Collected Poems (11 page)

MOTH

Drawn by the white glitter of a lamp

A slick-winged moth got in

My midnight room and ran quick

Around the switches of a radio.

Antennae searched the compact powerpacks

And built-in aerials, feet on metal paused

At
METER-SELECT
,
MINIMUM-MAX

TUNER, VOLUME, TONE

Licked up shortwave stations onto neat

Click-buttons with precision feet.

Unable to forego the next examination

My own small private moth seemed all

Transistor-drunk on fellow-feeling,

A voluptuous discovery pulled

From some far bigger life.

A thin and minuscule antenna

Felt memory backtuning as it crawled

Familiar mechanism, remembering an instrument

Once cherished,

Forgotten but loved for old times' sake.

I switched the wireless on, and the moth

To prove its better senses

Mocked me with open wings and circled the light,

Making its own theatre, which outran all music.

FISHES

Fishes never change their habits:

A million years seem like a day

As far as fishes' habits go.

Beware of those who change them half as fast

Like people every year or so

So fast you cannot find

A firm limb or settled eye.

The constancy of fishes is unique.

They multiply but keep their habits

In deep and solitary state;

Feel unique and all alone

Not being touched and hardly touching

Even to keep the species spreading –

Unique is never-changing habits.

Fishes are flexible and fit the water,

And though continually moving

Never change their habits.

THISTLES

Thistles grow in spite of flowers,

Brittle taproots drawing succour till the autumn.

Seeds flop from the hedge

And at puberty suck their fill by beans and carrots.

Entrenching blade hacks soil,

And fingers under thistle-spikes grip,

And easily out it's tossed to the sun's bake.

A dry and useless thistle pricks –

Fingers gather and inflate with pus:

For weeks the memory of pain.

RELEASE

Flowers wilt, leaves feloniously snatched,

Birds sucked away – autumn happens.

Frenetic bluebottles saw the air.

Blackberries scratch with poison.

Love is taken before knowing the mistake.

The last thief grins

At the look of life.

There are many, so who cares?

The trap is a loaded crossbow,

Ratchet-pulley sinewed back

From birth and set in wait.

None walk upright from the bolt's release.

LEFT HANDED

The left hand guards my life.

I use. It uses. Sinister

Alliances shape plans.

Left hand is fed by the heart

Strategically engined

Between brain and fingers,

Sometimes filtering intelligence.

The left eye is in line with hand

And pen. The left lung

Rotted when I tried the right:

Lesson one was spitting blood.

Vulnerable left side lives in harmony

And liberates the rules,

Rides monsters who fear to eat themselves,

So do not bite.

NEW MOON

Since men have waved flags on her

Classified geology with peacock colours

Sent cameras probing every angle

The moon has turned lesbian;

Shows brighter now in her woman hunger

Goes with purpose to her lover

In the Milky Way, nothing more from earth

Yet better by far than shining palely

A mirror for courtiers to gawp at –

And that stricken poet who ached

In her unrequiting love but now is free.

OPHELIA

When Ophelia lay a finger on the water

The cold and shallow brook scorched flesh.

She pulled it back.

The fire was love.

She was forget-me-not's daughter,

Each eye a pond of flowers.

She climbed the arching cliff

Where water sent its clouds of salt,

Luminous across the sun.

The nunnery was found:

No one saw her body spin.

A lunar sea-change sent it cleanly in.

ALIOTH THE BIGOT

A bigot walks fast.

Get out of the way

Or walk faster.

He walked faster too

Veered right

To evade me.

I increased my rate

Hinging left to avoid

The fire in his eyes.

Collisionable material

Should not promenade

On the same street.

We muttered sorry

Then went on

More speedily than ever.

CHANGING COURSE

Down the slope to the horizon

Fix the black-dot sun before departure.

When the day sets at the storm's end

Far along the moonbeams that flow in,

Shut the barometer, hang the watch away

Lay the sextant in its box.

How deep the valley which enclosed

The lifeboat washed against the shore.

The heart says goodnight at dawn,

And hopes the dark is best

Which fears the day to come.

ON FIRST SEEING JERUSALEM

The way to knowing is to know

How useless to talk of hills and colours

Looking at Jerusalem.

To know is to keep silent

Yet in silence

One no longer knows;

Can never unknow what was known

Or let silence slaughter reason.

One knows, and always knows

Unable to believe silence

A better way of knowing.

One sees Jerusalem, knows

Yet does not, comes to life

And knows that walls outlast whoever watches.

The Temple was destroyed: one knows for sure.

One joins the multitude and grieves.

Knows it from within.

One does not know. Let me see you

Everyday as if for the first time

Then I'll know more:

Which already has been said

By wanderers who, coming home,

Regret the loss of that first vision.

The dust that knew it once is mute.

Stones that know stay warm and silent.

From pale dry hills I watch Jerusalem,

Make silence with the stones:

An ever-new arrival.

NAILS

Tel Aviv is built on sand:

Sand spills from a broken paving stone

And sandals cannot tread it back;

Waves beat threateningly

A sea to flow through traffic

Climb hills and wash Jerusalem.

Every white-eyed speckle of its salt

Feasts on oranges and people,

Envying their safety;

And their rock through which

Six million nails were hammered

As deep as the world's middle,

And the sky that no floodtide can reach.

