The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (15 page)

who received it from others.
I’ve been patched together

from many things, I’ve been gathered in different times,

I’ve been assembled from spare parts, from disintegrating

materials, from decomposing words.
And already now,

in the middle of my life, I’m beginning to return them, gradually,

because I want to be a good and orderly person

at the border, when they ask me: “Do you have anything to declare?”

So that there won’t be too much pressure at the end,

so that I won’t arrive sweating and breathless and confused.

So that I won’t have anything left to declare.

The red stars are my heart, the distant Milky Way

is the blood in it, in me.
The hot

hamsin
breathes in huge lungs,

my life is close to a huge heart, always inside.

I’m sitting in the German Colony, which is

the Valley of the Ghosts.
Outside they call to one another,

a mother to her children, a child to a child, a man

to God: Come home now!
Time to come home!
“And he is merciful,”

come home, God, be gathered to your people in Jerusalem

so that we can be gathered to you, in mutual death

and mutual prayers, with shaken-out sheets and smoothed pillows

and turning off the bed light and the eternal lamp,

closing the book, and closing the eyes, and turning,

curled-up, to the wall.
Here, in the valley, in the house

above whose entrance my birth year is carved with

a verse in German: “Begin with God

and end with God.
That is the best way to live.”

A stone lion crouches and watches over the words

and the four-digit number.

On the gatepost the mezuzah, flute of my childhood’s God,

and two columns, a memorial to a temple that never was,

the curtain moves like the curtain in the hotel in Rome

that first morning, moves and is drawn open,

uncovered to me the nakedness of that city,

the roofs and the sky, and I was aroused to

come to her.
Please, now, please.
My belovèd, your hair

is parted in the middle, you walk proudly, your strong

face carries a heavy weight, heavier than

the urn on the heads of Arab women at the well, and your eyes

are open as if from a nonweight.
And outside

cars are wailing.
Motors take on

the sound of humans in distress,

in depression, in gasoline shortage, in the great heat and in the cold,

in old age and in loneliness, and they weep and wail.

Josephus Flavius, son of the dead, like me,

son of Matityahu, surrendered his fortresses in Galilee

and threw down his sword on the table in front of me:

a ray of light that penetrated from outside.

He saw my name carved on the door as if on a tombstone,

he thought that my house too was a grave.
Son of the dead,

son of dust, son of the streetlamp that shines in the evening

outside.
The people in front of the window are the legions

of Titus; they are descending on Jerusalem

now, as this Sabbath ends, on its cafés and on

its movie theaters, on lights and on cakes

and on women’s thighs: surrender of love,

supplication of love.
The rustling of trees

in the garden announces a change in my actions, but not

in my dreams.
My inner clothes won’t be changed

and the tattoo from my childhood keeps on sinking

inward.

Go, cheerful commander and sad historian,

slumber between the pages of your books, like pressed

flowers you will sleep in them.
Go,

my child too is a war orphan of three wars

in which I wasn’t killed and in which he

wasn’t born yet, but he is a war orphan of them all.

Go, white governor of Galilee.
I too

am always entering and leaving as if into new apartments,

through iron window-grilles that are of memory.

You must be shadow or water

to pass through all these without breaking,

you are gathered again afterward.
A declaration of peace

with yourself, a treaty, conditions, protracted deliberations,

dunes stretching out, rustling of trees

over multitudes of the wounded, as in

a real war.
A woman once said to me:

“Everyone goes to his own funeral.”
I didn’t

understand then.
I don’t understand now, but I’m going.

Death is only a bureaucrat who arranges

our lives by subject and place

in files and in archives.
This valley

is the rip God made in his clothes, in the ritual

mourning for the dead, and all that the poet and

the chronicler can do is to hand over their fortresses

and be wailing-women, mourners for a fee or without one.

Yodfat opens her gates wide: a great

light bursts forth, the light of surrender

that should have sufficed for the darkness of millennia.

Ta-da, ta-daaaaaaa, ta-daaa (sadly),

the blower’s lips cracked in the prolonged
khamsin,
the tongue cleaved

to the roof of his mouth, the right hand forgot its cunning.
I

remember only the movement of the woman

pulling her dress over her head:

what a
hands-up!,
what a blind surrender,

what imploring, what lust, what surrender!

