one had bothered to repair

for a long time.
Did you go on living, past

that moment?
For not a single person here

knows you.
Well, perhaps a prince will call,

will arrive on his white horse to whisk you off,

soaring high up, above the white canal

that stretches out between your photograph

and signed name; or the embossed official stamp

will bridge that gap and be your exit-ramp.

Poems for a Woman

1

Your body is white like sand

that children have never played in.

Your eyes are sad and beautiful

like the pictures of flowers in a textbook.

Your hair hangs down

like the smoke from Cain’s altar:

I have to kill my brother.

My brother has to kill me.

2

All the miracles in the Bible and all the legends

happened between us when we were together.

On God’s quiet slope

we were able to rest awhile.

The womb’s wind blew for us everywhere.

We always had time.

3

My life is sad like the wandering

of wanderers.

My hopes are widows,

my chances won’t get married, ever.

Our loves wear the uniforms of orphans

in an orphanage.

The rubber balls come back to their hands

from the wall.

The sun doesn’t come back.

Both of us are an illusion.

4

All night your empty shoes

screamed alongside your bed.

Your right hand hangs down from your dream.

Your hair is studying night-ese

from a torn textbook of wind.

The moving curtains:

ambassadors of foreign superpowers.

5

If you open your coat,

I have to double my love.

If you wear the round white hat,

I have to exaggerate my blood.

In the place where you love,

all the furniture has to be cleared out from the room,

all the trees, all the mountains, all the oceans.

The world is too narrow.

6

The moon, fastened with a chain,

keeps quiet outside.

The moon, caught in the olive branches,

can’t break free.

The moon of round hopes

is rolling among clouds.

7

When you smile,

serious ideas get exhausted.

At night the mountains keep quiet beside you,

in the morning the sand goes with you down to the beach.

When you do nice things to me

all the heavy industries shut down.

8

The mountains have valleys

and I have thoughts.

They stretch out

until fog and until no roads.

Behind the port city

masts stood.

Behind me God begins

with ropes and ladders,

with crates and cranes,

with forever and evers.

Spring found us;

all the mountains around

are stone weights

to weigh how much we love.

The sharp grass sobbed

into our dark hiding-place;

spring found us.

Children’s Procession

Upon the banners fluttering overhead

are verses with a day-off from all the trouble

they live with in their black and heavy Bible;

and already, in the air, the poems fade

like smoke above them, to the starting-point

where the children left behind: the trampled grass,

candy wrappers, footprints, cards, a bus,

and also a little girl in tears, who couldn’t

find what she’d lost.
But in the interim,

far from here, everything stopped, and then

they had to march in place, a long long time,

while at the bright edges of the birds of day

a row of angels dangled upside-down

like shirts on a clothesline; they arrived that way.

Ballad of the Washed Hair

The stones on the mountain are always

awake and white.

In the dark town, angels on duty

are changing shifts.

A girl who has washed her hair

asks the hard world, as if it were Samson,

where is it weak, what is its secret.

A girl who has washed her hair

puts new clouds on her head.

The scent of her drying hair is

prophesying in the streets and among stars.

The nervous air between the night trees

starts to relax.

The thick telephone book of world history

closes.

Sonnet from the Voyage

To V.S., captain of the
Rimmon

Gulls escorted us.
From time to time

one would fly down upon the waves and settle

there, like the rubber ducks when I was little

inside the bathtub of a far-off dream.

Then fog descended, all the winds were stilled,

a buoy danced and its slow ringing raised

memories of another life, effaced.

And then we knew: that we were in the world.

And the world sensed us there, with empathy;

God called to you and called to me again

with the same call, by this time almost banal,

that once addressed the patriarchs in the Bible.

We didn’t answer.
Even the mild rain

splashed down, as if being wasted, on the sea.

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba

1.
Preparations for the Journey

Not resting but

moving her lovely butt,

the Queen of Sheba,

having decided to leave, a-

rose from her lair

among dark spells, tossed her hair,

clapped her hands,

the servants fainted, and

already she drew in the sand

with her big toe:

King Solomon, as though

he were a rubber ball, an

apocalyptic, bearded herring, an

imperial walking-stick, an

amalgam, half chicken

and half Solomon.

The minister of protocol

went too far, with all

those peacocks and ivory boxes.

Later on,

she began to yawn

deliciously, she stretched like a cat

so that

he would be able to sniff

her odiferous

heart.
They spared no expense,

they brought feathers, to tickle

his ears, to make his last defense

prickle.

She had been brought

a vague report

about circumcision,

she wanted to know everything, with absolute precision,

her curiosity

blossomed like leprosy,

the disheveled sisters of her corpuscles

screamed through their loudspeaker into all her muscles,

the sky undid

its buttons, she made herself up and slid

into a vast commotion,

felt her head

spin, all the brothels of her emotions

were lit up in red.

In the factory

of her blood, they worked frantically

till night came: a dark night, like an old table,

a night as eternal

as a jungle.

2.
The Ship Waits

A ship in the harbor.
Night.

Among the shadows, a white

ship, with a cargo of yearnings,

some temperate, some burning,

a ship that desire launches,

a ship without a subconscious.

Already among the sails

sway the Queen’s colored veils,

made of the silk of sparrows

who had died of their tiny sorrows

before they could flutter forth

to the cool lands of the North.

It’s worthwhile, at any rate,

for the white ship to wait

cheek to cheek with the dock

and let itself gently rock

between ideas of sand

and ideas of ocean, and

endure its insomnia

till morning, etc.

3.
Setting Sail

She called her thighs to return to each other,

knee-cheek to knee-cheek, and her soul

was already a zebra of moods, good and bad.

In the oven of her body, her heart

rotated on a spit.
The morning screamed,

a tropical rain fell.

The forecasters, chained to the spot, forecasted,

the engineers of her sleep went out on weary camels,

all the little fish of her laughter fled

before the shark of her awakening rage.
In her armpits

faint-hearted corals hid,

night-lizards left their footprints on her belly.

She sat in bed, sharpening her charms and her riddles

like colored pencils.
From the beards

of old blowhards, she had had an African apron made,

her secrets were embroidered on scarves.

But the lions still held the laws

like the two tablets over the holy ark

and over the whole world.

4.
The Journey on the Red Sea

Fish blew through the sea and through

the long anticipation.
Captains

plotted their course by the map

of her longing.
Her nipples preceded her like scouts,

her hairs whispered to one another

like conspirators.
In the dark corners between sea and ship

the counting started, quietly.

A solitary bird sang

in the permanent trill of her blood.
Rules fell

from biology textbooks, clouds were torn like contracts,

at noon she dreamt about

making love naked in the snow, egg yolks dripping

down her leg, the thrill of yellow beeswax.
All the air

rushed to be breathed inside her.
The sailors cried out

in the foreign language of fish.

But underneath the world, underneath the sea,

there were cantillations as if on the Sabbath:

everything sang each other.

5.
Solomon Waits

Never any rain,

never any rain,

always clouds without closure,

always raw-voiced love.

Shepherds of the wind returned

from the pasture.

In the world’s courtyards,