Square Letters and Miracles[63] (1964–1967)
Drawing by the poet.
What I Wanted to Say and Was Late
What I wanted to say and was late
Among so many different yours
Just to you,
What I terribly wanted to say and was late —
Would have been fewer than twin words,
Would have lasted less than three seconds.
What I wanted to say and was late —
I'm saying in book after book and am twisted,
Tormented,
By sundials, filled with sand and with sandy time.
What I wanted to say and was late —
I say in a prayer to a prayer of yours,
Till you return a signal
As if from a distant planet.
Even less: just a rhyme,
Just an oy:
The language of seed in the earth that creates its own heaven.
What I wanted to say —
I'll be silent for both.
1966
First Rain
What shall I do with so much memory?
Where shall I hide it,
Infuse it in veins —
For my grandchild to find it?
Perhaps, deep in the earth,
In its core?
Rain, rain,
Don't slice your veins with the sun,
Lest the grapes in the vineyard
Flee in fear.
Perhaps instill it in a mirror?
Perhaps, save it with birds?
Birds, soaring letters,
Take it!
My memory is yours.
Maybe a good-hearted bird
Will sing it into a hut —
And a man will make a blessing
Over singing fire.
1966
When the River Overflowed Its Bank
When the river overflowed its bank
I only came up to my knees.
But time stood before me on its knees,
When the river overflowed its bank.
Because of me, a thatch roof floated
With a rooster on his throne of hay:
His cock-a-doodle-doo, his haughty way —
Just like a gypsy, fine.
Years later, cut away by a stream,
I saw it, sharp as an axe in a dream:
The roof is mine, mine.
Because of me, a floating oak made his mark:
He tried to take off his copper bark,
Thrusting his molars, his roots, in the flow.
Years later — I saw in Africa his scion,
Floating in the grass in the guise of a lion
Stalking a trembling doe.
But one thing I envy above all:
A piano floating, legs shot off, almost sank —
On it, Chopin wailed like a rain,
When the river overflowed its bank.
Years later I grasped that the piano in the flow,
With its black bent wing followed by a floe,
Was just a coffin swimming toward my fate —
And I was lying in that coffin dank,
When the river overflowed its bank.
1966
The Ailing Poet to His Friend
Music of torments.
Who is the conductor?
For whom do they play a crescendo?
Later, will any hands applaud?
Who are they? And who the conductor?
I want to see him!
Even a murderer under lock and key
Is not denied his last wish.
I want to see the conductor!
His baton is a knife.
Just the knife is real.
The past — a splendid superstition.
Faces of clay in the black hall
Have gone to a different zone.
She' s no longer she: a separate beam.
In my heart, I call her: my widow.
Day and night the conductor waves.
In his footprints,
My childhood arrives,
Dressed up in silver manuscripts.
Will any hands really
Applaud —
I do not know. If I could only
Give you a sign: tomorrow
You will know whose
Greeting or crippled hands.
Day and night the conductor waves.
1966
With the Hundredth Sense
Till I love you with my hundredth sense,
The black scorpion will stray with the kiss in the sands,
And I will not doff my gray cloak of skin.
Down with the counter of senses to five or to six,
The miser who counted them off like moldy sticks!
More beautiful things I would throw to stray dogs on the roads.
A fiddle is tree and is water and is ship and is tone,
When the fingers are dead and the bow rows homeward alone.
So I will come with my hundredth sense to my bliss.
A branch will tell his neighbor: there is a God …
A human ear is fated to hear where He trod
When over his bliss the solitary man will reign.
With its hundredth sense, my time, an invisible wind,
Will find its cosmic form in body's labyrinth.
And the helplessness of both I will throw to the dogs.
1965
Zeykher Le-Ghetto
Close the Window
It's not for you to finish. Not a time for wholeness.
Tatters of texts more eternal than marble.
Close the window. Let shadows put on sackcloth
When ghosts play Carmen, Rigoletto.
Leave an empty line, a blot —
A memory of the ghetto.
1965
In Blue Gowns
In blue gowns — like bells down to their soles,
Bound to one another's hands with rope —
They march through Hell Street of my memory,
Past the Green Bridge,
Twisted, gall-splattered huts,
Between blond rifles and genuflecting Gentiles —
They march for years and years and years
From madhouse to ghetto — sick Jews, madmen.
A boot shoved me in among them. I become
A bone of their bone. A dream of their minds.
I feel good. Good morning. Blessed are
You honest voyagers.[ 65]
Dressed in the same blue gown, on my hands
A rope — it will lead us all together
To new gates, to new walls.
Such a huddling with Jews is a blessing.
Never felt such joy with Jews in my grief.
Late-summer blue. Messiah our Lord marches
With us all, in a gown blue as the Viliya.
