Ripe Faces (1968–1970)
Drawing by the poet.
The eye of my soul weeps images —
For itself as for another,
For another as for itself.
The eye of my soul weeps images
As sunset weeps clouds:
Where and to whom to confide?
I burned up my desk. It's a disgrace
To bow down to wood. I exchanged it for a wild night
Of struggle in the desert, where an eagle whirled,
Where the eye of my soul weeps images,
Pristine images imploring: Describe, describe —
For yourself as for another world.
1968
Land of My Children
Such a sleep I didn't have for half an eternity.
Such a sleep visits you only from inside copper.
Was I transformed into a beehive?
Someone, I feel,
Plunges into my body and extracts a bunch of honey.
Only when the Morning Star,
Blue as himself,
Called my by name and I sensed
A difference between my heartbeat and my dear shadow,
Did I grasp that in my sleep, I lost a rib.
A rib has vanished.
My lord has stuffed the gap with words,
Thrusting out of the seal on my lips.
And facing me, from my rib, my lord built
A land,
A Morning-Star Land,
For my children.
1968
Branch with Last Cherries
Where there is no more my home, no more my mother,
There is my blue home and there is my mother.
Perhaps someone lives who still recalls her face.
Among copper scorpions I will walk to seek him.
Elijah, I shall call him. Elijah.
Him, the Chosen One, who recalls my mother's face.
I will kiss his feet and beg: Elijah,
By virtue of my wounds — please, breathe out her face.
Just for a moment. If it's too long: half a moment.
With the rest of my years I am prepared to pay.
Oy, as to a branch of last cherries, through a mist,
I shall come close, and fear to come closer.
In that half moment, I shall ask: Tell me, mother,
Could the Creator look you in the eye?
1968
Barefoot
We took off our shoes
In the middle of the hot city.
And we looked so loose,
Like newborn and pretty.
With the same speed, if we could
Free our thoughts for a while
From their heavy boots —
It would be easier, mile after mile,
To leap barefoot into childhood.
1968
My Armor
As the desert porcupine darts
Its white and black arrows
Into the hollow circle
Drawing it like a Fata Morgana,
So, in wandering to your face, I dart
The days and nights of my body,
Spread them over miles,
To defend myself
From death:
From myself.
1968
Falling Water
"Falling water has no depth" —
Thus I heard a sheikh in Dimona.
But when it falls? When it falls, I add,
Its depth
Can drown a river and the moon in the river.
Fall from the mountains,
My borrowed time,
Like a rain,
Fall from the mountains with your childhood music
Toward me,
Before you give yourself back
To your borrower.
Fall like water
Before I rise like fire.
Fall from the mountains
Like a melted mirror,
That already saw
To the depths of its vision.
Before your lord drops his eyelash
And you are no more.
Fall like water
Before I rise like fire.
1968
Signs
Show me a sign that I am your sign,
I will become a hymn, soaring like a pine.
A sign that I am chosen in your field
And all my falling leaves are healed.
Show me a sign in a buzzing bee
Seeking red honey for the grief in me.
A sign that you ache with my gray hair
And cuddle my feet in grass so fair.
I seek your voice from first dawn blue,
That the last breath has meaning too.
A woodpecker pecks at a tree. Send a beak
To peck into me the essence oblique.
That I belong with the lightning and with the worm
And with the sea, pulled out of your arm.
The sea lands on the shore and won't swim back.
Show me a sign. Like of foam a speck.
Show me a sign that in your memory borne
Is a red rose of me the thorn.
Just one image left to see
Of all the visions you revealed to me.
1968
Report of a Journey
A ship slid me off and
Off.
Slid me off a fat butcher table and
Off.
Slid me on a strange island
With Indonesians, Burmese, Malayans.
I run up to my neck in water. Want to catch up with the sinful,
Catch her by her braid
Of smoke and fire —
In vain. No ship. Her braid has turned
Into a tongue. It seems: the tongue sticks out a tongue
To the cheated, stranded islander who will nevermore see
A beloved. Not a familiar face. Not a Yiddish book.
I felt like Napoleon on St. Helena.
A chill ran down my back.
No one here understands my language. It's mutual. Man, where to?
I see a sign: a painted bread. I ask in sign language for a loaf.
A dwarf with the face as large as a lemon
Serves me instead of bread a snake with hissing sulfur.
I show the address of the poet Machayo,
The world-famous, the papers sing his praise —
And the driver bows sadly and takes me around
An hour, and two, and three, and leaves me over an abyss
Where lepers, with little hammers on metal plates
Ever beat and ring so no one should approach.
Back in the city —
And there is no more city, but a blend
Of pieces of night and sea and stone and smell of hashish.
But where the night leaves a trace there is a woman.
"She will understand my non-language on the horror island."
I ask her where Buddha lives,
Sakya-Muni,
Buddha.
She points at her diamond hump: a child,
And dancing out of her, the she in the mirror of a knife.
But when I lie down to sleep on a mattress of the ground,
I hear a familiar language: a cat's meow.
I answer her in the same tongue. She — back. I — again.
Such intimate talk you will not hear
Between two sisters. Bride and groom. Brothers.
Where else can you find such universal chatter?
Two lonelinesses never understood each other better.
1968
The Sculptor
The sculptor says: once upon a time, I had an atelier
In the ear of a needle. But it was roomier
To blow out of the clay faces and muscles
Than here in the old palace — a gift from the king.
On top of that, in that sweet ear,
With no regret,
I settled with a model — Lili or Lilith,
I don't quite remember her name. Just her shining body
Remained stiff in my memory. Just her body.
I swear,
When from the veinous marble
I hewed out, called up her hot breasts —
They spurted buzzing milk.
A sign that a man too is a partner to a birth.
"Music, you breath of statues" — Rilke wrote.
For my sake, I would have turned it around:
Sculptures are the breath of music.
Basalt, granite, and marble are classical music.
The sculptor is the conductor:
He just makes them play.
His chisel and hammer is the baton.
A cut,
A chisel with a cosmic challenge,
And musically, the breath of granite is molded
In the marble orchestra.
But now I am old.
I have a face of basalt.
I need no more raw stone
To pinch out limbs.
It's enough for me to open the shutters at dawn
And white marble of the day fills
My atelier, my quaking ground.
I throw myself upon him and chip off
Pieces of the day.
I want to expose his muscles. Leave just the essence.
The cut-off hours lie mute in a corner.
Till nightfall. Till both fall drunk from the struggle.
And drunk, I hear the tick-tock of drunk atoms.
And again my atelier is in the ear of a needle
With Lili or Lilith — I don't quite remember her name.
1968