The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (14 page)

descends into the terrible likeness.
Everything is the fruit of the bowels.

[
Turn around now.
]
Ladies and gentlemen, observe the hollow

passing down the back and deepening between the buttocks.
Who

can say where these begin and where

the thighs end; here are the bold buttresses

of the pelvis, columns of legs,

and the curlicues of a Hellenistic gate

above the vagina.
The Gothic arch that reaches

toward the heart and like a reddish Byzantine flame between

her legs.
[
Bend down into a perfect arabesque.
]

A Crusader influence is evident in the hard jawbones,

in the prominent chin.
She touches the earth with both palms

without bending her knees, she touches

the earth that I didn’t kiss when I was brought to it

as a child.
Come again, ladies and gentlemen, visit

the promised land, visit my tears and the east wind,

which is the true Western Wall.
It’s made of

huge wind-stones, and the weeping is the wind’s, and the papers

whirling in the air are the supplications that I stuck between

the cracks.
Visit the land.
On a clear day,

if the visibility is good, you can see

the great miracle of my child

holding me in his arms, though he is four

and I am forty-four.

And here is the zoo of the great belovèd,

acres of love.
Hairy animals breathing

in cages of net underwear, feathers and brown

hair, red fish with green eyes,

hearts isolated behind the bars of ribs

and jumping around like monkeys, hairy fish,

snakes in the shape of a round fat thigh.

And a body burning with a reddish glow, covered

with a damp raincoat.
That is soothing.

This earth speaks only if

they beat her, if hail and rain and bombs beat her,

like Balaam’s ass who spoke only when

her master gave her a sound beating.
I speak

and speak: I’ve been beaten.
Sit

down.
Today is the day of judgment.

I want to make a bet with Job,

about how God and Satan will behave.

Who will be the first to curse man.

Like the red of sunset in Job’s mouth,

they beat him and his last word

sets in redness into his last face.

That’s how I left him in the noisy station

in the noise, among the loudspeaker’s voices.

“Go to hell, Job.
Cursed be the day

when you were created in my image.
Go fuck your mother, Job.”

God cursed, God blessed.
Job won.
And I

have to kill myself with the toy pistol

of my small son.

My child blossoms sad,

he blossoms in the spring without me,

he’ll ripen in the sorrow-of-my-not-being-with-him.

I saw a cat playing with her kittens,

I won’t teach my son war,

I won’t teach him at all.
I won’t exist.

He puts sand into a little pail.

He makes a sand-cake.

I put sand into my body.

The cake crumbles.
My body.

I ate and was filled.
While this one is still coming there comes

yet another, while this one is still speaking there speaks yet another.

Birthdays came to me standing up,

in a hurry.
A quiet moment on a floating plank.

The forty-third birthday.
Anniversary

of a wedding with yourself—and no possibility of divorce.

Separate beds for dream and day,

for your desire and your love.

I live outside my mother’s instruction and in the lands

that are not my father’s teaching.
The walls of my house

were built by stonemasons, not prophets, and on the arch

of the gate I discovered that the year of my birth is carved.

(“What’s become of the house and what’s become of me!”)

In the afternoon hours I take a quiet stroll

among the extraterritorial wounds of

my life: a lit-up window behind which you are perhaps undressing.

A street where we were.
A black door

that’s there.
A garden that’s next to it.
A gate through which.
A dress

like yours on a body that’s not like yours.
A mouth that sings like,

a word that’s almost.
All these are outdoor wounds in a large

wound-garden.

I wear colorful clothes,

I’m a colorful male bird.

Too late I discovered that this is the natural order of things.

The male dresses up.
A pink shirt, a green

sport jacket.
Don’t see me this way, my son!

Don’t laugh.
You’re not seeing me.
I’m part of

the city wall.
My shirt collar blackens.

Under my eyes there’s a black shadow.
Black is the leftover

coffee and black the mourning in my fingernails.
Don’t see me

this way, my son.
With hands smelling of tobacco

and strange perfume, I knead your future

dreams, I prepare your subconscious.

My child’s first memory is the day

when I left his home, my home.
His memories

are hard as gems inside a watch that hasn’t stopped

since.
Someday, when a woman asks him on the first night

of love, as they lie awake on their backs,

he will tell her: “When my father left for the first time.”