Every head is shorn, naked,
But the face — a palette of a wild, dead painter:
Dried up, unused colors, still breathing,
A shadow of a brush dances on their skull.
Thus they march through Hell Street of my memory,
From madhouse to ghetto — madmen, in an alien
Otherworldliness, in long blue gowns,
They march for years and years and years.
And I thank today, as then, for the honor
To be chained with the lowest of the low,
Marching on the pavement to the ghetto and the bonfire,
Further away,
To be further away
From Germans.
1966
The Smile of Maidanek
I
No thicker than the membrane of an eye —
My neighbor's door.
No thicker than the spungold tavern
Where a weary dewdrop staggers in
For the night.
No thicker than a shadow
Flayed from the flesh —
Wherefore do I never succeed in opening the door
When, after all, the door was never locked?
And he, my bosom-friend,
My poison-friend,
Wherefore can he not go through the same door to his neighbor
And simply say to him good-morning?
The door is lucid as fear,
The door is not locked.
II
How far is a bygone second?
Just one second far
From any today and tomorrow.
My neighbor is himself a bygone second
Covered with a mask
To conceal
His wound.
III
My neighbor knocks on the door
As if to say:
A hollow attic vessel, the earth is cracked.
Just hit it a little harder
And it crumbles into ash and dust
And all the seas swing back into the sky
And put out the bonfires we call the stars.
So maybe you can lend me wings
To fly away to a safer planet?
Without a second thought, I'm moving out of here.
God's mercy on the earth-born.
Is it the apple's fault I carry such a hump?
IV
On a crematorium chimney in the Land of Poland,
Barefoot,
Feet dangling,
As in childhood
Fishing in lulav[ 66] reedy water —
My neighbor sits.
He's dreaming:
The hook of his own pole
Trapped him
With a glimmering worm.
He is his own catcher
On the long
Thin pole.
He is himself his own legend.
V
What do you think he's doing on the chimney,
When someone long ago dredged up from the red belly
My neighbor's parchment city of Jews?
He holds a little mirror in his hand
And casts,
As in childhood
Spots of sun on grandpa's face —
A green smile, raining panic on old and young:
It won't let you dream, be silent, talk —
He casts out, casts into you
The smile of Maidanek.
VI
The smile of Maidanek falls
On wedding and bris.[67]
In opera.
Theater.
In the wings.
In creases of your bread and salt,
Salty conscience.
The green smile falls
On your elegy, your ballad,
On every tremor
Of a sound.
The smile falls
With hissing fire
Into the best wine,
Burgundy
Or Tokay.
It falls on squat depots,
Barely mapped, like mushrooms.
On the tall building of the United
Nations,
And higher — on the silver wanderer
To the abysses.
VII
And nobody knows that on anointed,
High-domed
Summer nights,
In snowy or rainy spaces,
Barefoot,
Feet dangling, as in childhood —
My neighbor sits in Poland on a chimney,
Ponders the beautiful reality that is not real,
And what my neighbor does is ever the same:
He holds in his hand a little mirror. Nothing more.
1966
Emblem
I
And the three of us, on a narrow, one-oared
Sampan, swam out of the port of Aberdeen[68]
Into the sea. The waves — thin,
Transparent shells,
Lose their weight and turn into foamy amber
Between British Isles
And China.
The isles — kingdoms for dragons
And miniature runners. With rickshaws, temples, mottos,
With silkworms spinning banners from their innards,
And smiling little Buddhas in the heart of a blue lotus.
Ya-Tang was born here. The peak of that rock —
He points to it with a cherry branch. The rock — his bride.
She sings, a kitten
Meowing.
Patiently, on the smooth sea, swims the night —
A black coffin.
In the black coffin swim my years.
And the Chinese madonna
Keeps on meowing.
— Ya-Tang, where to? I see in him a dwarf,
The dwarf drinks a toast to the pearl bottom of the sea.
— My lord, this is the tavern of wine and love,
Where he jumped out to catch the moon,
The godly Li-Po.
II
The Morning Star lets his star inherit a wave,
The Morning Star lets his morning inherit the sea.
Godly Li-Po unravels the braid around his waist
And dozes off in the pearl tavern, along with him.
A conch is my ear and the conch weeps Chinese.
One-syllable needles fill my hearing.
And differently cries a wave, differently flies a stork —
Where are we, what vision approaches us?
A different sea: a rainbow between us and islands —
Is it after a rain, before a rain? Tell us the secret, Ya-Tang!
Red, split water-strings of his oar splatter gleams,
And go back to the sea, to its indifferent movement.
— Such a rainbow, says Ya-Tang, is not from the rain:
With children on their shoulders, with a spear and a sack of rice,
Chinese swim in the nights of the great land — across,
To dream-islands … and dolphins are fed.
Oh, rainbow, red as an open heart, emblem of Asia,
Did the godly Li-Po, the splendor of all sons,
See you in reality, as I do, or in a dream? —
You gave me a poem on the shores of Aberdeen.