“I’m not a traitor,” and between the columns my brother Josephus

vanished.
“I have to write a history.”

The columns are sick, their capital is circled by a leprosy of Greek

ornaments and an insanity of carved flowers and buds.

The home is sick.
“Homesick” they say in English

when a man yearns for his home.
The home

is man-sick.
I yearn.
I am sick.
Go,

Josephus my brother, flying flags too

are curtains in windows that no longer have a home.

I am a pious Jew, my beard has grown inward,

instead of flesh and blood I’m stuffed with beard-hair

like a mattress.
Pain stays in the forehead, under the phylactery box, with

no remedy.
My heart fasts almost every week, whether I’ve dropped

a Torah scroll or not, whether the Temple

was destroyed or rebuilt.

I don’t drink wine; but everything the wine doesn’t do to me

is a black abyss without drunkenness, a dark

empty vineyard where they tread and bruise the soles of

their feet on the hard stone.
My body is a shipyard

for what is called my soul.
My body will be dismantled and my soul

will glide out to sea, and its shape is the shape of my body in which it lay

and its shape is the shape of the sea, and the shape of the sea is like the shape of my body.

My belovèd is Jobesque.
It happened in summer, and the elastic straps

of her clothing snapped with the twang of a taut string.
The wailings of

labor pains and rattle of death-agony already in a first night of love.

Rip, riiiiiip of light clothing,

because it was summer, the end of a heavy summer of

thin, light clothing.
A shofar like the hiccup

of a sick man.
And in the beginning of the month of Elul

the blower blew the ram’s horn and his face was sheepish

like a ram’s face and his eye was bulging and glassy and rolled

in its socket like the eye of a closed tank.
And his mouth was caught in the shofar,

with no way to escape.

Jobesque: we met in the flight of the hemlock.
With legs spread apart

wider than the spreading of wings, beyond the borders of your body.

In love always, despair lies with you now

and your movements and the writhing of your limbs and your screams with him

are the same as with me.

Sometimes I feel my soul rolling

as if it were inside an empty barrel.
In the dull sound

of a barrel pushed from place to place.
Sometimes

I see Jerusalem between two people

who stand in front of a window, with a space

between them.
The fact that they aren’t close and loving

allows me to see my life, between them.

“If only it were possible to grasp the moment

when two people first become strangers to each other.”

This could have been a song of praise to

the sweet, imaginary God of my childhood.

It happened on Friday, and black angels

filled the Valley of the Cross, and their wings

were black houses and abandoned quarries.

Sabbath candles bobbed up and down like ships

at the entrance to a harbor.
“Come O bride,”

wear the clothes of your mourning and your splendor

from the night when you thought I wouldn’t come to you

and I came.
The room was drenched in the fragrance

of syrup from black, intoxicating cherries.

Newspapers, scattered on the floor, rustled below

and the flapping wings of the hemlock above.

Love with parting, like a record

with applause at the end of the music, love

with a scream, love with a mumble of despair

at walking proudly into exile from each other.

Come O bride, hold in your hand something made of clay

at the hour of sunset, because flesh vanishes

and iron doesn’t keep.
Hold clay in your hand

for future archaeologists to find and remember.

They don’t know that anemones after the rain

are another archaeological find, a document of major importance.

The time has come for the canon of my life to be closed,

as the rabbis closed the canon of the Bible.

There will be a final decision, chapters and books will remain outside,

will be declared apocryphal, some days won’t be counted with the rest,

they will be examples and exegeses and interpretations of interpretations

but not the essence, not holy.

I imagine matches that were moistened with tears

or with blood, and can no longer be lit.
I imagine

a shofar blowing in the assault upon an empty objective.

Jewish shofar-bagpipes, Jeremiah of Anatot

assaulting an empty place with a troop of weepers running behind him.

But last Yom Kippur, at the close of the final

prayer, when everyone was waiting for the shofar

in great silence, after the shouts of “Open the gate for us,”

his voice was heard like the thin squeal of an infant,

his first cry.
My life, the beginning of my life.

I chose you, love, I was Ahasuerus who sat

on his throne and chose.
Through the splendorous clothing

I saw you and the signs of mutability on your body

and the arch of curling apocalyptic hair

above the vagina.
You wore black stockings,

but I knew that you were the opposite.
You wore black dresses

as if in mourning, but I saw red on your body