The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (6 page)

blossoms of stone opened

consecrated to strange gods.

Trembling ladders dreamt about

humans dreaming about them.

But he

saw the world,

the slightly torn

lining of the world.

And was awake like many lit stables

in Megiddo.

Never any rain,

never any rain,

always raw-voiced love,

always quarries.

6.
The Queen Enters the Throne Room

The dewy rose of her dark pudenda

was doubled in the mirrored floor.
His agenda

seemed superfluous now, and all the provisions

he had made for her, the decrees and decisions

he had worked out while he was judging the last

of the litigants.
Then he rolled up his past

like a map; and he sat there, reeling, giddy,

and saw in the mirror a body and a body,

from above and below, like the queen of spades.

In the bedroom of his heart he pulled down the shades,

he covered his blood with sackcloth, tried

to think of icebergs, of putrefied

camel flesh.
And his face changed seasons

like a speeded-up landscape.
He followed his visions

to the end of them, growing wiser and warm,

and he knew that her soul’s form was like the form

of her supple body, which he soon would embrace—

as a violin’s form is the form of its case.

7.
Who Could Stump Whom

In the pingpong of questions and answers

not a sound was heard

except:

ping .
.
.
pong .
.
.

And the cough of the learned counselors

and the sharp tearing of paper.

He made black waves with his beard

so that her words would drown in it.

She made a jungle

of her hair, for him to be lost in.

Words were plunked down with a click

like chessmen.

Thoughts with high masts

sailed past one another.

Empty crossword puzzles filled up

as the sky fills with stars,

secret caches were opened,

buckles and vows were unfastened,

cruel religions

were tickled, and laughed

horribly.

In the final game,

her words played with his words, her tongue

with his tongue.

Precise maps

were spread, face up, on the table.

Everything was revealed.
Hard.

And pitiless.

8.
The Empty Throne Room

All the word games

lay scattered out of their boxes.

Boxes were left gaping

after the game.

Sawdust of questions,

shells of cracked parables,

woolly packing materials from

crates of fragile riddles.

Heavy wrapping paper

of love and strategies.

Used solutions rustled

in the trash of thinking.

Long problems

were rolled up on spools,

miracles were locked in their cages.

Chess horses were led back to the stable.

Empty cartons that had

“Handle With Care!”

printed on them

sang hymns of thanksgiving.

Later, in ponderous parade, the King’s soldiers arrived.

She fled, sad

as black snakes

in the dry grass.

A moon of atonement spun around the towers

as on Yom Kippur eve.

Caravans with no camels, no people,

no sound, departed and departed and departed.

From
In a Right Angle: A Cycle of Quatrains

1

In the sands of prayer my father saw angels’ traces.

He saved me a space, but I wandered in other spaces.

That’s why his face was bright and why mine is scorched.

Like an old office calendar, I’m covered with times and places.

9

I kiss the hem of my fate, as my father would kiss the side

of his prayer-shawl before I would wrap myself deep inside.

I will always remember the free summer clouds and always

the stars that glimmer beyond our need to decide.

13

Along the summer, along the sandy shoreline

of the heart.
During the gray stones, at the edge of a lover’s incline.

Deep within the black ships, under the grief,

near the steep wish, inside the wind of time.

18

The driver asked.
We answered, All the way.

His shoulders said, If that’s what you want, okay.

We paid a distant look, a close hello.

Our lives were stamped
To the last stop: one-way.

24

My love writes commentaries on me, like the rabbis explaining the Bible.

Spring translates the world into every language.
On the table

our bread keeps prophesying.
Our words are lovely and fresh.

But Fate works inside us overtime, as hard as he’s able.

30

I escaped once and don’t remember what god it was from, what test.

So I’m floating inside my life, like Jonah in his dark fish, at rest.

I’ve made a deal with my fish, since we’re both in the guts of the world:

I won’t get out of him, ever.
He’ll endure me and not digest.

