Part One

The U.N. Headquarters in the High Commissioner’s House in Jerusalem

The mediators, the peacemakers, the compromise-shapers, the comforters

live in the white house

and get their nourishment from far away,

through winding pipes, through dark veins, like a fetus.

And their secretaries are lipsticked and laughing,

and their sturdy chauffeurs wait below, like horses in a stable,

and the trees that shade them have their roots in no-man’s-land

and the illusions are children who went out to find cyclamen in the field

and do not come back.

And the thoughts pass overhead, restless, like reconnaissance planes,

and take photos and return and develop them

in dark sad rooms.

And I know they have very heavy chandeliers

and the boy-I-was sits on them and swings

out and back, out and back, out till there’s no coming back.

And later on, night will arrive to draw

rusty and bent conclusions from our old lives,

and over all the houses a melody will gather the scattered words

like a hand gathering crumbs upon a table

after the meal, while the talk continues

and the children are already asleep.

And hopes come to me like bold seafarers,

like the discoverers of continents coming to an island,

and stay for a day or two

and rest . . .

And then they set sail.

Autobiography, 1952

My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard

and I left it once, before I was finished,

and he remained there with his big, empty worry.

And my mother was like a tree on the shore

between her arms that stretched out toward me.

And in ’31 my hands were joyous and small

and in ’41 they learned to use a gun

and when I first fell in love

my thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons

and the girl’s white hand held them all

by a thin string—then let them fly away.

And in ’51 the motion of my life

was like the motion of many slaves chained to a ship,

and my father’s face like the headlight on the front of a train

growing smaller and smaller in the distance,

and my mother closed all the many clouds inside her brown closet,

and as I walked up my street

the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,

blood that wanted to get out in many wars

and through many openings,

that’s why it knocks against my head from the inside

and reaches my heart in angry waves.

But now, in the spring of ’52, I see

that more birds have returned than left last winter.

And I walk back down the hill to my house.

And in my room: the woman, whose body is heavy

and filled with time.

The Smell of Gasoline Ascends in My Nose

The smell of gasoline ascends in my nose.

Love, I’ll protect you and hold you close

like an etrog in soft wool, so carefully—

my dead father used to do it that way.

Look, the olive-tree no longer grieves—

it knows there are seasons and a man must leave,

stand by my side and dry your face now

and smile as if in a family photo.

I’ve packed my wrinkled shirts and my trouble.

I will never forget you, girl of my final

window in front of the deserts that are

empty of windows, filled with war.

You used to laugh but now you keep quiet,

the beloved country never cries out,

the wind will rustle in the dry leaves soon—

when will I sleep beside you again?

In the earth there are raw materials that, unlike us,

have not been taken out of the darkness,

the army jet makes peace in the heavens

upon us and upon all lovers in autumn.

Six Poems for Tamar

The rain is speaking quietly,

you can sleep now.

Near my bed, the rustle of newspaper wings.

There are no other angels.

I’ll wake up early and bribe the coming day

to be kind to us.

You had a laughter of grapes:

many round green laughs.

Your body is full of lizards.

All of them love the sun.

Flowers grew in the field, grass grew on my cheeks,

everything was possible.

You’re always lying on

my eyes.

Every day of our life together

Ecclesiastes cancels a line of his book.

We are the saving evidence in the terrible trial.

We’ll acquit them all!

Like the taste of blood in the mouth,

spring was upon us—suddenly.

The world is awake tonight.

It is lying on its back, with its eyes open.

The crescent moon fits the line of your cheek,

your breast fits the line of my cheek.

Your heart plays blood-catch

inside your veins.

Your eyes are still warm, like beds

time has slept in.

Your thighs are two sweet yesterdays,

I’m coming to you.

All hundred and fifty psalms

roar halleluyah.

My eyes want to flow into each other

like two neighboring lakes.

To tell each other

everything they’ve seen.

My blood has many relatives.

They never visit.

But when they die,

my blood will inherit.

Yehuda Ha-Levi

The soft hairs on the back of his neck

are the roots of his eyes.

His curly hair is

the sequel to his dreams.

His forehead: a sail; his arms: oars

to carry the soul inside his body to Jerusalem.

But in the white fist of his brain

he holds the black seeds of his happy childhood.

When he reaches the belovèd, bone-dry land—

he will sow.

Ibn Gabirol

Sometimes pus,

sometimes poetry—

always something is excreted,

always pain.

My father was a tree in a grove of fathers,

covered with green moss.

Oh widows of the flesh, orphans of the blood,

I’ve got to escape.

Eyes sharp as can-openers

pried open heavy secrets.

But through the wound in my chest

God peers into the universe.

I am the door

to his apartment.

When I Was a Child

When I was a child

grasses and masts stood at the seashore,

and as I lay there

I thought they were all the same

because all of them rose into the sky above me.

Only my mother’s words went with me

like a sandwich wrapped in rustling waxpaper,

and I didn’t know when my father would come back

because there was another forest beyond the clearing.

Everything stretched out a hand,

a bull gored the sun with its horns,

and in the nights the light of the streets caressed

my cheeks along with the walls,

and the moon, like a large pitcher, leaned over

and watered my thirsty sleep.

Look: Thoughts and Dreams

Look: thoughts and dreams are weaving over us

their warp and woof, their wide camouflage-net,

and the reconnaissance planes and God

will never know

what we really want

and where we are going.

Only the voice that rises at the end of a question

still rises above the world and hangs there,

even if it was made by

mortar shells, like a ripped flag,

like a mutilated cloud.

Look, we too are going

in the reverse-flower-way:

to begin with a calyx exulting toward the light,

to descend with the stem growing more and more solemn,

to arrive at the closed earth and to wait there for a while,

and to end as a root, in the darkness, in the deep womb.

From We Loved Here

My father spent four years inside their war,

and did not hate his enemies, or love.

And yet I know that somehow, even there,

he was already forming me, out of

his calms, so few and scattered, which he gleaned

among the bombs exploding and the smoke,

and put them in his knapsack, in between

the remnants of his mother’s hardening cake.

And in his eyes he took the nameless dead,

he stored them, so that someday I might know

and love them in his glance—so that I would

not die in horror, as they all had done. . . .

He filled his eyes with them, and yet in vain:

to all my wars, unwilling, I must go.

The lips of dead men whisper where they lie

deep down, their innocent voices hushed in earth,

and now the trees and flowers grow terribly

exaggerated, as they blossom forth.

Bandages are again torn off in haste,

the earth does not want healing, it wants pain.

And spring is not serenity, not rest,

ever, and spring is enemy terrain.

With the other lovers, we were sent to learn

about the strange land where the rainbow ends,

to see if it was possible to advance.

And we already knew: the dead return,

and we already knew: the fiercest wind

comes forth now from inside a young girl’s hand.

In the long nights our room was closed off and

sealed, like a grave inside a pyramid.

Above us: foreign silence, heaped like sand

for aeons at the entrance to our bed.

And when our bodies lie stretched out in sleep,

upon the walls, again, is sketched the last

appointment that our patient souls must keep.

Do you see them now? A narrow boat drifts past;

two figures stand inside it; others row.

And stars peer out, the stars of different lives;

are carried by the Nile of time, below.

And like two mummies, we have been wrapped tight

in love. And after centuries, dawn arrives;

a cheerful archaeologist—with the light.

A preface first: the two of them, the brittle

calm, necessity, and sun, and shade,

an anxious father, cities braced for battle,

and from afar, unrecognizable dead.

The story’s climax now—the war. First leave,

and smoke instead of streets, and he and she

together, and a mother from her grave

comforting: It’ll be all right, don’t worry.

And the last laugh is this: the way she put

his army cap on, walking to the mirror.

And was so lovely, and the cap just fit.

And then, behind the houses, in the yard,

a separation like cold-blooded murder,

and night arriving, like an afterword.

God’s Hand in the World

God’s hand is in the world

like my mother’s hand in the guts of the slaughtered chicken

on Sabbath eve.

What does God see through the window

while his hands reach into the world?

What does my mother see?

My pain is already a grandfather:

it has begotten two generations

of pains that look like it.

My hopes have erected white housing projects

far away from the crowds inside me.

My girlfriend forgot her love on the sidewalk

like a bicycle. All night outside, in the dew.

Children mark the eras of my life

and the eras of Jerusalem

with moon chalk on the street.

God’s hand in the world.

Sort of an Apocalypse

The man under his fig tree telephoned the man under his vine:

“Tonight they definitely might come. Assign

positions, armor-plate the leaves, secure the tree,

tell the dead to report home immediately.”

The white lamb leaned over, said to the wolf:

“Humans are bleating and my heart aches with grief.

I’m afraid they’ll get to gunpoint, to bayonets in the dust.

At our next meeting this matter will be discussed.”

All the nations (united) will flow to Jerusalem

to see if the Torah has gone out. And then,

inasmuch as it’s spring, they’ll come down

and pick flowers from all around.

And they’ll beat swords into plowshares and plowshares into swords,

and so on and so on, and back and forth.

Perhaps from being beaten thinner and thinner,

the iron of hatred will vanish, forever.

And That Is Your Glory

(Phrase from the liturgy of the Days of Awe)

I’ve yoked together my large silence and my small outcry

like an ox and an ass. I’ve been through low and through high.

I’ve been in Jerusalem, in Rome. And perhaps in Mecca anon.

But now God is hiding, and man cries Where have you gone.

And that is your glory.

Underneath the world, God lies stretched on his back,

always repairing, always things get out of whack.

I wanted to see him all, but I see no more

than the soles of his shoes and I’m sadder than I was before.

And that is his glory.

Even the trees went out once to choose a king.

A thousand times I’ve given my life one more fling.

At the end of the street somebody stands and picks:

this one and this one and this one and this one and this.

And that is your glory.

Perhaps like an ancient statue that has no arms

our life, without deeds and heroes, has greater charms.

Ungird my T-shirt, love; this was my final bout.

I fought all the knights, until the electricity gave out.

And that is my glory.

Rest your mind, it ran with me all the way,

it’s exhausted now and needs to knock off for the day.

I see you standing by the wide-open fridge door, revealed

from head to toe in a light from another world.

And that is my glory

and that is his glory

and that is your glory.

Of Three or Four in a Room

Of three or four in a room

there is always one who stands beside the window.

He must see the evil among thorns

and the fires on the hill.

And how people who went out of their houses whole

are given back in the evening like small change.

Of three or four in a room

there is always one who stands beside the window,

his dark hair above his thoughts.

Behind him, words.

And in front of him, voices wandering without a knapsack,

hearts without provisions, prophecies without water,

large stones that have been returned

and stay sealed, like letters that have no

address and no one to receive them.

Not Like a Cypress

Not like a cypress,

not all at once, not all of me,

but like the grass, in thousands of cautious green exits,

to be hiding like many children

while one of them seeks.

And not like the single man,

like Saul, whom the multitude found

and made king.

But like the rain in many places

from many clouds, to be absorbed, to be drunk

by many mouths, to be breathed in

like the air all year long

and scattered like blossoming in springtime.

Not the sharp ring that wakes up

the doctor on call,

but with tapping, on many small windows

at side entrances, with many heartbeats.

And afterward the quiet exit, like smoke

without shofar-blasts, a statesman resigning,

children tired from play,

a stone as it almost stops rolling

down the steep hill, in the place

where the plain of great renunciation begins,

from which, like prayers that are answered,

dust rises in many myriads of grains.

Through Two Points Only One Straight Line Can Pass

(Theorem in geometry)

A planet once got married to a star,

and inside, voices talked of future war.

I only know what I was told in class:

through two points only one straight line can pass.

A stray dog chased us down an empty street.

I threw a stone; the dog would not retreat.

The king of Babel stooped to eating grass.

Through two points only one straight line can pass.

Your small sob is enough for many pains,

as locomotive-power can pull long trains.

When will we step inside the looking-glass?

Through two points only one straight line can pass.

At times I stands apart, at times it rhymes

with you, at times we’s singular, at times

plural, at times I don’t know what. Alas,

through two points only one straight line can pass.

Our life of joy turns to a life of tears,

our life eternal to a life of years.

Our life of gold became a life of brass.

Through two points only one straight line can pass.

Half the People in the World

Half the people in the world

love the other half,

half the people

hate the other half.

