The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

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