LEARNING HEBREW

With coloured pens and pencils

And a child's alphabet book

I laboriously draw

Each Hebrew letter

Right to left

And hook to foot,

Lamed
narrow at the top,

The steel pen deftly thickening

As it descends

And turns three bends

Into a black cascade of hair,

Halting at the vowel-stone

To one more letter.

Script comes up like music

Blessing life

The first blue of the sea

The season's ripe fruit

And the act of eating bread:

Each sign hewn out of rock

By hands deserving God as well as Beauty.

I'm slow to learn

Cloud-tail shapes and whale-heads

Arks and ships in black, pure black

The black of the enormous sky

From behind a wall of rock:

With their surety of law

Such shapes make me illiterate

And pain the heart

As if a boulder bigger than the earth

Would crush me:

Struck blind I go on drawing

To enlighten darkness.

Such help I need:

Lost in this slow writing,

Clutch at a letter like a walking-stick

Go into the cavern-mouth

And sleep by phosphorescent letters

Dreaming between
aleph
or
tav

Beginning and end

Or the lit-up middle.

Dreams thin away:

In day the hand writes

Hebrew letters cut in my rock

Painted by a child on the page,

For they are me and I am them

But can't know which.

SYNAGOGUE IN PRAGUE

Killers said

Before they used their slide-rules

‘Death is the way to Freedom':

Seventy-seven thousand names

Carved on these great walls

Are a gaol Death cannot open.

Eyes close in awe and sorrow

As if that name was my mother

That boy starved to death my son

Those men gassed my brothers

Or striving cousins.

It might have been me and if it was

I spend a day searching the words

For my name.

I'd be glad it was not me

If the dead could see sky again,

Reach that far-off river and swim in it.

What can one say

When shouting rots the brain?

The dead god hanging in churches

Was not allowed to hear

Of work calling for revenge

To ease the pain of having let it happen

And stop it being planned again.

Letters calling for revenge on such a wall

Would vandalize that encyphered synagogue,

And seventy-seven thousand

Stonily indented names

Would still show through.

Vengeance is Jehovah's own;

To prove He's not abandoned us

He gave the gift of memory,

The fruit of all trees

In the Land of Israel.

ISRAEL

Israel is light and mountains

Bedrock and river

Sand-dunes and gardens,

Earth so enriched

It can be seen from

The middle of the sun.

Without Israel

Would be

The pain

Of God struck from the universe

And the soul falling

Endlessly through night.

Israel

Guards the Sabbath-candle of the world

A storm-light marking

Job's Inn – open to all –

An ark without lifeboats

On land's vast ocean.

ON AN OLD FRIEND REACHING JERUSALEM

No one may ask what I am doing here:

Olive-leaves one side glisten tin

The other is opaque like my dulled hair.

I travelled far. I walked. I ate

The train's black smoke,

Choked on Europe's bitter sin.

When forests grew from falling ash

I gleaned the broken letters of my alphabet

And sucked them back to life for bread.

Christian roofs were painted red

And four horizons closed their doors.

Pulled apart by Europe's sky

My soul is polished by Jerusalem

Where I fall fearlessly in love

Ashen by the Western Wall,

And through my tears no one dare ask

What I am doing here.

FESTIVAL

The moon came up over Jerusalem

Blood-red

An hour later it was white

Bled to death.

The breath of memory revives

On the Fifteenth Day of Ab.

The spirit and the flesh

Don't clash when men and women

Walk in orange groves

To reinvigorate the moon.

God knew the left hand

And the right

When Lot chose

The Plain of Ha-Yarden

And Abram – Canaan.

An excruciating noise of car brakes

Comes from the Valley of Hinnom.

Jerusalem is ours.

YAM KINNERET (THE SEA OF GALILEE)

Galilee is a lake of reasonable size,

Unless immensity is measured down

In dreams, in darkness.

Then it becomes an ocean.

Distant sails are birds trapped

On the unreflecting surface,

As if savage fish below

Pull at their wings.

With casual intensity

And such immensity

Are new dreams made from old.

EZEKIEL

On the fifth day

In the fourth month

Of the thirtieth year

Among the captives by the river

A storm wind came out of the north.

Ezekiel the priest saw visions:

Saw Israel

Had four faces

Four wings

Four faces:

The face of a man

The face of a lion

The face of an ox

The face of an eagle.

That was the vision of Ezekiel.

THE ROCK

Moses drew water from a cliff.

I set my cup

Till it was filled.

Water saved me, and I drank,

Reflecting on

The shape of flame

Of how a fire needs

Putting down

By swords of water.

IN ISRAEL, DRIVING TO THE DEAD SEA

I drive a car. Cars don't

Figure much in poems.

Poets do not like them,

Which is strange to me.

Poets do not make cars

Never have, not

One nut or bit of Plexiglass

Passes through their fingers.

No reason why they should.

To make a bolt or screw

Is not poetic. To fit a window:

Is that necessary?

Likewise an engine

Makes a noise. It smells,

And runs you off too fast.

What's more you have to sit

As fixed at work as that

Engine-slave who made it.

Nevertheless I drive a car

With pleasure. It makes my life poetic

I float along and tame