Must I because of this half and that half

go wandering and changing ceaselessly

like rain in its cycle,

must I sleep among rocks,

and grow rugged like the trunks of olive trees,

and hear the moon barking at me,

and camouflage my love with worries,

and sprout like frightened grass between the railroad tracks,

and live underground like a mole,

and remain with roots and not with branches,

and not feel my cheek against the cheek of angels,

and love in the first cave,

and marry my wife beneath a canopy

of beams that support the earth,

and act out my death, always

till the last breath and the last

words and without ever understanding,

and put flagpoles on top of my house

and a bomb shelter underneath. And go out on roads

made only for returning and go through

all the appalling stations—

cat, stick, fire, water, butcher,

between the kid and the angel of death?

Half the people love,

half the people hate.

And where is my place between such well-matched halves,

and through what crack will I see

the white housing projects of my dreams

and the barefoot runners on the sands

or, at least, the waving

of a girl’s kerchief, beside the mound?

For My Birthday

Thirty-two times I went out into my life,

each time causing less pain to my mother,

less to other people,

more to myself.

Thirty-two times I have put on the world

and still it doesn’t fit me.

It weighs me down,

unlike the coat that now takes the shape of my body

and is comfortable

and will gradually wear out.

Thirty-two times I went over the account

without finding the mistake,

began the story

but wasn’t allowed to finish it.

Thirty-two years I’ve been carrying along with me

my father’s traits

and most of them I’ve dropped along the way,

so I could ease the burden.

And weeds grow in my mouth. And I wonder,

and the beam in my eyes, which I won’t be able to remove,

has started to blossom with the trees in springtime.

And my good deeds grow smaller

and smaller. But

the interpretations around them have grown huge, as in

an obscure passage of the Talmud

where the text takes up less and less of the page

and Rashi and the other commentators

close in on it from every side.

And now, after thirty-two times,

I am still a parable

with no chance to become its meaning.

And I stand without camouflage before the enemy’s eyes,

with outdated maps in my hand,

in the resistance that is gathering strength and between towers,

and alone, without recommendations

in the vast desert.

Two Photographs

1. Uncle David

When Uncle David fell in the First World War,

the high Carpathians buried him in snow.

And just as buried: his hard questions. So

I never found out what the answers were.

But somehow the brass buttons on his coat

opened for me. My life began far from

the pure white of his death, and like a gate

his face swung open, and because of him

I live my answer, as a part of all

that did survive, after the deep snow fell.

And he, still posing sadly as before,

dressed in the antique uniform and the

sharp helmet, seems like an ambassador

from some strange land a hundred years away.

2. Passport Photograph of a Young Woman

Pinned to the paper like a butterfly.

How is it your identity’s still breathing

between the pages? Your mouth was set to cry

till you found out that tears spoil everything.

And held yourself, unmoved, like a death mask

or a watch no one had bothered to repair

for a long time. Did you go on living, past

that moment? For not a single person here

knows you. Well, perhaps a prince will call,

will arrive on his white horse to whisk you off,

soaring high up, above the white canal

that stretches out between your photograph

and signed name; or the embossed official stamp

will bridge that gap and be your exit-ramp.

Poems for a Woman

Your body is white like sand

that children have never played in.

Your eyes are sad and beautiful

like the pictures of flowers in a textbook.

Your hair hangs down

like the smoke from Cain’s altar:

I have to kill my brother.

My brother has to kill me.

All the miracles in the Bible and all the legends

happened between us when we were together.

On God’s quiet slope

we were able to rest awhile.

The womb’s wind blew for us everywhere.

We always had time.

My life is sad like the wandering

of wanderers.

My hopes are widows,

my chances won’t get married, ever.

Our loves wear the uniforms of orphans

in an orphanage.

The rubber balls come back to their hands

from the wall.

The sun doesn’t come back.

Both of us are an illusion.

All night your empty shoes

screamed alongside your bed.

Your right hand hangs down from your dream.

Your hair is studying night-ese

from a torn textbook of wind.

The moving curtains:

ambassadors of foreign superpowers.

If you open your coat,

I have to double my love.

If you wear the round white hat,

I have to exaggerate my blood.

In the place where you love,

all the furniture has to be cleared out from the room,

all the trees, all the mountains, all the oceans.

The world is too narrow.

The moon, fastened with a chain,

keeps quiet outside.

The moon, caught in the olive branches,

can’t break free.

The moon of round hopes

is rolling among clouds.

When you smile,

serious ideas get exhausted.

At night the mountains keep quiet beside you,

in the morning the sand goes with you down to the beach.

When you do nice things to me

all the heavy industries shut down.

The mountains have valleys

and I have thoughts.

They stretch out

until fog and until no roads.

Behind the port city

masts stood.

Behind me God begins

with ropes and ladders,

with crates and cranes,

with forever and evers.

Spring found us;

all the mountains around

are stone weights

to weigh how much we love.

The sharp grass sobbed

into our dark hiding-place;

spring found us.

Children’s Procession

Upon the banners fluttering overhead

are verses with a day-off from all the trouble

they live with in their black and heavy Bible;

and already, in the air, the poems fade

like smoke above them, to the starting-point

where the children left behind: the trampled grass,

candy wrappers, footprints, cards, a bus,

and also a little girl in tears, who couldn’t

find what she’d lost. But in the interim,

far from here, everything stopped, and then

they had to march in place, a long long time,

while at the bright edges of the birds of day

a row of angels dangled upside-down

like shirts on a clothesline; they arrived that way.

Ballad of the Washed Hair

The stones on the mountain are always

awake and white.

In the dark town, angels on duty

are changing shifts.

A girl who has washed her hair

asks the hard world, as if it were Samson,

where is it weak, what is its secret.

A girl who has washed her hair

puts new clouds on her head.

The scent of her drying hair is

prophesying in the streets and among stars.

The nervous air between the night trees

starts to relax.

The thick telephone book of world history

closes.

Sonnet from the Voyage

To V.S., captain of the Rimmon

Gulls escorted us. From time to time

one would fly down upon the waves and settle

there, like the rubber ducks when I was little

inside the bathtub of a far-off dream.

Then fog descended, all the winds were stilled,

a buoy danced and its slow ringing raised

memories of another life, effaced.

And then we knew: that we were in the world.

And the world sensed us there, with empathy;

God called to you and called to me again

with the same call, by this time almost banal,

that once addressed the patriarchs in the Bible.

We didn’t answer. Even the mild rain

splashed down, as if being wasted, on the sea.

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba

1. Preparations for the Journey

Not resting but

moving her lovely butt,

the Queen of Sheba,

having decided to leave, a-

rose from her lair

among dark spells, tossed her hair,

clapped her hands,

the servants fainted, and

already she drew in the sand

with her big toe:

King Solomon, as though

he were a rubber ball, an

apocalyptic, bearded herring, an

imperial walking-stick, an

amalgam, half chicken

and half Solomon.

The minister of protocol

went too far, with all

those peacocks and ivory boxes.

Later on,

she began to yawn

deliciously, she stretched like a cat

so that

he would be able to sniff

her odiferous

heart. They spared no expense,

they brought feathers, to tickle

his ears, to make his last defense

prickle.

She had been brought

a vague report

about circumcision,

she wanted to know everything, with absolute precision,

her curiosity

blossomed like leprosy,

the disheveled sisters of her corpuscles

screamed through their loudspeaker into all her muscles,

the sky undid

its buttons, she made herself up and slid

into a vast commotion,

felt her head

spin, all the brothels of her emotions

were lit up in red.

In the factory

of her blood, they worked frantically

till night came: a dark night, like an old table,

a night as eternal

as a jungle.

2. The Ship Waits

A ship in the harbor. Night.

Among the shadows, a white

ship, with a cargo of yearnings,

some temperate, some burning,

a ship that desire launches,

a ship without a subconscious.

Already among the sails

sway the Queen’s colored veils,

made of the silk of sparrows

who had died of their tiny sorrows

before they could flutter forth

to the cool lands of the North.

It’s worthwhile, at any rate,

for the white ship to wait

cheek to cheek with the dock

and let itself gently rock

between ideas of sand

and ideas of ocean, and

endure its insomnia

till morning, etc.

3. Setting Sail

She called her thighs to return to each other,

knee-cheek to knee-cheek, and her soul

was already a zebra of moods, good and bad.

In the oven of her body, her heart

rotated on a spit. The morning screamed,

a tropical rain fell.

The forecasters, chained to the spot, forecasted,

the engineers of her sleep went out on weary camels,

all the little fish of her laughter fled

before the shark of her awakening rage. In her armpits

faint-hearted corals hid,

night-lizards left their footprints on her belly.

She sat in bed, sharpening her charms and her riddles

like colored pencils. From the beards

of old blowhards, she had had an African apron made,

her secrets were embroidered on scarves.

But the lions still held the laws

like the two tablets over the holy ark

and over the whole world.

4. The Journey on the Red Sea

Fish blew through the sea and through

the long anticipation. Captains

plotted their course by the map

of her longing. Her nipples preceded her like scouts,

her hairs whispered to one another

like conspirators. In the dark corners between sea and ship

the counting started, quietly.

A solitary bird sang

in the permanent trill of her blood. Rules fell

from biology textbooks, clouds were torn like contracts,

at noon she dreamt about

making love naked in the snow, egg yolks dripping

down her leg, the thrill of yellow beeswax. All the air

rushed to be breathed inside her. The sailors cried out

in the foreign language of fish.

But underneath the world, underneath the sea,

there were cantillations as if on the Sabbath:

everything sang each other.

5. Solomon Waits

Never any rain,

never any rain,

always clouds without closure,

always raw-voiced love.

Shepherds of the wind returned

from the pasture.

In the world’s courtyards,

blossoms of stone opened

consecrated to strange gods.

Trembling ladders dreamt about

humans dreaming about them.

But he

saw the world,

the slightly torn

lining of the world.

And was awake like many lit stables

in Megiddo.

Never any rain,

never any rain,

always raw-voiced love,

always quarries.

6. The Queen Enters the Throne Room

The dewy rose of her dark pudenda

was doubled in the mirrored floor. His agenda

seemed superfluous now, and all the provisions

he had made for her, the decrees and decisions

he had worked out while he was judging the last

of the litigants. Then he rolled up his past

like a map; and he sat there, reeling, giddy,

and saw in the mirror a body and a body,

from above and below, like the queen of spades.

In the bedroom of his heart he pulled down the shades,

he covered his blood with sackcloth, tried

to think of icebergs, of putrefied

camel flesh. And his face changed seasons

like a speeded-up landscape. He followed his visions

to the end of them, growing wiser and warm,

and he knew that her soul’s form was like the form

of her supple body, which he soon would embrace—

as a violin’s form is the form of its case.

7. Who Could Stump Whom

In the pingpong of questions and answers

not a sound was heard

except:

ping . . . pong . . .

And the cough of the learned counselors

and the sharp tearing of paper.

He made black waves with his beard

so that her words would drown in it.

She made a jungle

of her hair, for him to be lost in.

Words were plunked down with a click

like chessmen.

Thoughts with high masts

sailed past one another.

Empty crossword puzzles filled up

as the sky fills with stars,

secret caches were opened,

buckles and vows were unfastened,

cruel religions

were tickled, and laughed

horribly.

In the final game,

her words played with his words, her tongue

with his tongue.

Precise maps

were spread, face up, on the table.

Everything was revealed. Hard.

And pitiless.

8. The Empty Throne Room

All the word games

lay scattered out of their boxes.

Boxes were left gaping

after the game.

Sawdust of questions,

shells of cracked parables,

woolly packing materials from

crates of fragile riddles.

Heavy wrapping paper

of love and strategies.

Used solutions rustled

in the trash of thinking.

Long problems

were rolled up on spools,

miracles were locked in their cages.

Chess horses were led back to the stable.

Empty cartons that had

“Handle With Care!”

printed on them

sang hymns of thanksgiving.

Later, in ponderous parade, the King’s soldiers arrived.

She fled, sad

as black snakes

in the dry grass.

A moon of atonement spun around the towers

as on Yom Kippur eve.

Caravans with no camels, no people,

no sound, departed and departed and departed.

From In a Right Angle: A Cycle of Quatrains

In the sands of prayer my father saw angels’ traces.

He saved me a space, but I wandered in other spaces.

That’s why his face was bright and why mine is scorched.

Like an old office calendar, I’m covered with times and places.