1965
To Read, To Write
I
I want to be your reader and try to read the heavy
Sanskrit of your brows that lack so little,
One hair, no more, to become one, intertwined, unique.
I want to be the reader of your tears.
I want to read your silence, as the lining
Of trembling, silver leaves on a poplar,
When, below, an axe is lifted, glittering with treason.
I want to be the reader of your veins, your navel.
I want to be your reader, your only understander,
As a wolf who understands the dead howl
Of a she-wolf pierced by a bullet behind the evening
Veil of snow, amid warm pleasure.
Drawing by the poet.
II
Instead of paper — a leaf of thin, spring air. I want to write
Uninterrupted for a second, with teeth instead of pencil,
Like fire, fearing water more than fire.
I want to write one second, so an eternity remains.
I want to write for the beggar, the value of a coin.
I want to write for the sound, that should not work in vain.
I want to write for my childhood in a winged blizzard.
I want to write for the grass growing out of me, green.
I want to write for the silkworm, to spin out his silk.
I want to write for the suicide, to soothe his pain.
I want to write for the dying, run out of time to suffer.
I want to write for the mirror, like the hand of Leonardo.
1967
A Witness
Amazing: a tiny ant —
An atom,
Pulls the lead planet of an old elephant
Into the corner of its eye, the very abyss,
And still has a little
Time and space left for his grandfathers — —
And still has one empty pupil
To swallow up the witness.
1965
Morning After a Night in Jaffa
Believe the Times when I hardly
Believe in time, that golem facing me
Like an artist's painting
That ultra-abstracts?
And a voice replies: Abraham, Abraham,
Better not believe in yourself
Than not to believe in the facts!
And this is the fact:
In a frame, a black sore,
Sealed suddenly a name:
So-and-So is no more.
So-and-So, just yesterday in Jaffa
At the sea, read to me a sonnet.
And strode on like a young giraffe:
A Liliput, Lord, is Your planet.
So how can it be,
That he should suddenly not be?
The conch at the sea is the same
As yesterday.
The stiff-necked stone was and is
And goes on slaughtering
The foamy necks of the waves.
Even the glowworm amid deep green
Thickets —
On that teensy creature, the same Shekhina[69]
As yesterday —
So how can it be,
That he should suddenly not be?
What a lunatic game,
To create so many isn'ts all the same.
1966
The Shard Hunters
With Nostrils of Dogs
The shard-hunters — this is my company.
At midnight, we begin to advance
From the Red Sea, the coral inn,
In the rhythm of old caravans.
The shard-hunters lurk. In their
Primeval memory, emerges from the deep
The morning doe, as if a bride forgot
To remove her veil before a sleep.
And evoking in the same memory:
A sliver of a jar, a pot,
Where dead great-grandfathers grind rye
To leave for their grandchild — on this spot.
Thirstier for pebbles than for springs,
Nostrils of dogs with fine sense and measure,
Advancing through a wadi, they attack
The shards of its stolen treasure.
Desert Sun
A thorn grass in the Desert Zin. Thinner
Than a needle. Sucked out blue.
Alone. In sand. With those who are envious,
Who would bring him to the Moloch. Dry hue.
A whole day, at his feet, at his head —
The sun. In his scorched mind engraved,
Burned out, his dream about a drop.
The savior strays. How can you be saved?
It seems: the sun determined just
To scorch the thorn grass, to burn.
Oh miracle: livelier, longer falls its shadow
At the sun's lonely return.
So are you, poet, scorched in dread,
Time essayed to lay you waste:
Time declines lower, closer to her end,
And a long shadow falls from your waist.
The Third Silence
I see two scales hanging in the air:
On one scale, silence of the sea. The other —
Silence of the desert. Someone must weigh them.
Their primeval weeping is my escort.
The needle pulls back and forth. So far,
Undecided which silence should weigh down.
Do not escape, my heart, stay a moment.
There is a third silence — eavesdrop:
It has borne life. It is immortal.
There is no sand not sown with its seed.
The shard-hunters kiss its shards, they call it
Death, but it has a different name.
At night, when the scales turn silver,
Glow blue with sea- and desert-silence, unheard,
The needle dozes off, no voice, no sound —
The third silence talks in her sleep. The third.
Eilat, June 1966
Covered with Half of Jerusalem
Covered with half of Jerusalem up to
Their breath,
Covered with walls, hanging balconies, up to
The spring of an eye, up to
The genesis of colors —
Covered with stars
Through thin olive branches
Etched on nightmetal
With a needle of silence —
Covered with springs where angels bathe
Before turning into peasants, blacksmiths —
My fingers stretch, strike roots,
For generations,
Stretch and touch, palpable as clay,
Grasp themselves
And all the nonexistent.
1966