The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (17 page)

And the silver hand pointing for the reader of the Torah scroll

passes along the hard lines

like an arm on a large holy machine

with its oversized, bent, hard finger,

passes and points and hits against things that

can’t be changed.
Here thou shalt read.
Here thou shalt die, here.

And this is the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not wish.

I think about forgetting as about a fruit that grows larger and larger,

and when it ripens it won’t be eaten,

because it won’t exist and won’t be remembered:

its ripening is its forgetting.
When I lie on my back,

the bones of my legs are filled

with the sweetness

of my little son’s breath.

He breathes the same air as I do,

sees the same things,

but my breath is bitter and his is sweet

like rest in the bones of the weary,

and my childhood of blessèd memory.
His childhood.

I didn’t kiss the ground

when they brought me as a little boy

to this land.
But now that I’ve grown up on her,

she kisses me,

she holds me,

she clings to me with love,

with grass and thorns, with sand and stone,

with wars and with this springtime

until the final kiss.

Jews in the Land of Israel

We forget where we came from.
Our Jewish

names from the Exile give us away,

bring back the memory of flower and fruit, medieval cities,

metals, knights who turned to stone, roses,

spices whose scent drifted away, precious stones, lots of red,

handicrafts long gone from the world

(the hands are gone too).

Circumcision does it to us,

as in the Bible story of Shechem and the sons of Jacob,

so that we go on hurting all our lives.

What are we doing, coming back here with this pain?

Our longings were drained together with the swamps,

the desert blooms for us, and our children are beautiful.

Even the wrecks of ships that sunk on the way

reached this shore,

even winds did.
Not all the sails.

What are we doing

in this dark land with its

yellow shadows that pierce the eyes?

(Every now and then someone says, even after forty

or fifty years: “The sun is killing me.”)

What are we doing with these souls of mist, with these names,

with our eyes of forests, with our beautiful children,

with our quick blood?

Spilled blood is not the roots of trees

but it’s the closest thing to roots

we have.

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire,

not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,

but rather

as in the heart when the excitement is over

and you can talk only about a great weariness.

I know that I know how to kill,

that makes me an adult.

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows

how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.

A peace

without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,

without words, without

the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be

light, floating, like lazy white foam.

A little rest for the wounds—

who speaks of healing?

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation

to the next, as in a relay race:

the baton never falls.)

Let it come

like wildflowers,

suddenly, because the field

must have it: wildpeace.

The Way It Was

The way it was.

When the water we drank at night, afterwards,

was all the wine in the world.

And doors, I never remember

if they open in or out,

and if those buttons in the entrance to your building

are for switching on the light, for ringing the bell

or ringing in silence.

That’s the way we wanted it.
Was that

the way we wanted it?

In our three rooms,

at the open window,

you promised me there wouldn’t be a war.

I gave you a watch instead of

a wedding ring: good round time,

the ripest fruit

of sleeplessness and forever.

Instead of Words

My love has a very long white gown

of sleep, of sleeplessness, of weddings.

In the evening she sits at a small table,

puts a comb down on it, two tiny bottles

and a brush, instead of words.

Out of the depths of her hair she fishes many pins

and puts them in her mouth, instead of words.

I dishevel her, she combs.

I dishevel again.
What’s left?

She falls asleep instead of words,

and her sleep already knows me,

wags her woolly dreams.

Her belly easily absorbs

all the wrathful prophecies of

the End of Days.

I wake her: we

are the instruments of a hard love.

Gifts of Love

I gave them to you

for your earlobes, your fingers.
I gilded

the time on your wrist,

I hung lots of glittery things on you

so you’d sway for me in the wind, so you’d

chime softly over me

to soothe my sleep.

I comforted you with apples, as it says

in the Song of Songs,

I lined your bed with them,

so we could roll smoothly on red apple-bearings.

I covered your skin with a pink chiffon,

transparent as baby lizards—the ones with

black diamond eyes on summer nights.

You helped me to live for a couple of months

without needing religion

or a point of view.

You gave me a letter opener made of silver.

Real letters aren’t opened that way;

they’re torn open,

torn,
torn.