I kiss the hem of my fate, as my father would kiss the side

of his prayer-shawl before I would wrap myself deep inside.

I will always remember the free summer clouds and always

the stars that glimmer beyond our need to decide.

Along the summer, along the sandy shoreline

of the heart. During the gray stones, at the edge of a lover’s incline.

Deep within the black ships, under the grief,

near the steep wish, inside the wind of time.

The driver asked. We answered, All the way.

His shoulders said, If that’s what you want, okay.

We paid a distant look, a close hello.

Our lives were stamped To the last stop: one-way.

My love writes commentaries on me, like the rabbis explaining the Bible.

Spring translates the world into every language. On the table

our bread keeps prophesying. Our words are lovely and fresh.

But Fate works inside us overtime, as hard as he’s able.

I escaped once and don’t remember what god it was from, what test.

So I’m floating inside my life, like Jonah in his dark fish, at rest.

I’ve made a deal with my fish, since we’re both in the guts of the world:

I won’t get out of him, ever. He’ll endure me and not digest.

Like torn shirts that my mother couldn’t mend,

the dead are strewn about the world. Like them,

we’ll never love or know what voices weep

and what winds will pass by to say Amen.

Two hopes away from the battle, I had a vision of peace.

My weary head must keep walking, my legs keep dreaming apace.

The scorched man said, I am the bush that burned and that was consumed:

come hither, leave your shoes on your feet. This is the place.

A young soldier lies in the springtime, cut off from his name.

His body is budding and flowering. From artery and vein

his blood babbles on, uncomprehending and small.

God boils the flesh of the lamb in its mother’s pain.

In the right angle between a dead man and his mourner I’ll start

living from now on, and wait there as it grows dark.

The woman sits with me, the girl in her fiery cloud

rose into the sky, and into my wide-open heart.

As for the World

As for the world,

I am always like one of Socrates’ students:

walking beside him,

hearing his seasons and generations,

and all I can do is say:

Yes, certainly that is true.

You are right again.

It is exactly as you have said.

As for my life, I am always

Venice:

everything that is streets

is in other people.

In me—love, dark and flowing.

As for the scream, as for the silence,

I am always a shofar:

hoarding, all year long, its one blast

for the terrible Days of Awe.

As for the deeds,

I am always Cain:

a fugitive and a vagabond before the deed that I won’t do,

or after the deed that

can’t be undone.

As for the palm of your hand,

as for the signals of my heart

and the plans of my flesh,

as for the writing on the wall,

I am always an ignoramus: I can’t

read or write

and my head is empty as a weed,

knowing only the secret whisper

and the motion in the wind

when a fate passes through me, to

some other place.

In the Middle of This Century

In the middle of this century we turned to each other

with half face and full eyes

like an ancient Egyptian painting

and for a short time.

I stroked your hair in a direction opposite to your journey,

we called out to each other

as people call out the names of the cities they don’t stop in

along the road.

Beautiful is the world that wakes up early for evil,

beautiful is the world that falls asleep to sin and mercy,

in the profanity of our being together, you and I.

Beautiful is the world.

The earth drinks people and their loves

like wine, in order to forget. It won’t be able to.

And like the contours of the Judean mountains,

we also won’t find a resting-place.

In the middle of this century we turned to each other.

I saw your body, casting the shadow, waiting for me.

The leather straps of a long journey

had long since been tightened crisscross on my chest.

I spoke in praise of your mortal loins,

you spoke in praise of my transient face,

I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey,

I touched the tidings of your last day,

I touched your hand that has never slept,

I touched your mouth that now, perhaps, will sing.

Desert dust covered the table

we hadn’t eaten from.

But with my finger I wrote in it the letters of your name.

Farewell

face of you, already face of dreaming.

Wandering rises up, aloft and wild.

Face of beasts, of water, face of leaving,

grove of whispers, face of breast, of child.

No more the hour in which we two could happen,

no more for us to murmur: now and all.

You had a name of wind and raincloud, woman

of tensions and intentions, mirror, fall.

For what we didn’t know, we sang together.

Changes and generations, face of night.

No longer mine, code unresolved forever,

closed-nippled, buckled, mouthed and twisted tight.

And so farewell to you, who will not slumber,

for all was in our words, a world of sand.

From this day forth, you turn into the dreamer

of everything: the world within your hand.

Farewell, death’s bundles, suitcase packed with waiting.

Threads, feathers, holy chaos. Hair held fast.

For look: what will not be, no hand is writing;

and what was not the body’s will not last.

Such as Sorrow

Should you realize so much, daughter of every season,

this year’s fading flowers or last year’s snow.

And afterward, not for us, not the vial of poison,

but rather the cup and the muteness and the long way to go.

Like two briefcases we were interchanged for each other.

Now I am no longer I, and you are not you.

No more returning, no more approaching together,

just a candle snuffed in the wine, as when Sabbath is through.

Now all that’s left from your sun is the pallid moon.

Trivial words that may comfort today or tomorrow:

Such as, give me rest. Such as, let it all go and be gone.

Such as, come and hand me my last hour. Such as, sorrow.

Jerusalem

On a roof in the Old City

laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:

the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,

the towel of a man who is my enemy,

to wipe off the sweat of his brow.

In the sky of the Old City

a kite.

At the other end of the string,

a child

I can’t see

because of the wall.

We have put up many flags,

they have put up many flags.

To make us think that they’re happy.

To make them think that we’re happy.

Before

Before the gate has been closed,

before the last question is posed,

before I am transposed.

Before the weeds fill the gardens,

before there are no more pardons,

before the concrete hardens.

Before all the flute-holes are covered,

before things are locked in the cupboard,

before the rules are discovered.

Before the conclusion is planned,

before God closes his hand,

before we have nowhere to stand.

And as Far as Abu Ghosh

And as far as Abu Ghosh we were silent

and as far as old age I will love you

at the foot of the hill of horrors,

in the den of the winds. And in Sha’ar Ha-Gai

the angels of the three religions stepped down into

the road. Faith in one god is still heavy. And with words

of pain I must describe the fig trees

and what happened to me, which wasn’t my fault. Sand

was blown into my eyes and became tears. And in Ramla

small planes were parked, and large nameless dead. The scent

of orange groves touched my blood. My blood looked

over its shoulder to see who touched. Winds, like actors, began

to put on their costumes again so that they could act before us,

their masks of house and mountain and woods,

makeup of sunset and night.

From there the other roads began.

And my heart was covered with dreams, like my shiny

shoes, which were covered with dust.

For dreams too are a long road

whose end I will never reach.

You Too Got Tired

You too got tired of being an advertisement

for our world, so that angels could see: yes it’s pretty, earth.

Relax. Take a rest from smiling. And without complaint

allow the sea-breeze to lift the corners of your mouth.

You won’t object; your eyes too, like flying paper,

are flying. The fruit has fallen from the sycamore tree.

How do you say to love in the dialect of water?

In the language of earth, what part of speech are we?

Here is the street. What sense does it finally make:

any mound, a last wind. What prophet would sing. . . .

And at night, from out of my sleep, you begin to talk.

And how shall I answer you. And what shall I bring.

The Place Where We Are Right

From the place where we are right

flowers will never grow

in the spring.

The place where we are right

is hard and trampled

like a yard.

But doubts and loves

dig up the world

like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place

where the ruined

house once stood.

Mayor

It’s sad to be

the mayor of Jerusalem—

it’s terrible.

How can a man be mayor of such a city?

What can he do with it?

Build and build and build.

And at night the stones of the mountains crawl down

and surround the stone houses,

like wolves coming to howl at the dogs,

who have become the slaves of men.

Resurrection

Afterward they will get up

all together, and with a sound of chairs scraping

they will face the narrow exit.

And their clothes are crumpled

and covered with dust and cigarette ashes

and their hand discovers in the inside pocket

a ticket stub from a very previous season.

And their faces are still crisscrossed

with God’s will.

And their eyes are red from so much sleeplessness

under the ground.

And right away, questions:

What time is it?

Where did you put mine?

When? When?

And one of them can be seen in an ancient

scanning of the sky, to see if rain.

Or a woman,

with an age-old gesture, wipes her eyes

and lifts the heavy hair

at the back of her neck.

From Summer or Its End

You washed the fruit.

You murdered the bacteria.

On the chair: a watch and a dress.

In the bed: us,

without any of these

and each for the other.

And if it weren’t for our names

we would have been completely naked.

It was marvelous, the dream on

the table.

We left the fruit

forever till the next day.

And one of these evenings

I’ll have a lot to say about

everything that remains and is kept inside us.

After midnight, when our words began

to influence the world,

I put my hand on your forehead:

your thoughts were smaller than the palm of my hand,

but I knew this was a mistake,

like the mistake of the hand that covers

the sun.

Last to dry was the hair.

When we were already far from the sea,

when words and salt, which had merged on us,

separated from one another with a sigh,

and your body no longer showed

signs of a terrible ancientness.

And in vain we had forgotten a few things on the beach,

so that we would have an excuse to return.

We didn’t return.

And these days I remember the days

that have your name on them, like a name on a ship,

and how we saw through two open doors

one man who was thinking, and how we looked at the clouds

with the ancient gaze we inherited from our fathers,

who waited for rain,

and how at night, when the world cooled off,

your body kept its warmth for a long time,

like the sea.

Like the imprint of our bodies,

not a sign will remain that we were here.

The world closes behind us,

the sand is smoothed out again.

And already on the calendar there are dates

you will no longer exist in,

already a wind bringing clouds

that won’t rain on us.

And your name is on the passenger list of

ships and in the guest books

of hotels whose very names

deaden the heart.

The three languages that I know,

all the colors that I see and dream,

won’t help me.

If with a bitter mouth you speak

sweet words, the world will not grow sweet

and will not grow bitter.

And it is written in the book that we shall not fear.

And it is written that we too shall change,

like the words,

in future and in past,

in plural and in loneliness.

And soon, in the coming nights,

we will appear, like wandering actors,

each in the other’s dream

and in the dreams of strangers whom we didn’t know together.

In the Full Severity of Mercy

Count them.

You are able to count them. They

are not like the sand on the seashore. They

are not innumerable like the stars. They are like lonely people.

On the corner or in the street.

Count them. See them

seeing the sky through ruined houses.

Go out through the stones and come back. What

will you come back to? But count them, for they

do their time in dreams

and they walk around outside and their hopes are unbandaged

and gaping, and they will die of them.

Count them.

Too soon they learned to read the terrible

writing on the wall. To read and write on

other walls. And the feast continues in silence.

Count them. Be present, for they

have already used up all the blood and there’s still not enough,

as in a dangerous operation, when one

is exhausted and beaten like ten thousand. For who is

the judge, and what is the judgment,

unless it be in the full sense of the night

and in the full severity of mercy.

Too Many

Too many olive trees in the valley,

too many stones on the slope.

Too many dead, too little

earth to cover them all.

And I must return to the landscapes painted

on the bank notes

and to my father’s face on the coins.

Too many memorial days, too little

remembering. My friends have

forgotten what they learned when they were young.

And my girlfriend lies in a hidden place

and I am always outside, food for hungry winds.

Too much weariness, too few eyes

to contain it. Too many clocks,

too little time. Too many oaths

on the Bible, too many highways, too few

ways where we can truly go: each to his destiny.

Too many hopes

that ran away from their masters.

Too many dreamers. Too few dreams

whose interpretation would change the history of the world

like Pharaoh’s dreams.

My life closes behind me. And I am outside, a dog

for the cruel, blind wind that always

pushes at my back. I am well trained: I rise and sit

and wait to lead it through the streets

of my life, which could have been my true life.

Poem for Arbor Day

Children are planting their shoots

that will become the forest

they’ll get lost in, terribly, when they grow up.

And they count with numbers

that will shatter their whole nights

to make them illuminated and outside,

sleepless, yearless.

The almond tree is in bloom

and it smells the smell of

humans as they walk

in the sweat of the fear of their living

for the first time.

And their voice will carry their joy, like a porter who carries

an expensive chair, not his, to the strange house,

and puts it down there in the rooms

and leaves, alone.

Jacob and the Angel

Just before dawn she sighed and held him

that way, and defeated him.

And he held her that way, and defeated her,

and both of them knew that a hold

brings death.

They agreed to do without names.

But in the first light

he saw her body,

which remained white in the places

the swimsuit had covered, yesterday.

Then someone called her suddenly from above,

twice.

