The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (27 page)

are on their way to becoming one again

like the long resounding “One”

at the end of
Shema Yisrael.

In Jerusalem my children roll over in their sleep

in the direction of my travels

into the past and the future.

Dry riverbeds think I’m water,

a cloud, the shadow of a cloud,

and I think: Don’t count on me.

I have two friends left, a geologist

and a biologist.

The terrain between them is mine.

I Guard the Children

I guard the children in the schoolyard.

The dog is part of me,

from inside me I hear the echo of his barking.

And the shouts of the children like wild birds

rising up.
Not a single shout

will return to the mouth it came from.

I’m an old father keeping watch in place of the great god

who struts around forever in his eternal youth.

I ask myself, during the Shoah

did a father beat his son behind the barbed wire,

did a mother and daughter quarrel in the huts

of annihilation?
Was there a stubborn rebellious son

in the transport wagons, a generation gap on the ramp,

an Oedipus in the death cells?

I guard the children as they play.

Sometimes the ball leaps over the fence

and skips and bounces on the slope from yard to yard

and rolls over into another reality.

I lift up my face to a hideous vision:

the honorable men

of power, vaunted and vaunting,

clerks of war, merchants of peace,

treasurers of fate, ministers and presidents

flaunting their colors.

I see them pass over us like death-angels

stalking the firstborn,

their wide-open groin dripping

a honeyed drool like lubricant,

the soles of their clawed feet like the feet of Ashmedai,

their heads up in the sky, foolish as flags.

North of San Francisco

Here the soft hills touch the ocean

like one eternity touching another

and the cows grazing on them

ignore us, like angels.

Even the scent of ripe melon in the cellar

is a prophecy of peace.

The darkness doesn’t war against the light,

it carries us forward

to another light, and the only pain

is the pain of not staying.

In my land, called holy,

they won’t let eternity be:

they’ve divided it into little religions,

zoned it for God-zones,

broken it into fragments of history,

sharp and wounding unto death.

And they’ve turned its tranquil distances

into a closeness convulsing with the pain of the present.

On the beach at Bolinas, at the foot of the wooden steps,

I saw some girls lying in the sand bare-bottomed,

their heads bowed, drunk

on the kingdom everlasting,

their souls like doors

closing and opening,

closing and opening inside them

to the rhythm of the surf.

Fall in Connecticut

Leaves fall from the trees

but words multiply on people.

Small red fruits prepare

to stay under the snow and stay red.

The wild games of children

have been domesticated.

On the wall, pictures of winners and losers,

you can’t tell them apart.

The rhythmical strokes of the swimmers

have gone back into the stopwatches.

On the deserted shore, folded beach chairs

chained to each other, the slaves of summer.

The suntanned lifeguard will grow pale inside his house

like a prophet of wrath in peacetime.

I shift mental states

like the gears of a car,

from animal to vegetable

and then to stone.

Sandals

Sandals are the skeleton of a whole shoe,

the skeleton, and its only true spirit.

Sandals are the reins of my galloping feet

and the
tefillin
straps

of a tired foot, praying.

Sandals are the patch of private land I walk on

everywhere I go, ambassadors of my homeland,

my true country, the sky

to small swarming creatures of the earth

and their day of destruction that’s sure to come.

Sandals are the youth of the shoe

and a memory of walking in the wilderness.

I don’t know when they’ll lose me

or when I’ll lose them, but they will

be lost, each in a different place:

one not far from my house

among rocks and shrubs, the other

sinking into the dunes near the Great Sea

like a setting sun,

facing a setting sun.

Jerusalem, 1985

Scribbled wishes stuck between the stones

of the Wailing Wall:

bits of crumpled, wadded paper.

And across the way, stuck in an old iron gate

half-hidden by jasmine:

“Couldn’t make it,

I hope you’ll understand.”

Evidence

An abandoned tractor stuck in the mud,

a shirt tossed on the seat and some crushed grass

testify to a great love, nearby

among the thick bushes, oleander and reed.

There is always more evidence than necessary.

I think of what people buy in a store

in different combinations.