Ballad in the Streets of Buenos Aires

And a man waits in the street and meets a woman

precise and beautiful as the clock on the wall of her room

and sad and white as the wall that holds it

And she doesn’t show him her teeth

and she doesn’t show him her belly

but she shows him her time, precise and beautiful

And she lives on the ground floor next to the pipes

and the water that rises begins there in her wall

and he has decided on tenderness

And she knows the reasons for weeping

and she knows the reasons for holding back

and he begins to be like her, like her

And his hair will grow long and soft, like her hair

and the hard words of his language dissolve in her mouth

and his eyes will be filled with tears, like her eyes

And the traffic lights are reflected in her face

and she stands there amid the permitted and the forbidden

and he has decided on tenderness

And they walk in the streets that will soon appear in his dreams

and the rain weeps into them silently, as into a pillow,

and impatient time has made them both into prophets

And he will lose her at the red light

and he will lose her at the green and the yellow

and the light is always there to serve every loss

And he won’t be there when soap and lotion run out

and he won’t be there when the clock is set again

and he won’t be there when her dress unravels to threads in the wind

And she will lock his wild letters away in a quiet drawer

and lie down to sleep beside the water in the wall

and she will know the reasons for weeping and for holding back

and he has decided on tenderness

Psalm

A psalm on the day

a building contractor cheated me.
A psalm of praise.

Plaster falls from the ceiling, the wall is sick, paint

cracking like lips.

The vines I’ve sat under, the fig tree—

it’s all just words.
The rustling of the trees

creates an illusion of God and justice.

I dip my dry glance like bread

into the death that softens it,

always on the table in front of me.

Years ago, my life

turned my life into a revolving door.

I think about those who, in joy and success,

have gotten far ahead of me,

carried between two men for all to see

like that bunch of shiny pampered grapes

from the Promised Land,

and those who are carried off, also

between two men: wounded or dead.
A psalm.

When I was a child I sang in the synagogue choir,

I sang till my voice broke.
I sang

first voice and second voice.
And I’ll go on singing

till my heart breaks, first heart and second heart.

A psalm.

Seven Laments for the War-Dead

1

Mr.
Beringer, whose son

fell at the Canal that strangers dug

so ships could cross the desert,

crosses my path at Jaffa Gate.

He has grown very thin, has lost

the weight of his son.

That’s why he floats so lightly in the alleys

and gets caught in my heart like little twigs

that drift away.

2

As a child he would mash his potatoes

to a golden mush.

And then you die.

A living child must be cleaned

when he comes home from playing.

But for a dead man

earth and sand are clear water, in which

his body goes on being bathed and purified

forever.

3

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

across there.
On the enemy’s side.
A good landmark

for gunners of the future.

Or the war monument in London

at Hyde Park Corner, decorated

like a magnificent cake: yet another soldier

lifting head and rifle,

another cannon, another eagle, another

stone angel.

And the whipped cream of a huge marble flag

poured over it all

with an expert hand.

But the candied, much-too-red cherries

were already gobbled up

by the glutton of hearts.
Amen.

4

I came upon an old zoology textbook,

Brehm, Volume II,
Birds:

in sweet phrases, an account of the life of the starling,

swallow, and thrush.
Full of mistakes in an antiquated

Gothic typeface, but full of love, too.
“Our feathered

friends.”
“Migrate from us to the warmer climes.”

Nest, speckled egg, soft plumage, nightingale,

stork.
“The harbingers of spring.”
The robin,

red-breasted.

Year of publication: 1913, Germany,

on the eve of the war that was to be

the eve of all my wars.

My good friend who died in my arms, in

his blood,

on the sands of Ashdod.
1948, June.

Oh my friend,

red-breasted.

5

Dicky was hit.

Like the water tower at Yad Mordechai.

Hit.
A hole in the belly.
Everything

came flooding out.

But he has remained standing like that

in the landscape of my memory

like the water tower at Yad Mordechai.

He fell not far from there,

a little to the north, near Huleikat.

6

Is all of this

sorrow?
I don’t know.

I stood in the cemetery dressed in

the camouflage clothes of a living man: brown pants

and a shirt yellow as the sun.

Cemeteries are cheap; they don’t ask for much.

Even the wastebaskets are small, made for holding

tissue paper

that wrapped flowers from the store.

Cemeteries are a polite and disciplined thing.

“I shall never forget you,” in French

on a little ceramic plaque.

I don’t know who it is that won’t ever forget:

he’s more anonymous than the one who died.