The way you call a little girl from playing

in the yard.

And he knew her name; and let her go.

Here

Here, underneath the kites that the children are flying

and the ones the telephone lines snatched last year, I stand

with the strong branches of my quiet decisions that have

long since grown from me and the birds of the small hesitation

in my heart and the boulders of the huge hesitation at my feet

and my two twin eyes, one of which is always

busy and the other always in love. And my gray pants

and my green sweater, and my face absorbing colors

and reflecting colors; and I don’t know what else

I return and receive and project and reject

and how I was a market for many things.

Import-export. Border checkpoint. Crossroads.

Division of waters, of the dead. The meeting-place. The parting-place.

And the wind comes through a treetop and lingers

in every leaf; but still,

how it passes without stopping

while we come and stay a little and then fall.

And as between sisters, there is much resemblance between us and the world:

thighs and mountainside. A distant thought

looks like the deed that grew here in the flesh and on the mountain,

looks like the cypresses that happened, dark, in the mountain range.

The circle closes. I am its buckle.

And before I discovered that my hard fathers

are soft on the inside, they died.

And all the generations that came before me are many acrobats

mounted on one another in the circus,

and usually I am the one on the bottom

while all of them, a heavy load, stand on my shoulders,

and sometimes I am on the top: one hand lifted

to the roof; and the applause in the arena below

is my flesh and my reward.

Elegy on an Abandoned Village

The wine of August was spilled on the face of the girl, but

the destruction was sober. Thick wooden beams stuck out

from the life of forgotten people; and a distant love

hurled itself, echoing like thunder, into the ravine.

And slowly the valleys rose to the mountain, in the midday

hours, and we were almost sad. And like some stranger

in a strange city, who reads in a book of addresses and names,

I stand and choose a hotel, temporary: here.

The enormous snow was set down far away. Sometimes

I must use my love as the only way to describe it,

and must hire the wind to demonstrate the wailing of women.

It’s hard for stones that roll from season to season

to remember the dreamers and the whisperers in the grass,

who fell in their love. And like a man who keeps shaking

his wrist when his watch stops: Who is shaking us? Who?

The wind brought voices from far away, like an infant

in her arms. The wind never stops. There, standing,

are the power-plants that discovered our weakness when

we needed to appear strong, needed to make

a decision in the dark, without a mirror or a light.

Thoughts have dropped and fly parallel to the ground, like birds.

And beside the sea: picnickers sit among friends.

Their money was brought from far away; their portrait is seen

on crumpling paper. In their laughter: blossoming clouds.

Our heart beats in the footsteps that watchmen take, back and forth.

And if someone should love us, surely the distant snow

will realize it, a long time before we do.

The rest is not simply silence. The rest is a screech.

Like a car shifting gears on a dangerous uphill road.

Have you listened closely enough to the calls of the children

at play in the ruined houses, when their voices stop

short, as they reach the ceiling, out of habit, and later

burst up to the sky? Oh night without a Jerusalem,

oh children in the ruins, who will never again be birds,

oh passing time, when newspapers that have yellowed already

interest you again: like a document. And the face of last year’s

woman lights up in the memory of a distant man.

But the wind keeps forgetting. Because it is always there.

Should I wait here for God’s voice, or for the scream of a train

between the hard-pressing hills? Look, children and birds

were closed and opened, each into song and muteness.

Or girls on their long road: look as again they turn into

fig trees; how wonderful they are for love. And the thunder

of sparrows as they rise from the garbage; see what is written

on stones. You weren’t the one who wrote it. And yet

it is always your handwriting. Stay for a while, in the narrow

place between earth and its short god. Listen as the tin

gradually matures in its rust, and the voice of alleys

changes too late: not till death has arrived.

For only in the half-destroyed do we understand

the blue that covers the inside of rooms, like doctors

who learn by the bodies gaping in front of them. But we

will never know how blood behaves when it’s inside,

within the whole body, when the heart shines into it, from

far away, in its dark path. And girls are still

hidden among the fresh laundry hanging in the air

that also will turn into rain among the mountains

sent to scout and uncover the nakedness of the land;

and uncovered it; and stayed in the valleys, forever.

The Elegy on the Lost Child

I can see by their mark how high the waters reached

last winter; but how can I know what level

love reached inside me? And perhaps it overflowed my banks.

For what remained in the wadi?—just congealed mud.

What remained on my face?—not even a thin white line,

as above the lips of the child who was drinking milk

and put down the glass, with a click, on the kitchen table.

What remained? Perhaps a leaf in the small

stone that was placed on the windowsill, to watch over us

like an angel when we were inside. And to love means not

to remain; means not to leave a trace, but to change

utterly. To be forgotten. And to understand means to bloom.

Spring understands. To remember the belovèd means to

forget the many belongings that piled up.

Loving means having to forget the other love,

closing the other doors. Look, we saved a seat,

we put down a coat or a book on the empty chair

next to us, perhaps empty forever. And how long

could we keep it for ourselves? After all, someone will come,

a stranger will sit beside you. And you turn around,

impatient, to the door with the red sign over it, you look

at your watch; that too is a habit of prayer, like bowing

and kissing. And outside they always invent new thoughts

and these too are placed on the tired faces of people,

like colored lights in the street. Or look at the child, whose

thoughts are painted upon him like a pattern upon

an ancient urn, for others to see, he still isn’t

thinking them for himself. The earth wanders, passes

beneath the soles of our shoes, like a moving stage,

like your face which I thought was mine and wasn’t. But the child

got lost. The last scion of his games, the Benjamin

of colored paper, the grandson of his ancient hiding-places.

He came and went in the ringing of his toys among

empty wells, at the ends of holidays and within

the terrible cycle of cries and silence, in the process

of hope and death and hope. Everyone searched,

they were happy to look for some thing in the land of forgetting:

voices and a plane flying low like thoughts, police dogs

with philosophers’ faces, question-words hopping on thin legs

in the grass that gets drier and drier, before our very

eyes. Words worn out from prayers and talk and newspapers,

prophecies of Jeremiah down on all fours.

And in the big cities, protesters blocked the roads like

a blocked heart, whose master will die. And the dead were already

hung out like fruit, for eternal ripening within

the history of the world. They searched for the child; and found

pairs of lovers, hidden; found ancient urns;

found everything that sought not to be revealed. For love

was too short and didn’t cover them all, like a too-short

blanket. A head or two feet stuck out in the wind

when the cold night came. Or they found a short-cut of sharp

brief pain instead of the long, oblivion-causing

streets of joy and of satiation. And at night

the names of the world, of foreign cities and dark

lakes and peoples long vanished. And all the names

are like my belovèd’s name. She lifted her head

to listen. She had the feeling that she had been called,

and she wasn’t the one we meant. But the child disappeared

and the paths in the distant mountain emerged. Not much time.

The olives spoke hard stones. In the enormous fear

between heaven and earth, new houses arose and the glass

of windowpanes cooled the burning forehead of night.

The hot wind pounced upon us from a thicket of dry grass,

the distraction of mutual need erected high bridges

in the wasteland. Traps were set, spotlights turned on,

and nets of woven hair were spread out. But they passed

the place, and didn’t see, for the child bent over

and hid in the stones of tomorrow’s houses. Eternal

paper rustled between the feet of the searchers.

Printed and unprinted. The orders were clearly heard.

Exact numbers: not ten or fifty or a hundred.

But twenty-seven, thirty-one, forty-three, so that they would believe us.

And in the morning the search was renewed: quick, here!

I saw him among the toys of his wells, the games

of his stones, the tools of his olive trees. I heard his heartbeat

under the rock. He’s there. He’s here. And the tree

stirs. Did you all see? And new calls, like an ancient

sea bringing new ships with loud calls to the foreign shore.

We returned to our cities, where a great sorrow is divided among them

at appropriate intervals, like mailboxes, so that we can drop ours

into them: name and address, times of pickup. And the stones

chanted in the choir of black mouths, into the earth,

and only the child could hear them; we couldn’t. For he stayed

longer than we did, pretending from the clouds and already

known by heart to the children of olive trees,

familiar and changing and not leaving a trace, as in love,

and belonged to them completely, without a remnant.

For to love means not to remain. To be forgotten. But God

remembers, like a man who returns to the place he once left

to reclaim a memory he needed. Thus God returns to

our small room, so that he can remember how much he wanted

to build his creation with love. And he didn’t forget

our names. Names aren’t forgotten. We call a shirt

shirt: even when it’s used as a dustrag, it’s still called shirt,

perhaps the old shirt. And how long will we go on like this?

For we are changing. But the name remains. And what right

do we have to be called by our names, or to call the Jordan

Jordan after it has passed through the Sea of Galilee

and has come out at Zemach. Who is it? Is it still the one

that entered at Capernaum? Who are we after we pass through

the terrible love? Who is the Jordan? Who

remembers? Rowboats have emerged. The mountains are mute:

Susita, Hermon, the terrifying Arbel, painful Tiberias.

We all turn our backs on names, the rules of the game,

the hollow calls. An hour passes, hair is cut off

in the barbershop. The door is opened. What remains is for

the broom and the street. And the barber’s watch ticking close to

your ear as he bends over you. This too is time.

Time’s end, perhaps. The child hasn’t been found.

The results of rain are seen even now when it’s summer.

Aloud the trees are talking from the sleep of the earth.

Voices made out of tin are ringing in the wind

as it wakes up. We lay together. I walked away:

the belovèd’s eyes stayed wide open in fear. She sat up

in bed for a while, leaning on her elbows. The sheet

was white like the day of judgment, and she couldn’t stay

alone in the house, she went out into the world

that began with the stairs near the door. But the child remained

and began to resemble the mountains and the winds and the trunks

of olive trees. A family resemblance: as the face of a young man

who fell in the Negev arises in the face of his cousin

born in New York. The fracture of a mountain in the Aravah

reappears in the face of the shattered friend. Mountain range

and night, resemblance and tradition. Night’s custom that turned

into the law of lovers. Temporary precautions

became permanent. The police, the calls outside, the speaking

inside the bodies. And the fire-engines don’t wail when they come from

the fire. Silently they return from embers and ashes.

Silently we returned from the valley after love and searching

in retrospect: not being paid attention to. But a few of us

continued to listen. It seemed as if someone was calling.

We extended the outer ear with the palm of a hand,

we extended the area of the heart with a further love

in order to hear more clearly, in order to forget.

But the child died in the night

clean and well groomed. Neat and licked by the tongues

of God and night. “When we got here, it was still daylight.

Now darkness has come.” Clean and white like a sheet of

paper in an envelope closed and chanted upon

in the psalm-books of the lands of the dead. A few went on searching,

or perhaps they searched for a pain that would fit their tears,

for a joy that would fit their laughter, though nothing can fit

anything else. Even hands are from a different body.

But it seemed to us that something had fallen. We heard

a ringing, like a coin that fell. We stood for a moment.

We turned around. We bent down. We didn’t find

anything, and we went on walking. Each to his own.

Jerusalem, 1967

To my friends Dennis, Arieh, and Harold

This year I traveled a long way

to view the silence of my city.

A baby calms down when you rock it, a city calms down

from the distance. I dwelled in longing. I played the hopscotch

of the four strict squares of Yehuda Ha-Levi:

My heart. Myself. East West.

I heard bells ringing in the religions of time,

but the wailing that I heard inside me

has always been from my Yehudean desert.

Now that I’ve come back, I’m screaming again.

And at night, stars rise like the bubbles of the drowned,

and every morning I scream the scream of a newborn baby

at the tumult of houses and at all this huge light.

I’ve come back to this city where names

are given to distances as if to human beings

and the numbers are not of bus routes

but: 70 After, 1917, 500

B.C., Forty-eight. These are the lines

you really travel on.

And already the demons of the past are meeting

with the demons of the future and negotiating about me

above me, their give-and-take neither giving nor taking,

in the high arches of shell-orbits above my head.

A man who comes back to Jerusalem is aware that the places

that used to hurt don’t hurt anymore.

But a light warning remains in everything,

like the movement of a light veil: warning.

Illuminated is the Tower of David, illuminated is the Church of Maria,

illuminated the patriarchs sleeping in their burial cave, illuminated

are the faces from inside, illuminated the translucent

honey cakes, illuminated the clock and illuminated the time

passing through your thighs as you take off your dress.