34

Like torn shirts that my mother couldn’t mend,

the dead are strewn about the world.
Like them,

we’ll never love or know what voices weep

and what winds will pass by to say Amen.

43

Two hopes away from the battle, I had a vision of peace.

My weary head must keep walking, my legs keep dreaming apace.

The scorched man said, I am the bush that burned and that
was
consumed:

come hither, leave your shoes on your feet.
This is the place.

45

A young soldier lies in the springtime, cut off from his name.

His body is budding and flowering.
From artery and vein

his blood babbles on, uncomprehending and small.

God boils the flesh of the lamb in its mother’s pain.

46

In the right angle between a dead man and his mourner I’ll start

living from now on, and wait there as it grows dark.

The woman sits with me, the girl in her fiery cloud

rose into the sky, and into my wide-open heart.

As for the World

As for the world,

I am always like one of Socrates’ students:

walking beside him,

hearing his seasons and generations,

and all I can do is say:

Yes, certainly that is true.

You are right again.

It is exactly as you have said.

As for my life, I am always

Venice:

everything that is streets

is in other people.

In me—love, dark and flowing.

As for the scream, as for the silence,

I am always a shofar:

hoarding, all year long, its one blast

for the terrible Days of Awe.

As for the deeds,

I am always Cain:

a fugitive and a vagabond before the deed that I won’t do,

or after the deed that

can’t be undone.

As for the palm of your hand,

as for the signals of my heart

and the plans of my flesh,

as for the writing on the wall,

I am always an ignoramus: I can’t

read or write

and my head is empty as a weed,

knowing only the secret whisper

and the motion in the wind

when a fate passes through me, to

some other place.

In the Middle of This Century

In the middle of this century we turned to each other

with half face and full eyes

like an ancient Egyptian painting

and for a short time.

I stroked your hair in a direction opposite to your journey,

we called out to each other

as people call out the names of the cities they don’t stop in

along the road.

Beautiful is the world that wakes up early for evil,

beautiful is the world that falls asleep to sin and mercy,

in the profanity of our being together, you and I.

Beautiful is the world.

The earth drinks people and their loves

like wine, in order to forget.
It won’t be able to.

And like the contours of the Judean mountains,

we also won’t find a resting-place.

In the middle of this century we turned to each other.

I saw your body, casting the shadow, waiting for me.

The leather straps of a long journey

had long since been tightened crisscross on my chest.

I spoke in praise of your mortal loins,

you spoke in praise of my transient face,

I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey,

I touched the tidings of your last day,

I touched your hand that has never slept,

I touched your mouth that now, perhaps, will sing.

Desert dust covered the table

we hadn’t eaten from.

But with my finger I wrote in it the letters of your name.

Farewell

face of you, already face of dreaming.

Wandering rises up, aloft and wild.

Face of beasts, of water, face of leaving,

grove of whispers, face of breast, of child.

No more the hour in which we two could happen,

no more for us to murmur:
now
and
all.

You had a name of wind and raincloud, woman

of tensions and intentions, mirror, fall.

For what we didn’t know, we sang together.

Changes and generations, face of night.

No longer mine, code unresolved forever,

closed-nippled, buckled, mouthed and twisted tight.

And so farewell to you, who will not slumber,

for all was in our words, a world of sand.

From this day forth, you turn into the dreamer

of everything: the world within your hand.

Farewell, death’s bundles, suitcase packed with waiting.

Threads, feathers, holy chaos.
Hair held fast.

For look: what will not be, no hand is writing;

and what was not the body’s will not last.

Such as Sorrow

Should you realize so much, daughter of every season,

this year’s fading flowers or last year’s snow.

And afterward, not for us, not the vial of poison,

but rather the cup and the muteness and the long way to go.

Like two briefcases we were interchanged for each other.

Now I am no longer I, and you are not you.

No more returning, no more approaching together,

just a candle snuffed in the wine, as when Sabbath is through.

Now all that’s left from your sun is the pallid moon.

Trivial words that may comfort today or tomorrow: