The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (9 page)

the terrible cycle of cries and silence, in the process

of hope and death and hope.
Everyone searched,

they were happy to look for some thing in the land of forgetting:

voices and a plane flying low like thoughts, police dogs

with philosophers’ faces, question-words hopping on thin legs

in the grass that gets drier and drier, before our very

eyes.
Words worn out from prayers and talk and newspapers,

prophecies of Jeremiah down on all fours.

And in the big cities, protesters blocked the roads like

a blocked heart, whose master will die.
And the dead were already

hung out like fruit, for eternal ripening within

the history of the world.
They searched for the child; and found

pairs of lovers, hidden; found ancient urns;

found everything that sought
not
to be revealed.
For love

was too short and didn’t cover them all, like a too-short

blanket.
A head or two feet stuck out in the wind

when the cold night came.
Or they found a short-cut of sharp

brief pain instead of the long, oblivion-causing

streets of joy and of satiation.
And at night

the names of the world, of foreign cities and dark

lakes and peoples long vanished.
And all the names

are like my belovèd’s name.
She lifted her head

to listen.
She had the feeling that she had been called,

and she wasn’t the one we meant.
But the child disappeared

and the paths in the distant mountain emerged.
Not much time.

The olives spoke hard stones.
In the enormous fear

between heaven and earth, new houses arose and the glass

of windowpanes cooled the burning forehead of night.

The hot wind pounced upon us from a thicket of dry grass,

the distraction of mutual need erected high bridges

in the wasteland.
Traps were set, spotlights turned on,

and nets of woven hair were spread out.
But they passed

the place, and didn’t see, for the child bent over

and hid in the stones of tomorrow’s houses.
Eternal

paper rustled between the feet of the searchers.

Printed and unprinted.
The orders were clearly heard.

Exact numbers: not ten or fifty or a hundred.

But twenty-seven, thirty-one, forty-three, so that they would believe us.

And in the morning the search was renewed: quick, here!

I saw him among the toys of his wells, the games

of his stones, the tools of his olive trees.
I heard his heartbeat

under the rock.
He’s there.
He’s here.
And the tree

stirs.
Did you all see?
And new calls, like an ancient

sea bringing new ships with loud calls to the foreign shore.

We returned to our cities, where a great sorrow is divided among them

at appropriate intervals, like mailboxes, so that we can drop ours

into them: name and address, times of pickup.
And the stones

chanted in the choir of black mouths, into the earth,

and only the child could hear them; we couldn’t.
For he stayed

longer than we did, pretending from the clouds and already

known by heart to the children of olive trees,

familiar and changing and not leaving a trace, as in love,

and belonged to them completely, without a remnant.

For to love means not to remain.
To be forgotten.
But God

remembers, like a man who returns to the place he once left

to reclaim a memory he needed.
Thus God returns to

our small room, so that he can remember how much he wanted

to build his creation with love.
And he didn’t forget

our names.
Names aren’t forgotten.
We call a shirt

shirt:
even when it’s used as a dustrag, it’s still called
shirt,

perhaps
the old shirt.
And how long will we go on like this?

For we are changing.
But the name remains.
And what right

do we have to be called by our names, or to call the Jordan

Jordan
after it has passed through the Sea of Galilee

and has come out at Zemach.
Who is it?
Is it still the one

that entered at Capernaum?
Who are we after we pass through

the terrible love?
Who is the Jordan?
Who

remembers?
Rowboats have emerged.
The mountains are mute:

Susita, Hermon, the terrifying Arbel, painful Tiberias.

We all turn our backs on names, the rules of the game,

the hollow calls.
An hour passes, hair is cut off

in the barbershop.
The door is opened.
What remains is for

the broom and the street.
And the barber’s watch ticking close to

your ear as he bends over you.
This too is time.

Time’s end, perhaps.
The child hasn’t been found.

The results of rain are seen even now when it’s summer.

Aloud the trees are talking from the sleep of the earth.

Voices made out of tin are ringing in the wind

as it wakes up.
We lay together.
I walked away:

the belovèd’s eyes stayed wide open in fear.
She sat up

in bed for a while, leaning on her elbows.
The sheet

was white like the day of judgment, and she couldn’t stay

alone in the house, she went out into the world

that began with the stairs near the door.
But the child remained

and began to resemble the mountains and the winds and the trunks

of olive trees.
A family resemblance: as the face of a young man

who fell in the Negev arises in the face of his cousin

born in New York.
The fracture of a mountain in the Aravah

reappears in the face of the shattered friend.
Mountain range

and night, resemblance and tradition.
Night’s custom that turned

into the law of lovers.
Temporary precautions

became permanent.
The police, the calls outside, the speaking

inside the bodies.
And the fire-engines don’t wail when they come from

the fire.
Silently they return from embers and ashes.

Silently we returned from the valley after love and searching

in retrospect: not being paid attention to.
But a few of us

continued to listen.
It seemed as if someone was calling.

We extended the outer ear with the palm of a hand,

we extended the area of the heart with a further love

in order to hear more clearly, in order to forget.

But the child died in the night

clean and well groomed.
Neat and licked by the tongues

of God and night.
“When we got here, it was still daylight.

Now darkness has come.”
Clean and white like a sheet of

paper in an envelope closed and chanted upon

in the psalm-books of the lands of the dead.
A few went on searching,

or perhaps they searched for a pain that would fit their tears,

for a joy that would fit their laughter, though nothing can fit

anything else.
Even hands are from a different body.

But it seemed to us that something had fallen.
We heard

a ringing, like a coin that fell.
We stood for a moment.

We turned around.
We bent down.
We didn’t find

anything, and we went on walking.
Each to his own.

Jerusalem, 1967

To my friends Dennis, Arieh, and Harold

1

This year I traveled a long way

to view the silence of my city.

A baby calms down when you rock it, a city calms down

from the distance.
I dwelled in longing.
I played the hopscotch

of the four strict squares of Yehuda Ha-Levi:

My heart.
Myself.
East West.

I heard bells ringing in the religions of time,

but the wailing that I heard inside me

has always been from my Yehudean desert.

Now that I’ve come back, I’m screaming again.

And at night, stars rise like the bubbles of the drowned,

and every morning I scream the scream of a newborn baby

at the tumult of houses and at all this huge light.

2

I’ve come back to this city where names

are given to distances as if to human beings

and the numbers are not of bus routes

but: 70 After, 1917, 500

B.C.
, Forty-eight.
These are the lines

you really travel on.

And already the demons of the past are meeting

with the demons of the future and negotiating about me

above me, their give-and-take neither giving nor taking,

in the high arches of shell-orbits above my head.

A man who comes back to Jerusalem is aware that the places

that used to hurt don’t hurt anymore.

But a light warning remains in everything,

like the movement of a light veil: warning.

3

Illuminated is the Tower of David, illuminated is the Church of Maria,

illuminated the patriarchs sleeping in their burial cave, illuminated

are the faces from inside, illuminated the translucent

honey cakes, illuminated the clock and illuminated the time

passing through your thighs as you take off your dress.

Illuminated illuminated.
Illuminated are the cheeks of my childhood,

illuminated the stones that wanted to be illuminated

along with those that wanted to sleep in the darkness of squares.

Illuminated are the spiders of the banister and the cobwebs of churches

and the acrobats of the stairs.
But more than all these, and in them all,

illuminated is the terrible, true X-ray writing

in letters of bones, in white and lightning:
MENE

MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN.

4

In vain you will look for the fences of barbed wire.

You know that such things

don’t disappear.
A different city perhaps

is now being cut in two; two lovers

separated; a different flesh is tormenting itself now

with these thorns, refusing to be stone.

In vain you will look.
You lift up your eyes unto the hills,

perhaps there?
Not these hills, accidents of geology,

but The Hills.
You ask

questions without a rise in your voice, without a question mark,

only because you’re supposed to ask them; and they

don’t exist.
But a great weariness wants you with all your might

and gets you.
Like death.

Jerusalem, the only city in the world

where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.

5

On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on