Illuminated illuminated. Illuminated are the cheeks of my childhood,

illuminated the stones that wanted to be illuminated

along with those that wanted to sleep in the darkness of squares.

Illuminated are the spiders of the banister and the cobwebs of churches

and the acrobats of the stairs. But more than all these, and in them all,

illuminated is the terrible, true X-ray writing

in letters of bones, in white and lightning: MENE

MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN.

In vain you will look for the fences of barbed wire.

You know that such things

don’t disappear. A different city perhaps

is now being cut in two; two lovers

separated; a different flesh is tormenting itself now

with these thorns, refusing to be stone.

In vain you will look. You lift up your eyes unto the hills,

perhaps there? Not these hills, accidents of geology,

but The Hills. You ask

questions without a rise in your voice, without a question mark,

only because you’re supposed to ask them; and they

don’t exist. But a great weariness wants you with all your might

and gets you. Like death.

Jerusalem, the only city in the world

where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.

On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on

my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of Jerusalem.

For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,

not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with

buttons and zippers and spools of thread

in every color and snaps and buckles.

A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.

I told him in my heart that my father too

had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.

I explained to him in my heart about all the decades

and the causes and the events, why I am now here

and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates prayer.

He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate

and I returned, with all the worshipers, home.

It’s not time that keeps me far away from my childhood,

it’s this city and everything in it. Now

I’ve got to learn Arabic too, to reach all the way to Jericho

from both ends of time; and the length of walls has been added

and the height of towers and the domes of prayer houses

whose area is immeasurable. All these

really broaden my life and force me

always to emigrate once more from the smell

of river and forest.

My life is stretched out this way; it grows very thin

like cloth, transparent. You can see right through me.

In this summer of wide-open-eyed hatred

and blind love, I’m beginning to believe again

in all the little things that will fill

the holes left by the shells: soil, a bit of grass,

perhaps, after the rains, small insects of every kind.

I think of children growing up half in the ethics of their fathers

and half in the science of war.

The tears now penetrate into my eyes from the outside

and my ears invent, every day, the footsteps of

the messenger of good tidings.

The city plays hide-and-seek among her names:

Yerushalayim, Al-Quds, Salem, Jeru, Yeru, all the while

whispering her first, Jebusite name: Y’vus,

Y’vus, Y’vus, in the dark. She weeps

with longing: Ælia Capitolina, Ælia, Ælia.

She comes to any man who calls her

at night, alone. But we know

who comes to whom.

On an open door a sign hangs: Closed.

How do you explain it? Now

the chain is free at both ends: there is no

prisoner and no warden, no dog and no master.

The chain will gradually turn into wings.

How do you explain it?

Ah well, you’ll explain it.

Jerusalem is short and crouched among its hills,

unlike New York, for example.

Two thousand years ago she crouched

in the marvelous starting-line position.

All the other cities ran ahead, did long

laps in the arena of time, they won or lost,

and died. Jerusalem remained in the starting-crouch:

all the victories are clenched inside her,

hidden inside her. All the defeats.

Her strength grows and her breathing is calm

for a race even beyond the arena.

Loneliness is always in the middle,

protected and fortified. People were supposed

to feel secure in that, and they don’t.

When they go out, after a long time,

caves are formed for the new solitaries.

What do you know about Jerusalem.

You don’t need to understand languages;

they pass through everything as if through the ruins of houses.

People are a wall of moving stones.

But even in the Wailing Wall

I haven’t seen stones as sad as these.

The letters of my pain are illuminated

like the name of the hotel across the street.

What awaits me and what doesn’t await me.

Jerusalem stone is the only stone that can

feel pain. It has a network of nerves.

From time to time Jerusalem crowds into

mass protests like the tower of Babel.

But with huge clubs God-the-Police beats her

down: houses are razed, walls flattened,

and afterward the city disperses, muttering

prayers of complaint and sporadic screams from churches

and synagogues and loud-moaning mosques.

Each to his own place.

Always beside ruined houses and iron girders

twisted like the arms of the slain, you find

someone who is sweeping the paved path

or tending the little garden, sensitive

paths, square flower-beds.

Large desires for a horrible death are well cared-for

as in the monastery of the White Brothers next to the Lions’ Gate.

But farther on, in the courtyard, the earth gapes:

columns and arches supporting vain land

and negotiating with one another: crusaders and guardian angels,

a sultan and Rabbi Yehuda the Pious. Arched vaults with a

column, ransom for prisoners, and strange conditions in rolled-up

contracts, and sealing-stones. Curved hooks holding

air.

Capitals and broken pieces of columns scattered like chessmen

in a game that was interrupted in anger,

and Herod, who already, two thousand years ago, wailed

like mortar shells. He knew.

If clouds are a ceiling, I would like to

sit in the room beneath them: a dead kingdom rises

up from me, up, like steam from hot food.

A door squeaks: an opening cloud.

In the distances of valleys someone rapped iron against stone

but the echo erects large, different things in the air.

Above the houses—houses with houses above them. This is

all of history.

This learning in schools without roof

and without walls and without chairs and without teachers.

This learning in the absolute outside,

a learning short as a single heartbeat. All of it.

I and Jerusalem are like a blind man and a cripple.

She sees for me

out to the Dead Sea, to the End of Days.

And I hoist her up on my shoulders

and walk blind in my darkness underneath.

On this bright autumn day

I establish Jerusalem once again.

The foundation scrolls

are flying in the air, birds, thoughts.

God is angry with me

because I always force him

to create the world once again

from chaos, light, second day, until

man, and back to the beginning.

In the morning the shadow of the Old City falls

on the New. In the afternoon—vice versa.

Nobody profits. The muezzin’s prayer

is wasted on the new houses. The ringing

bells roll like balls and bounce back.

The shout of Holy, Holy, Holy from the synagogues will fade

like gray smoke.

At the end of summer I breathe this air

that is burnt and pained. My thoughts have

the stillness of many closed books:

many crowded books, with most of their pages

stuck together like eyelids in the morning.

I climb up the Tower of David

a little higher than the prayer that ascends the highest:

halfway to heaven. A few of

the ancients succeeded: Mohammed, Jesus,

and others. Though they didn’t find rest in heaven;

they just entered a higher excitement. But

the applause for them hasn’t stopped ever since,

down below.

Jerusalem is built on the vaulted foundations

of a held-back scream. If there were no reason

for the scream, the foundations would crumble, the city would collapse;

if the scream were screamed, Jerusalem would explode into the heavens.

Poets come in the evening into the Old City

and they emerge from it pockets stuffed with images

and metaphors and little well-constructed parables

and crepuscular similes from among columns and crypts,

from within darkening fruit

and delicate filigree of hammered hearts.

I lifted my hand to my forehead

to wipe off the sweat

and found I had accidentally raised up

the ghost of Else Lasker-Schüler.

Light and tiny as she was

in her life, all the more so in her death. Ah, but

her poems.

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

The Temple Mount is a huge ship, a magnificent

luxury liner. From the portholes of her Western Wall

cheerful saints look out, travelers. Hasidim on the pier

wave goodbye, shout hooray, hooray, bon voyage! She is

always arriving, always sailing away. And the fences and the piers

and the policemen and the flags and the high masts of churches

and mosques and the smokestacks of synagogues and the boats

of psalms of praise and the mountain-waves. The shofar blows: another one

has just left. Yom Kippur sailors in white uniforms

climb among ladders and ropes of well-tested prayers.

And the commerce and the gates and the golden domes:

Jerusalem is the Venice of God.

Jerusalem is Sodom’s sister-city,

but the merciful salt didn’t have mercy on her

and didn’t cover her with a silent whiteness.

Jerusalem is an unconsenting Pompeii.

History books that were thrown into the fire,

their pages are strewn about, stiffening in red.

An eye whose color is too light, blind,

always shattered in a sieve of veins.

Many births gaping below,

a womb with numberless teeth,

a double-edged woman and the holy beasts.

The sun thought that Jerusalem was a sea

and set in her: a terrible mistake.

Sky fish were caught in a net of alleys,

tearing one another to pieces.

Jerusalem. An operation that was left open.

The surgeons went to take a nap in faraway skies,

but her dead gradually

formed a circle, all around her,

like quiet petals.

My God.

My stamen.

Amen.

The Bull Returns

The bull returns from his day of work in the ring

after a cup of coffee with his opponents,

having left them a note with his address and

the exact location of the red scarf.

The sword remains in his stiff-necked neck.

And when he’s usually at home. Now

he sits on his bed, with his heavy

Jewish eyes. He knows

that the sword too is hurt when it pierces flesh.

In his next incarnation he’ll be a sword: the hurt will remain.

(“The door is open. If not, the key is under

the mat.”)

He knows about the mercy of twilight and about the final

mercy. In the Bible, he’s listed with the clean animals.

He’s very kosher: chews his cud,

and even his heart is divided and cloven like a hoof.

From his chest, hairs burst forth

dry and gray, as though from a split mattress.

A Luxury

My uncle is buried at Sheikh Badr, my other uncle

is scattered in the Carpathians, my father is buried in Sanhedria,

my grandmother on the Mount of Olives, and all their forefathers

are buried in a half-destroyed Jewish graveyard

among the villages of Lower Franconia,

near rivers and forests that are not Jerusalem.

Grandfather, Grandfather, who converted heavy-eyed cows

in his barn underneath the kitchen and got up at four in the morning.

I inherited this earliness from him. With a mouth

bitter from nightmares, I go out to feed my bad dreams.

Grandfather, Grandfather, chief rabbi of my life,

sell my pains the way you used to sell

khametz on Passover eve: so that they stay in me and even go on hurting

but won’t be mine. Won’t belong to me.

So many tombstones are scattered in the past of my life,

engraved names like the names of stations

where the train doesn’t stop any more.

How will I cover all the distances on my own routes,

how will I make connections among them all? I can’t afford

to maintain such an expensive railway system. It’s a luxury.

To Bake the Bread of Yearning

The last time I went to see my child

he was still eating pablum. Now, sadly,

bread and meat, with knife and fork,

with manners that are already preparing him

to die quietly, politely.

He thinks I’m a sailor, knows I don’t have a ship

or a sea; only great distances and winds.

The movements of my father’s body in prayer

and mine in lovemaking

are already folded in his small body.

To be an adult means

to bake the bread of yearning

all night long, with reddened face

in front of the fire. My child sees.

And the powerful spell See you soon

which he’s learned to say

works only among the dead.

National Thoughts

A woman, caught in a homeland-trap of the Chosen People: you.

Cossack’s fur hat on your head: you the

offspring of their pogroms. “After these things had come to pass,”

always.

Or, for example, your face: slanting eyes,

eyes descended from massacre. High cheekbones

of a hetman, head of murderers.

But a mitzvah dance of Hasidim,

naked on a rock at twilight,

beside the water canopies of Ein Gedi,

with eyes closed and body open like hair. After

these things had come to pass. “Always.”

People caught in a homeland-trap:

to speak now in this weary language,

a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled,

it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described

miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.

Square letters want to stay

closed; each letter a closed house,

to stay and to close yourself in

and to sleep inside it, forever.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated

your thighs from my hips.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re always

doctors. All of them.

They dismantled us

from each other. As far as I’m concerned,

they’re engineers.

A pity. We were such a good and loving

invention: an airplane made of a man and a woman,

wings and all:

we even got off

the ground a little.

We even flew.

Elegy

The wind won’t come to draw smiles in the sand of dreams.

The wind will be strong.

And people are walking without flowers,

unlike their children in the festival of the first fruits.

And a few of them are victors and most of them are vanquished,

passing through the arch of others’ victories

and as on the Arch of Titus everything appears, in bas-relief:

the warm and belovéd bed, the faithful and much-scrubbed pot,

and the lamp, not the one with the seven branches, but the simple one,

the good one, which didn’t fail even on winter nights,

and the table, a domestic animal that stands on four legs and keeps

silent. . . .

And they are brought into the arena to fight with wild beasts

and they see the heads of the spectators in the stadium

and their courage is like the crying of their children,

persistent, persistent and ineffectual.

And in their back pocket, letters are rustling,

and the victors put the words into their mouths

and if they sing, it is not their own song,

and the victors set large yearnings inside them

like loaves of dough

and they bake these in their love

and the victors will eat the warm bread and they won’t.

But a bit of their love remains on them

like the primitive decorations on ancient urns:

the first, modest line of emotion all around

and then the swirl of dreams

and then two parallel lines,

mutual love,

or a pattern of small flowers, a memory of childhood, high-stalked

and thin-legged.

Threading

Loving each other began this way: threading

loneliness into loneliness

patiently, our hands trembling and precise.

Longing for the past gave our eyes

the double security of what won’t change

and of what can’t be returned to.

But the heart must kill one of us

on one of its forays,

if not you—me,

when it comes back empty-handed,

like Cain, a boomerang from the field.

Now in the Storm

Now in the storm before the calm

I can tell you what

in the calm before the storm I didn’t say

because they would have heard us and discovered our hiding-place.

That we were just neighbors in the fierce wind,

brought together in the ancient hamsin from Mesopotamia.

And the Latter Prophets of my veins’ kingdom

prophesied into the firmament of your flesh.

And the weather was good for us and for the heart,

and the sun’s muscles were flexed inside us and golden

in the Olympiad of emotions, on the faces of thousands of spectators,

so that we would know, and remain, and there would again be clouds.

Look, we met in a protected place, in the angle

where history began to arise, quiet

and safe from all the hasty events.

And the voice began to tell stories in the evening, by the children’s bed.

And now it’s too early for archaeology

and too late to repair what has been done.

Summer will arrive, and the clop, clop of the hard sandals

will sink in the soft sand, forever.

Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela

You ate and were filled, you came

in your twelfth year, in the Thirties

of the world, with short pants that reached down to your knees,

tassels dangling from your undershawl

sticky between your legs in the sweltering land.

Your skin still smooth, without protective hair.

The brown, round eyes you had, according

to the pattern of ripe cherries, will get used to

oranges. Orange scents. Innocence.

Clocks were set, according

to the beats of the round heart, train tracks

according to the capacity of children’s feet.

And silently, like a doctor and mother, the days bent over me

and started to whisper to one another, while the grass

already was laid flat by the bitter wind

on the slope of hills I will never walk on again.

Moon and stars and ancient deeds of grownups

were placed on a high shelf beyond

my arm’s reach;

and I stood in vain underneath the forbidden bookshelves.

But even then I was marked for annihilation like an orange scored

for peeling, like chocolate, like a hand-grenade for explosion and death.

The hand of fate held me, aimed. My skies were the

inside of the soft palm wrapped around me, and on the outside:

rough skin, hard stars, protruding veins,

airplane routes, black hairs, mortar-shell trajectories

in silence or in wailing, in black or in radiant flares.

And before I was real and lingering here

the heart’s shoulders carried an anguish not mine

and from somewhere else ideas entered, slowed-down

and with a deep rumble, like a train

into the hollow, listening station.

You ate and were filled and recited the blessing

alone and in company and alone.

In the bridal chamber after the wedding, and outside

the bearded witnesses stood and listened

to the sounds of love, to the sighs and murmurs and screams,

mine and yours, in that room. And at the door

wedding gifts piled up like gifts for the

dead at the mouth of the Pharaohs’ tombs.

Stone lions from the bridges of my childhood city watched over us

along with stone lions from the old house in Jerusalem.

You didn’t eat, weren’t filled. You spoke big words

with a small mouth. Your heart will never learn to judge distances.

The farthest distance it knows is the nearest tree,

the curb of the sidewalk, the face of the belovèd. Like a blind man,

the blind heart hit against the obstacle with its cane and it still

hits and gropes, without advancing. Hits and will hit.

Loneliness is one of the tenses in which an action’s time

can be conjugated: hits, will hit. Time is a fragrance. For example,

the fragrance of 1929, when sorrow recited over you the blessing

of the first fruits. And you didn’t know that you

were her first fruit.

You were educated in a Montessori kindergarten. They taught you

to love doing things alone, with your very own hands,

they educated you for loneliness. You masturbated

in secret: nocturnal emissions, diurnal additions. “I’ll tell your father.”

Rosh Hashanah halls echoey and hollow, and white

Yom Kippur machines made of bright metal, cogwheels

of prayers, a conveyor belt of prostrations and bows

with a menacing buzz. You have sinned, you have gone astray

inside a dark womb shaped like the dome of a synagogue,

the round, primordial cave of prayer,

the holy ark, gaping open, blinded you

in a third-degree interrogation. Do you confess? Do you confess?

I confess before Thee in the morning with the sun out. What’s

your name? Do you surrender? You have transgressed, you are guilty, are you alive?

How do you? (“Do you love me?”) You have remembered, you have forgotten.

Oh Montessori, Montessori, with your white hair,

the first dead woman that I loved. “Hey kid!” Even now

I turn around in the street if I hear that

behind me.

Slowly and with terrible pains the I turns into a he, after

resting a little in the you. You turns into they. The surgery is performed

with open eyes, only the place is anesthetized with ice perhaps

or with a love pill. After you too they will call: Dreamer! Dreamer!

You won’t be able to. What’s your name now? And not even

one name did I take in vain. Names are for

children. An adult gets far away from his name. He is left

with the name of the family. Afterward father, teacher, uncle, mister, oh mister,

hey you there! (Do you love me?—That’s different,

that’s more than a name), afterward numbers and afterward

perhaps: he, he’s gone out, they’ll be back, they, hey! Hey!

The forest of names is bare, and the kinder-garden

has shed the leaves of its trees and is black and will die.

And on Sabbath eve they sewed my handkerchief

to the corner of my pants pocket so that I wouldn’t sin by carrying it

on the Sabbath. And on holy-days kohanim blessed me

from inside the white caves of their prayer-shawls, with fingers

twisted like epileptics. I looked at them

and God didn’t thunder: and since then his thunder has grown

more and more remote and become a huge

silence. I looked at them and my eyes weren’t blinded: and since then

my eyes have grown more and more open from year to year, beyond

sleep, till pain, beyond eyelids, beyond clouds, beyond years.

Death is not sleep but gaping eyes, the whole body

gaping with eyes since there’s not enough space in the narrow world.

Angels looked like Torah scrolls in velvet dresses and petticoats

of white silk, with crowns and little silver bells, angels

fluttered around me and sniffed at my heart and cried ah! ah!

to one another with adult smiles. “I’ll tell your father.”

And even now, after thirty-three years, my father’s blessing

remains in my hair, though it grew desert-wild,

blood-sticky and dust-yellow, and though I sheared it and shortened it

to a military brush or a sad urban French pompadour

stuck to my forehead. Nevertheless

the blessing remains in the hair of my blessed head.

You came via Haifa. The harbor was new, the child was new.

You lay on your belly, so you could kiss the holy ground,

but to duck from the shots of 1936. British soldiers

wearing cork sun-helmets of a great empire,

envoys of a crumbling kingdom, opened for you

the new kingdom of your life. “What’s your name?” Soldiers

opened for you with arms of engraved tattoo: a dragon, a woman’s breasts

and thighs, a knife and a primeval coiled serpent, a large

rose and a girl’s buttocks. Since then the tattoo’s

words and pictures have been sinking into you, without being seen

on the outside. The words sink further and further in a continuous

engraving and pain, down to your soul, which is itself an inscribed scroll

rolled up like a mezuzah the whole length of your inner body.

You have become a collector of pains in the tradition of this land.

“My God, my God, why?” Hast Thou forsaken me. My God, my God. Even then

he had to be called twice. The second call

was already like a question, out of a first doubt: my God?

I haven’t said the last word yet. I haven’t

eaten yet and already I’m filled. My cough isn’t

from smoke or from illness. It is a concentrated

and time-saving form of question.

Whatever happened is as though it never happened and all the rest

I don’t know. Perhaps it is written in the difficult books on the shelf,

in the concordances of pain and in the dictionaries of joy,

in the encyclopedias with pages stuck together like eyes that don’t want

to let go of their dream at dawn, in the terrible volumes of correspondence

between Marx/Engels, I/you, God/he,

in the Book of Job, in the difficult words. Verses

that are deep cuts in my flesh. Wounds long

and red from whip lashes, wounds filled with white salt, like the meat

that my mother would salt and kosher so that there wouldn’t be any blood,

just pink blood-soaked salt, just pains that are

a searing knowledge, kashrut and purity.

The rest—unknown and estrangement in the dark. Like the brothers in Egypt

we will wait, bending down in the darkness of our knees, hiding

submissive faces, till the world can’t hold back any longer

and weeps and cries out: I am Joseph your brother! I am the world!

In the year the war broke out I passed by your mother’s belly

in which you were sitting already then curled up as in the nights with me.

The rhythm of orange-grove pumps and the rhythm of shots were our rhythm.

It’s starting! Light and pain, iron and dust and stones.

Stones and flesh and iron in changing combinations

of matter. Render unto matter that which is matter’s. Dust, dust,

from man thou art and unto man shalt thou return. It’s starting!

My blood flows in many colors and pretends to be red

when it bursts outside. The navel of the belovèd, also,

is an eye to foresee the End of Days. End and beginning in her body.

Two creases in the right buttock, one crease in the left,

glittering eyeglasses next to white skin of belly, an eyebrow

arched in the scream of the eye, black soft silk over

taut skin of heavy thighs. Shoulder distinct

and prominent, crossed by a strap of strict black cloth.

Shoulder and shoulder, flesh and flesh, dust and dust.

Like a legend and a child, love and fro, world and ear,

time within the snailshell of a smile, love and open up:

the house to the night, the earth to the dead and to the rain,

the morning after the gift of sun. Spring raised in us

green words, and summer bet that we would be first to

arrive, and love burst out from inside us, all at once,

all over our bodies, like sweat, in the fear of our lives, in the race of our lives, in the game.

And children grew up and matured, for the surface of the waters

constantly rises in the terrible flood, and all their growing

is because of the rising flood, so they won’t drown.

And still, his fingers stained with moon, like a teacher’s with chalk,

God strokes our head, and already his wrists

are poetry and angels! And what his elbows are! And the face

of the woman, already turned toward something else. A profile in the window.

The veins in my legs are beginning to swell, because my legs think

a lot, and their walk is thinking. Into the abandoned wasteland

in my emotions the wild beasts return, who had abandoned it when I cleared

and drained and made my life a settled civilization. Long

rows of books, calm rooms and corridors.

My body is constructed for good resonance like a concert hall,

the sound of weeping and screams won’t penetrate. The walls are absorbent

and impermeable, waves of memories rebound. And above me, on the ceiling,

objects of childhood, soft words, women’s dresses, my father’s prayer shawl,

half bodies, big wooly toys, clouds,

good-night chunks, heavy hair: to increase the resonance inside me.

Dust, dust, my body, the installation of half my life. Still

bold scaffoldings of hopes, trembling ladders that lean

against what is unfinished from the outside, even the head is nothing but

the lowest of the additional floors that were planned.

My eyes, one of them awake and interested, the other indifferent

and far away, as if receiving everything from within, and my hands

that pull sheets over the faces of the dead and the living. Finis.

My face, when I shave, is the face of a white-foamed clown, the only foam

that isn’t from wrath. My face is something between

a mad bull and a migratory bird that has lost the direction of

its flight, and lags behind the flock,

but sees slow good things before it dies in the sea.

Even then, and ever since then, I met

the stagehands of my life, moving the walls

and the furniture and the people, putting up and taking down

new illusions of new houses,

different landscapes, distances

seen in perspective, not real distances,

closeness and not true closeness. All of them,

my lovers and my haters, are directors and stagehands,

electricians to light up with a different light, making distant

and bringing close, changers, hangers and hanged.

All the days of his life my father tried to make a man of me,

so that I’d have a hard face like Kosygin and Brezhnev,

like generals and admirals and stockbrokers and financiers,

all the unreal fathers I’ve established

instead of my father, in the soft land of the “seven kinds”

(not just two, male and female, but seven kinds

beyond us, more lustful, harder and more deadly than we are).

I have to screw onto my face the expression of a hero

like a lightbulb screwed into the grooves of its hard socket,

to screw in and to shine.

All the days of his life my father tried to make

a man of me, but I always slip back

into the softness of thighs and the yearning to say the daily blessing

who hath made me according to his will. And his will is woman.

My father was afraid to say a wasted blessing.

To say who hath created the fruit of the tree and not eat the apple.

To bless without loving. To love without being filled.

I ate and wasn’t filled and didn’t say the blessing.

The days of my life spread out and separate from one another:

in my childhood there were still stories of kings and demons

and blacksmiths; now, glass houses and sparkling

spaceships and radiant silences that have no hope.