And my childhood, of blessed memory.
I filled my quota

of rebelliousness, I did my duty as a disobedient son,

I made my contribution to the war of the generations and to the wildness

of adolescence.
Therefore I have little time left

for rest and fulfillment.
Such

is man, and my childhood of blessed memory.

Insomnia has turned me into a night watchman

without a definite assignment about what to watch.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” understanding

and heroism, wisdom and age, knowledge and death

came to me all at once.
My childhood of blessèd.
Memory.

I returned home, a big-game hunter of emotions.

On the walls, antlers and wings and heads,

stuffed emotions everywhere on the wall.

I sit and look at them calmly, don’t

see me this way, my son.
Even my laughter shows

that I no longer know how to laugh, and the mirror

has long since known that I am its reflection,

don’t see me like this, my son, your eyes are darker than my eyes,

perhaps you’re already sadder than I am.

My heavy body shakes its hearts, like the hand of a gambler

shaking the dice before he throws them onto the table.

That is the movement of my body, that is its game, and that is my fate.

Bialik, a bald knight among olive trees,

didn’t write poems in the land of Israel, because he kissed

the ground and shooed flies and mosquitoes with his

writing hands and wiped sweat from his rhyming brain

and in the
hamsin
put over his head a handkerchief from the Diaspora.

Richard, his lion heart peeping and sticking out a long

tongue between his ribs.
He too was brought

with the traveling circus to the Holy Land.
He was the heart

of a lion and I am the heart of a kicking donkey.

All of them in a death-defying leap, clowns painted

and smeared with white blood, feathers and armor, swallowers of

swords and sharpened crosses,

bell-acrobats.
Saladin

sallied in, with fire-swallowers and baptismal-water-sprinklers,

ballerinas with male genitals.

The King David Hotel flying in the air,

its guests asked for milk, were given dynamite in cans:

to destroy, to destroy, blood and fire in the candy stalls,

you can also get fresh foaming blood from the juice-squeezers

of heroism, war-dead twisted

and stiff like bagels on a string.

Yehuda Ha-Levi, bound up in his books, caught in the web

of his longings which he himself had excreted.
He was held

in pawn, a dead poet in Alexandria.
I don’t remember

his death, just as I don’t remember my death,

but Alexandria I remember: 66, Street of

the Sisters.
General Shmuel Ha-Nagid on his burnt

black horse like the burnt trunks of olive trees

riding around the round Abyssinian Church,

that’s how he imagined the Temple.

Napoleon, his hand on his heart comparing the rhythm of his heartbeats

to the rhythm of his cannons.

And small, triangular panties on a clothesline on

a roof in Jerusalem signal to the tired old

sailor from Tudela, the last Benjamin.

I lived for two months in Abu Tor inside the silence,

I lived for two weeks in the Valley of Gehenna,

in a house that was destroyed after me and in another house

that had an additional story built on it, and in a house whose

collapsing walls were supported, as I

was never supported.
A house hath preeminence over a man.

Sit
shiva
now, get used to a low seat

from which all the living will seem to you like towers.

A eulogy is scattered in the wind-cursed city, old

Jerusalem clamors in the stillness of evil gold.
Incantations

of yearning.
The air of the valleys is lashed by olive branches

to new wars, olives black and

hard as the knots in a whip, there is no hope between

my eyes, there is no hope between my legs in the double

domes of my lust.
Even the Torah portion for my Bar Mitzvah

was double,
Insemination / Leprosy,
and tells

of skin diseases shining with wounded colors,

with death-agony red and the Sodom-sulfur yellow of pus.

Muttered calculations of the apocalypse, numerology of tortures,

sterile acrostics of oblivion, a chess game

with twenty-four squares of lust and

twenty-four squares of disgust.

And Jerusalem too is like a cauldron cooking up a swampy

porridge, and all her buildings are swollen bubbles,

eyeballs bulging from their sockets,

the shape of a dome, of a tower, of a flat or sloping roof,

all are bubbles before bursting.
And God

takes the prophet who happens to be near him at the moment,

and as if with a wooden spoon he stirs it up, stirs and stirs.

I’m sitting here now with my father’s eyes

and with my mothers graying hair on my head, in a house

that belonged to an Arab, who bought it

from an Englishman, who took it from a German,

who hewed it out of the stones of Jerusalem, which is my city;

I look at the world of the god of others