I saw soap, a pack of matches and two apples

in one shopping basket, and some other things

whose combination I can’t decipher.

I think about the effort of history

to make connections and to remember,

and about the loneliness of an ancient clay jar

in a glass case in the museum, all lit-up,

rescued from forgetting and prevented from death.

I think of the basalt stones in the old Roman bridge:

they too are evidence

for things I don’t know.

Round time and square time

travel at the same speed,

but their sound as they pass is different.

And many memorial candles together

make a great joyful light.

The Course of a Life

Till eight days like any happy fly,

on the eighth, a Jew

to be circumcised,

to learn pain without words.

In childhood, a Catholic

for the dances of ritual and its games,

the splendor of fear, the glory of sin

and shining things up above,

or a Jew for the commandments of Shalt and Shalt Not.

We begged you, Lord, to divide right from wrong

and instead you divided the waters above the firmament

from those beneath it.
We begged

for the knowledge of good and evil, and you gave us

all kinds of rules and regulations

like the rules of soccer

for the permitted and the forbidden, for reward and punishment,

for defeat and victory, for remembering and forgetting.

A young man believes in nothing and loves everything,

worships idols and stars, girls, hope, despair.

A Protestant at the age when toughening sets in,

the cheek and the mouth, wheeling and dealing, upper

and lower jaw, commerce and industry.

But after midnight, everyone’s the muezzin

of his own life, calling out from the top of himself

as if from the top of a minaret,

crying parched from the pressure of the desert

about the failure of flesh and of blood,

howling insatiable lusts.

Afterward, a motley crowd, you and I, religions

of oblivion and religions of memory,

hot baths, sunsets and a quiet drunkenness

till the body is soul and the soul, body.

And toward the end, again a Jew,

served up on a white pillow to the
sandak

after the pain, from him to a good woman

and from one good woman to another,

the taste of sweet wine on his lips, and the taste

of pain between his legs.

And the last eight days without

consciousness, without knowledge, without belief

like any animal, like any stone,

like any happy fly.

What Kind of Man

“What kind of man are you?”
people ask me.

I am a man with a complex network of pipes in my soul,

sophisticated machineries of emotion

and a precisely-monitored memory system

of the late twentieth century,

but with an old body from ancient days

and a God more obsolete even than my body.

I am a man for the surface of the earth.

Deep places, pits and holes in the ground

make me nervous.
Tall buildings

and mountaintops terrify me.

I am not like a piercing fork

nor a cutting knife nor a scooping spoon

nor a flat, wily spatula that sneaks in from underneath.

At most I’m a heavy and clumsy pestle

that mashes good and evil together

for the sake of a little flavor,

a little fragrance.

Guideposts don’t tell me where to go.

I conduct my business quietly, diligently,

as if carrying out a long will that began to be written

the moment I was born.

Now I am standing on the sidewalk,

weary, leaning on a parking meter.

I can stand here for free, my own man.

I’m not a car, I’m a human being,

a man-god, a god-man

whose days are numbered.
Hallelujah.

The Greatest Desire

Instead of singing Hallelujah, a curtain

fluttering from an open window.

Instead of saying Amen, a door or a shutter closing.

Instead of the Vision of the End of Days

the flapping of banners on an empty street after the holiday.

Reflections slowly take over the house,

whatever glimmers in mirror and wineglass.

I saw broken glass flashing in the sun

in the Judean desert, celebrating a wedding

without bride or bridegroom, a pure celebration.

I saw a big beautiful parade going by in the street,

I saw policemen standing between the spectators and the parade,

their faces toward those who were watching,

their backs to whatever was passing by

with fanfare and joy and flags.

Maybe to live like that.

But the greatest desire of all is to be

in the dream of another person.

To feel a slight pull, like reins tugging.
To feel

a heavy pull, like chains.

Two Disappeared into a House

Two disappeared into a house.

The marble of the stairs comforts the feet of those who ascend

as it comforts the feet of those who descend,

like the marble that comforts the dead in their graves.

And the higher the stairs, the less worn they are,

the highest are like new