My arms are stretched out to a past not mine and a future not mine.

It’s hard to love, its hard to embrace

with arms like that.

Like a butcher sharpening knife on knife,

I sharpen heart on heart inside me. The hearts

get sharper and sharper until they vanish, but the movement of my soul

remains the movement of the sharpener, and my voice is lost

in the sound of metal.

And on Yom Kippur, in rubber-soled shoes, you ran.

And at Holy, Holy, Holy you high-jumped

higher than all of them, almost up to the angels of the ceiling,

and around the racecourse of Simchat Torah you circled

seven times and seven

and you arrived breathless.

Like a weight-lifter you pressed up

the Torah scroll above your head

with two trembling arms

so that all of them could see the writing and the strength of your hands.

At the kneeling and bowing, you dropped into a crouch

as if at the starting-line of a long jump into your life.

And on Yom Kippur you went out for a boxing match

against yourself: we have sinned, we have transgressed,

with hard fists and no gloves,

nervous feather-weight against heavy- and sad- and

defeated-weight. The prayers trickled from a corner of the mouth

in very thin red drops. With a prayer shawl they wiped off

the sweat of your brow between rounds.

The prayers that you prayed in your childhood

now return and fall from above

like bullets that missed their mark and are returning

long afterward to the ground,

without arousing attention, without causing damage.

When you’re lying with your belovèd

they return. “I love you,” “You’re

mine.” I confess before Thee. “And you shall love”

the Lord your God. “With all my might” stand in awe

and sin not, and be still, selah. Silence.

Reciting the Hear O Israel in bed. In bed

without reciting the Hear O Israel. In the double bed,

the double burial cave of a bed. Hear. O hear.

Now hear one more time, my love,

without Hear. Without you.

Not just one finger of God but all ten of them

strangle me. “I won’t let you

let me leave you.” This too is

one of the interpretations of death.

You forget yourself as you were.

Don’t blame the Chief Butler for forgetting

Joseph’s dreams! Hands

that are still sticky with candle wax

forgot Hanukkah. The wrinkled masks of my face forgot

the gaiety of Purim. The body mortifying itself on Yom Kippur

forgot the High Priest—as beautiful

as you, love, tonight—, forgot the song

in praise of him: the appearance of the Priest is like a sun, a diamond,

a topaz, the appearance of a Priest. And your body too, love,

is Urim and Thummim: the nipples, the eye,

the nostrils, dimple, navel, my mouth, your mouth,

all these shone for me like the Breastplate of Judgment,

all these spoke to me and prophesied what I should do.

I’m running away, before your body

prophesies a future. I’m running away.

Sometimes I want to go back

to everything I had, as in a museum,

when you go back not in the order

of the eras, but in the opposite direction, against the arrow,

to look for the woman you loved.

Where is she? The Egyptian Room,

the Far East, the Twentieth Century, Cave Art,

everything jumbled together, and the worried

guards calling after you:

You can’t go against the eras! Stop!

The exit’s over here! You won’t learn from this,

you know you won’t. You’re searching, you’re forgetting.

As when you hear a military band

marching in the street and you stand there and hear it moving

farther and farther away. Slowly, slowly its sounds

fade in your ears: first the cymbals, then

the trumpets hush,

then the oboes set in the distance,

then the sharp flutes and the

little drums; but for a very long time

the deep drums remain,

the tune’s skeleton and heartbeat, until

they too. And be still, selah. Amen, selah.

On Rosh Hashanah you give an order

to the shofar-blower. Ta-da, ta-da, ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da,

wrath, great wrath, ta-daaaaaaa,

fire at any target in front of you, fire!

Cease fire. It’s over, sit down. Today is the day of judgment,

today he will put on trial all the creatures in the world.

Synagogues like bunkers aimed toward Jerusalem,

the gun-slits of their windows facing the holy east.

The shofar forgot my lips,

the words forgot my mouth,

the sweat steamed from my skin,

the blood congealed and flaked off,

the hand forgot my hand,

the blessing evaporated from the hair of my head,

the radio is still warm,

the bed cooled before it did.

The seam between day and night

unraveled, now you’re liable to slip

out of your life and vanish without anyone noticing.

Sometimes you need several days

to get over a single night.

History is a eunuch,

it’s looking for mine too

to castrate, to cut off with paper pages

sharper than any knife; to crush

and to stuff my mouth forever

with what it cut off,

as in the mutilation of war-dead,

so that I won’t sing except in a sterile chirp,

so that I’ll learn many languages

and not one of them mine,

so that I’ll be scattered and dispersed,

so that I won’t be like a tower of Babel rising heavenward.

Not to understand is my happiness,

to be like stupid angels,

eunuchs soothing with their psalms.

The time has come to engage in technological

games, machines and their accessories,

toys that are kinetic, automatic,

spring-operated, doing it themselves, in their sleep,

wheels that make things revolve, switches that turn on,

everything that moves and jumps and emits

pleasant sounds, slaves and concubines,

a he-appliance and a she-appliance,

eunuchs and the eunuchs of eunuchs.

My life is spiced with heavy

lies, and the longer I live, the bigger

the art of forgery keeps growing inside me

and the more real. The artificial flowers

seem more and more natural

and the growing ones seem artificial.

Who ultimately will be able to tell the difference

between a real bank note and a forged one?

Even the watermarks

imprinted in me

can be forged: my heart.

The subconscious has gotten used to the light

like bacteria that after a while

get used to a new antibiotic.

A new underground is being established,

lower than the very lowest.

Forty-two light-years and forty-two

dark-years. Gourmand and glutton,

guzzling and swilling like the last Roman emperors

in the secondhand history books, scrawls of demented painting

and the writing on the wall in bathrooms,

chronicles of heroism and conquest and decline

and vain life and vain death.

Coups and revolts and the suppression of revolts

during the banquet. In a nightgown, transparent

and waving, you rose in revolt against me, hair

flying like a flag above and hair bristling below.

Ta-da, ta-daaaaaaa! Broken pieces of a bottle

and a shofar’s long blast. Suppression of the revolt with

a garter belt, strangulation with sheer stockings,

stoning with the sharp heels of evening shoes.

Battles of a gladiator armed with a broken bottle neck

against a net of delicate petticoats, shoes

against treacherous organdy, tongue against prong,

half a fish against half a woman. Straps and buttons,

the tangle of bud-decorated bras with buckles

and military gear. Shofar-blast and the suppression of it.

Soccer shouts from the nearby field,

and I was placed upon you, heavy and quiet

like a paperweight, so that time and the wind

wouldn’t be able to blow you away from here

and scatter you like scraps of paper, like hours.

“Where do you feel your soul inside you?”

Stretched between my mouth-hole and my asshole,

a white thread, not transparent mist,

cramped in some corner between two bones,

in pain.

When it is full it disappears, like a cat.

I belong to the last generation of

those who know body and soul separately.

“What do you think you’ll do tomorrow?”

I can’t kick the habit of myself. I gave up

smoking and drinking and my father’s God:

I gave up everything that might accelerate my end.

The smell of the new bicycle I was given

when I was a child is still in my nostrils, the blood

hasn’t dried yet and already I’m searching for calm, for other gods,

gods of order, as in the order of Passover night: the four

questions and their ready-made answer, reward and punishment,

the ten plagues, the four mothers, egg, shankbone, bitter herbs,

everything in order, the one kid, the familiar soup, the reliable

matzohballs, nine months of pregnancy, forty

plagues on the sea. And the heart trembling a little

like the door for Elijah the Prophet,

neither open nor closed. “And it came to pass at midnight.” Now

the children have been put to bed. In their sleep

they still hear the sounds

of chewing and grinding: the world’s big eat.

The sound of swallowing is the sound of history,

belch and hiccup and gnawing of bones are the sounds of history,

bowel-movements are its movements. The digestion. In the digestion

everything begins to look like everything else:

brother and sister, a man and his dog, good people and bad people,

flower and cloud, shepherd and sheep, ruler and ruled

descend into likeness. My experimental life also is descending. Everything

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

who received it from others. I’ve been patched together

from many things, I’ve been gathered in different times,

I’ve been assembled from spare parts, from disintegrating

materials, from decomposing words. And already now,

in the middle of my life, I’m beginning to return them, gradually,

because I want to be a good and orderly person

at the border, when they ask me: “Do you have anything to declare?”

So that there won’t be too much pressure at the end,

so that I won’t arrive sweating and breathless and confused.

So that I won’t have anything left to declare.

The red stars are my heart, the distant Milky Way

is the blood in it, in me. The hot

hamsin breathes in huge lungs,

my life is close to a huge heart, always inside.

I’m sitting in the German Colony, which is

the Valley of the Ghosts. Outside they call to one another,

a mother to her children, a child to a child, a man

to God: Come home now! Time to come home! “And he is merciful,”

come home, God, be gathered to your people in Jerusalem

so that we can be gathered to you, in mutual death

and mutual prayers, with shaken-out sheets and smoothed pillows

and turning off the bed light and the eternal lamp,

closing the book, and closing the eyes, and turning,

curled-up, to the wall. Here, in the valley, in the house

above whose entrance my birth year is carved with

a verse in German: “Begin with God

and end with God. That is the best way to live.”

A stone lion crouches and watches over the words

and the four-digit number.

On the gatepost the mezuzah, flute of my childhood’s God,

and two columns, a memorial to a temple that never was,

the curtain moves like the curtain in the hotel in Rome

that first morning, moves and is drawn open,

uncovered to me the nakedness of that city,

the roofs and the sky, and I was aroused to

come to her. Please, now, please. My belovèd, your hair

is parted in the middle, you walk proudly, your strong

face carries a heavy weight, heavier than

the urn on the heads of Arab women at the well, and your eyes

are open as if from a nonweight. And outside

cars are wailing. Motors take on

the sound of humans in distress,

in depression, in gasoline shortage, in the great heat and in the cold,

in old age and in loneliness, and they weep and wail.

Josephus Flavius, son of the dead, like me,

son of Matityahu, surrendered his fortresses in Galilee

and threw down his sword on the table in front of me:

a ray of light that penetrated from outside.

He saw my name carved on the door as if on a tombstone,

he thought that my house too was a grave. Son of the dead,

son of dust, son of the streetlamp that shines in the evening

outside. The people in front of the window are the legions

of Titus; they are descending on Jerusalem

now, as this Sabbath ends, on its cafés and on

its movie theaters, on lights and on cakes

and on women’s thighs: surrender of love,

supplication of love. The rustling of trees

in the garden announces a change in my actions, but not

in my dreams. My inner clothes won’t be changed

and the tattoo from my childhood keeps on sinking

inward.

Go, cheerful commander and sad historian,

slumber between the pages of your books, like pressed

flowers you will sleep in them. Go,

my child too is a war orphan of three wars

in which I wasn’t killed and in which he

wasn’t born yet, but he is a war orphan of them all.

Go, white governor of Galilee. I too

am always entering and leaving as if into new apartments,

through iron window-grilles that are of memory.

You must be shadow or water

to pass through all these without breaking,

you are gathered again afterward. A declaration of peace

with yourself, a treaty, conditions, protracted deliberations,

dunes stretching out, rustling of trees

over multitudes of the wounded, as in

a real war. A woman once said to me:

“Everyone goes to his own funeral.” I didn’t

understand then. I don’t understand now, but I’m going.

Death is only a bureaucrat who arranges

our lives by subject and place

in files and in archives. This valley

is the rip God made in his clothes, in the ritual

mourning for the dead, and all that the poet and

the chronicler can do is to hand over their fortresses

and be wailing-women, mourners for a fee or without one.

Yodfat opens her gates wide: a great

light bursts forth, the light of surrender

that should have sufficed for the darkness of millennia.

Ta-da, ta-daaaaaaa, ta-daaa (sadly),

the blower’s lips cracked in the prolonged khamsin, the tongue cleaved

to the roof of his mouth, the right hand forgot its cunning. I

remember only the movement of the woman

pulling her dress over her head:

what a hands-up!, what a blind surrender,

what imploring, what lust, what surrender!

“I’m not a traitor,” and between the columns my brother Josephus

vanished. “I have to write a history.”

The columns are sick, their capital is circled by a leprosy of Greek

ornaments and an insanity of carved flowers and buds.

The home is sick. “Homesick” they say in English

when a man yearns for his home. The home

is man-sick. I yearn. I am sick. Go,

Josephus my brother, flying flags too

are curtains in windows that no longer have a home.

