The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (26 page)

I want to remember the last frame

like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine:

the young man tanned and pampered in his jazzy suit

and beside him the angel, dressed for a formal reception

in a long silk gown,

both of them looking with empty eyes

at two empty places,

and behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,

caught in the thicket before the slaughter,

the thicket his last friend.

The angel went home.

Isaac went home.

Abraham and God had gone long before.

But the real hero of The Binding of Isaac

is the ram.

At the Maritime Museum

I saw clay jars covered with barnacles

that were saved from the ocean bottom,

and thought about the sailors of ancient times

who gave half their lives to sail to those jars,

and the other half to bring them back here.

They did what they had to do, and drowned near the shore.

A woman beside me said, “Aren’t they

beautiful!”
and was startled by her words and by me.

Then she walked away into her life,

which is also half a setting out

and half a returning.

Try to Remember Some Details

Try to remember some details.
Remember the clothing

of the one you love

so that on the day of disaster you’ll be able to say: last seen

wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.

Try to remember some details.
For they have no face

and their soul is hidden and their crying

is the same as their laughter,

and their silence and their shouting rise to one height

and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees

and they have no life outside this narrow space

and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory

and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing

and disposable paper plates.

Try to remember some details.
For the world

is filled with people who were torn from their sleep

with no one to mend the tear,

and unlike wild beasts they live

each in his lonely hiding place and they die

together on battlefields

and in hospitals.

And the earth will swallow all of them,

good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,

all of them in their rebellion against death,

their mouths open till the last moment,

and blessing and cursing are a single

howl.
Try, try

to remember some details.

A Man in His Life

A man doesn’t have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn’t have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose.
Ecclesiastes

was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur.
It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and in its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,

shriveled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches already pointing to the place

where there’s time for everything.

My Mother Comes from the Days

My mother comes from the days when they made

paintings of beautiful fruit in silver bowls

and didn’t ask for more.

People moved through their lives

like ships, with the wind or against it, faithful

to their course.

I ask myself which is better,

dying old or dying young.

As if I’d asked which is lighter,

a pound of feathers or a pound of iron.

I want feathers, feathers, feathers.

Now She’s Breathing

Now she’s breathing quietly, I said.
No, she’s

screaming inside because of a great pain, the doctor said.

He asked my permission

to remove the wedding ring from her finger

because it was very swollen.
I gave permission in the name of

the pain and in the name of my father

who never left her in his life.
We kept turning the ring

like the magic ring in a fairy tale, but

it didn’t come off and there was

no miracle.
The doctor asked permission to cut

the ring, and he cut it with the gentleness

of careful forceps.

Now she’s laughing, practicing the laughter of over there.

Now she’s crying, weaning herself

from the crying of here.

The photo on her passport was taken many years ago.

After she came to the land of Israel, she never

went abroad.
A death certificate

doesn’t need a photo.

My Mother Died on Shavuot

My mother died on Shavuot, at the end of

the Counting of the Omer.

Her oldest brother died in 1916; he fell in the war.

I almost fell in 1948, and my mother died in 1983.

Everyone dies at the end of some counting, long or short,

everyone falls in a war and deserves

a wreath, a ceremony, an official letter.

When I stand at my mother’s grave

its as if I’m saluting,

and the hard words of the Kaddish are like a gun salute

into the bright summer sky.

We buried her in Sanhedria next to my father’s grave,

we’d saved a place for her

the way people do on a bus or at the movies:

we left flowers and little stones, so that no one

would take her place.

(Twenty years ago the graveyard

was on the border, facing the enemy positions.

The tombstones were a good defense against tanks.)

But when I was a child, there was a botanical garden here,

all sorts of plants and shabby wooden signs

with names in Hebrew and Latin:

the Common Rose, Mediterranean Sage,

the Common Shriek, the Tufted Lamentation,

the Annual Lamentation, the Perennial Grief,

the Crimson Remembrance, the Sweet Remembrance,

the remembrance and the forgetting.

The Body Is the Cause of Love

The body is the cause of love;

after that, the fortress that protects it;

after that, loves prison.

But when the body dies, love is set free

in wild abundance,

like a slot machine that breaks down

and with a furious ringing pours out all at once

all the coins of

all the generations of luck.

Orchard

Here they stand, a living tree next to a dead one

and a sick tree next to one with sweet fruit,

and none of them knows what happened.

And all of them together, not like human beings

who are separated from one another.

And there is a tree that holds onto the earth with its roots

as if with despairing fingers, so the earth won’t sink down,

and beside it a tree pulled down by the same earth,

and both are one height, you can’t tell the difference.

And a wild pigeon cries out a wild hope,

and the whirr of quail in their low flight

brings tidings of things I don’t want to know.

And there are mounds of stones for remembrance

and hedges of stones for forgetting,

that’s how I mark the boundary between the plots of my life,

and that’s how the stones will be scattered again over the field.

O bliss of the earth swept out to sea in winter

freed of roots and the dead.

O holy erosion that makes us forget.

The cassia gives off its fragrance, and the fragrance

gives back the cassia.
That’s how imagination

turns a great wheel in my life,

a wheel that won’t stop.

Soon my son will rebel against me

even before I am able to tell him

what to do, what path to take.

But peace returns to my heart.

Not peace as it used to be

before it left me years ago.
It went away to school,

matured as I did,

and came back looking like me.

Late Marriage

I sit in a waiting room with bridegrooms

much younger than me.
If I had lived in ancient times

I would be a prophet.
But now I wait quietly

to register my name along with the name of my beloved

in the big book of marriages,

and to answer the questions I still

can answer.
I’ve filled my life with words,

I’ve gathered enough data in my body to supply

the intelligence services of several nations.

With heavy steps I carry light thoughts

as in my youth I carried thoughts heavy with destiny

on light feet that almost danced from so much future.

The pressure of my life brings my date of birth closer

to the date of my death, as in history books

where the pressure of history has brought

those two numbers together next to the name of a dead king

with only a hyphen between them.

I hold onto that hyphen with all my might

like a lifeline, I live on it,

and on my lips the vow not to be alone,

the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride,

the sound of children laughing and shouting

in the streets of Jerusalem

and the cities of Yehuda.

Inside the Apple

You visit me inside the apple.

Together we can hear the knife

paring around and around us, carefully,

so the peel won’t tear.

You speak to me.
I trust your voice

because it has lumps of hard pain in it

the way real honey

has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

I touch your lips with my fingers:

that too is a prophetic gesture.

And your lips are red, the way a burnt field

is black.

Its all true.

You visit me inside the apple

and you’ll stay with me inside the apple

until the knife finishes its work.

North of Beersheba

The soil is ploughed up.
Inside

has turned into outside now

like a man who’s confessed.

And all the crumbling things