I am a pious Jew, my beard has grown inward,

instead of flesh and blood I’m stuffed with beard-hair

like a mattress. Pain stays in the forehead, under the phylactery box, with

no remedy. My heart fasts almost every week, whether I’ve dropped

a Torah scroll or not, whether the Temple

was destroyed or rebuilt.

I don’t drink wine; but everything the wine doesn’t do to me

is a black abyss without drunkenness, a dark

empty vineyard where they tread and bruise the soles of

their feet on the hard stone. My body is a shipyard

for what is called my soul. My body will be dismantled and my soul

will glide out to sea, and its shape is the shape of my body in which it lay

and its shape is the shape of the sea, and the shape of the sea is like the shape of my body.

My belovèd is Jobesque. It happened in summer, and the elastic straps

of her clothing snapped with the twang of a taut string. The wailings of

labor pains and rattle of death-agony already in a first night of love.

Rip, riiiiiip of light clothing,

because it was summer, the end of a heavy summer of

thin, light clothing. A shofar like the hiccup

of a sick man. And in the beginning of the month of Elul

the blower blew the ram’s horn and his face was sheepish

like a ram’s face and his eye was bulging and glassy and rolled

in its socket like the eye of a closed tank. And his mouth was caught in the shofar,

with no way to escape.

Jobesque: we met in the flight of the hemlock. With legs spread apart

wider than the spreading of wings, beyond the borders of your body.

In love always, despair lies with you now

and your movements and the writhing of your limbs and your screams with him

are the same as with me.

Sometimes I feel my soul rolling

as if it were inside an empty barrel. In the dull sound

of a barrel pushed from place to place. Sometimes

I see Jerusalem between two people

who stand in front of a window, with a space

between them. The fact that they aren’t close and loving

allows me to see my life, between them.

“If only it were possible to grasp the moment

when two people first become strangers to each other.”

This could have been a song of praise to

the sweet, imaginary God of my childhood.

It happened on Friday, and black angels

filled the Valley of the Cross, and their wings

were black houses and abandoned quarries.

Sabbath candles bobbed up and down like ships

at the entrance to a harbor. “Come O bride,”

wear the clothes of your mourning and your splendor

from the night when you thought I wouldn’t come to you

and I came. The room was drenched in the fragrance

of syrup from black, intoxicating cherries.

Newspapers, scattered on the floor, rustled below

and the flapping wings of the hemlock above.

Love with parting, like a record

with applause at the end of the music, love

with a scream, love with a mumble of despair

at walking proudly into exile from each other.

Come O bride, hold in your hand something made of clay

at the hour of sunset, because flesh vanishes

and iron doesn’t keep. Hold clay in your hand

for future archaeologists to find and remember.

They don’t know that anemones after the rain

are another archaeological find, a document of major importance.

The time has come for the canon of my life to be closed,

as the rabbis closed the canon of the Bible.

There will be a final decision, chapters and books will remain outside,

will be declared apocryphal, some days won’t be counted with the rest,

they will be examples and exegeses and interpretations of interpretations

but not the essence, not holy.

I imagine matches that were moistened with tears

or with blood, and can no longer be lit. I imagine

a shofar blowing in the assault upon an empty objective.

Jewish shofar-bagpipes, Jeremiah of Anatot

assaulting an empty place with a troop of weepers running behind him.

But last Yom Kippur, at the close of the final

prayer, when everyone was waiting for the shofar

in great silence, after the shouts of “Open the gate for us,”

his voice was heard like the thin squeal of an infant,

his first cry. My life, the beginning of my life.

I chose you, love, I was Ahasuerus who sat

on his throne and chose. Through the splendorous clothing

I saw you and the signs of mutability on your body

and the arch of curling apocalyptic hair

above the vagina. You wore black stockings,

but I knew that you were the opposite. You wore black dresses

as if in mourning, but I saw red on your body

like a mouth. As if the tongue of a red velvet gown were sticking out from

an antique trunk that didn’t close tight.

I was your Purim bull, your Kippurim bull,

dressed in a shroud that had the two colors of a clown.

Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da, ta-da, love and its long shofar-blasts.

Sit down. Today is the world-pregnant day of judgment. Who raped

the world and made the day pregnant?

Today is the day of judgment, today you, today war.

Tanks from America, fighter planes from France, Russian

jet-doves, armored chariots from England, Sisera’s regiments

who dried the swamps with their corpses, a flying Massada,

Beitar slowly sinking, Yodfat on wheels, the Antonia, ground-to-ground

ground, ground-to-air air, ground-to-sky sky. Massada won’t fall again, won’t fall again,

won’t fall again, Massada, won’t. Multiple automatic

prayer beads and also in single shots. Muezzins armed with

three-stage missiles, paper-rips and battle-cries

of holy wars in all seven kinds,

shtreimls like mines in the road and in the air, deep philosophical

depth charges, a heart lit up with a green light inside

the engine of a red-hot bomber, Elijah’s ejection-seat leaping up

at a time of danger, hurling circumcision knives, thundering

dynamite fuses from heart to heart, a Byzantine tank

with a decorated window in which an icon appears

lit up in purity and softness, mezuzahs filled with

explosives, don’t kiss them or they’ll blow up, dervishes

with powdered rococo curls, the Joint Chiefs of Staff

consisting of Job, his friends, Satan, and God, around a sand-table.

A pricking with bannered pins in the live flesh

of hills and valleys made of naked

humans lying in front of them,

underwater synagogues, periscope rabbis,

cantors out of the depths, jeeps armed with women’s hair

and with wild girls’ fingernails, ripping their

clothes in rage and mourning. Supersonic angels

with wings of women’s fat thighs,

letters of a Torah scroll in ammunition straps, machine guns,

flowers in the pattern of a fortified bunker,

fingers of dynamite, prosthetic legs of dynamite,

eight empty bullet-shells for a Hanukkah menorah,

explosives of eternal flame, the cross of a crossfire,

a submachine gun carried in phylactery straps,

camouflage nets of thin lacy material

from girlfriends’ panties, used women’s dresses

and ripped diapers to clean the cannon mouth,

offensive hand-grenades in the shape of bells,

defensive hand-grenades in the shape of a spice box

for the close of the Sabbath, sea mines

like the prickly apples used as smelling-salts on Yom Kippur

in case of fainting, half my childhood in

a whole armored truck, a grandmother clock

for starting a time-egg filled with

clipped fingernails of bad boys

with a smell of cinnamon, Dürer’s

praying hands sticking up

like a vertical land mine, arms with an attachment

for a bayonet, a good-night fortified with sand bags,

the twelve little minor prophets

in a night ambush with warm breath,

cannon barrels climbing like ivy, shooting

cuckoo shells every fifteen minutes: cuckoo,

boom-boom. Barbed-wire testicles,

eye-mines bulging and hurting,

aerial bombs with the heads of

beautiful women like the ones that used to be carved

on ships’ prows, the mouth of a cannon

open like flower petals,

M.I.R.V., S.W.A.T., I.C.B.M., I.B.M.,

P.O.W., R.I.P., A.W.O.L.,

S.N.A.F.U., I.N.R.I., J.D.L., L.B.J.,

E.S.P., I.R.S., D.N.A., G.O.D.

Sit down. Today is the day of judgment. Today there was war.

The terrible angel pulled back his arm like a spring

to his side, to rest it or to strike

again. Keep this arm

busy, distract its muscles! Hang

heavy ornaments on it, gold and silver, necklaces

and diamonds, so that it’s weighed down, so that it will sink and

not strike again. Again Massada won’t fall, won’t fall.

In the mists that came from below and in the holy

bluish light, inside his huge hollow dome,

I saw the lord of all the earth in all his sadness,

a radar god lonely and turning

with his huge wings, in the sad circles

of a doubt as ancient as the world,

yes yes and no no, with the sadness of a god who realizes

there is no answer and no decision aside from that turning.

Whatever he sees is sad. And whatever

he doesn’t see is sad, whatever he writes down

is a code of sadness for humans to decipher.

I love the bluish light and the white of his eyes

which are blind white screens

on which humans read what will befall them.

Again Massadah. Again Massada. Again won’t.

On one of these evenings I tried

to remember the name of the one who was killed beside me

in the pale sands of Ashod. He was a foreigner,

perhaps one of the wandering sailors, who thought that the Jewish people

was a sea and those deadly sands were waves. The tattoo

didn’t reveal his name, just a flower and

a dragon and fat women. I could have

called him Flower or Fat Women. In the first

light of retreat and dawn he died. “In his arms

he was dead.” Just as in the poem by Goethe. All evening

beside windows and desks I was immersed in the effort of remembering,

like the effort of prophecy. I knew that if I didn’t

remember his name I’d forget my own name, it would wither,

“the grass rises again.” This too by Goethe. The grass

doesn’t rise again, it remains trampled,

remains alive and whispering to itself. It won’t rise,

but will never die and will not fear sudden death

under the heavy hobnailed boots.

The year the world’s condition improved

my heart got sick. Should I conclude from this

that my life falls apart without

the sweet suffocating barrel-hoops of danger?

I’m forty-three years old. And my father died at sixty-three.

After summer’s end comes a summer and a summer and a summer, as

on a broken record. Dying is when the last season

never changes again.

And the body is the wax of the soul’s memorial candle

that drips and gathers and piles up inside me. And paradise

is when the dead remember only the

beautiful things: as when, even after the war, I remembered

only the beautiful days.

Last spring my child began

to be afraid—for the first time,

too early—of death.

Flowers grow from the earth,

fear blossoms in his heart,

a fragrant smell for someone who enjoys

a fragrance like that.

And in the summer I tried to engage in politics, in the questions of my time,

an attempt that has the same fragrance

of flowers and their withering,

the attempt of a man to stage-manage and move

the furniture in his house into a new arrangement,

to participate: as in a movie theater

when someone moves his head

and asks the people in front of him to move

their heads too, just a bit,

so that he’ll have at least

a narrow path for seeing. I tried

to go out into my time and to know, but I couldn’t get any farther

than the body of the woman beside me.

And there’s no escape. Don’t go to the ant, thou sluggard!

It will depress you to see that blind

diligence racing around beneath the shoe that is lifted to trample.

No escape. As in a modern chess set

which the craftsman shaped differently from the pieces you grew up with:

the king looks like a queen, the pawns are like knights,

the knights are barely horses and are as smooth as rooks. But the game

remains with its rules. Sometimes you long for

the traditional pieces, a king with a crown,

a castle that is round and turreted, a horse that is a horse.

The players sat inside, the talkers sat out on the balcony:

half of my belovèd, my left hand, a quarter of a friend,

a man half-dead. The click of the massacred pieces

tossed into the wooden box

is like a distant, ominous thunder.

I am a man approaching his end.

What seems like youthful vitality in me

isn’t vitality but craziness,

because only death can put an end to this craziness.

And what seem like deep roots that I put down

are only complications on

the surface: a disease of knots, hands cramped in spasm,

tangled ropes, and demented chains.

I am a solitary man, a lonely man. I’m not a democracy.

The executive and the loving and the judicial powers

in one body. An eating and swilling and a vomiting power,

a hating power and a hurting power,

a blind power and a mute power.

I wasn’t elected. I’m a political demonstration, I carry

my face above me, like a placard. Everything is written on it. Everything,

please, there’s no need to use tear gas,

I’m already crying. No need to disperse me,

I’m dispersed,

and the dead too are a demonstration.

When I visit my father’s grave,

I see the tombstones lifted up by

the dust underneath:

they are a mass demonstration.

Everyone hears footsteps at night,

not just the prisoner: everyone hears.

Everything at night is footsteps,

receding or approaching, but never

coming close enough

to touch. This is man’s mistake

about his God, and God’s mistake about man.

Oh this world, which everyone fills

to the brim. And bitterness will come to shut

your mouth like a stubborn, resistant spring

so that it will open wide, wide, in death,

what are we, what is our life. A child who got hurt

or was hit, as he was playing, holds back his tears

and runs to his mother, on a long road of backyards

and alleys and only beside her will he cry.

That’s how we, all our lives, hold back

our tears and run on a long road

and the tears are stifled and locked

in our throats. And death is just a good

everlasting cry. Ta-daaaaaa, a long blast of the shofar,

a long cry, a long silence. Sit down. Today.

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.