In the History of Our Love - Yehuda Amichai

With this selection, Amichai solidifies his lead as the most represented poet here.  And deservedly.  (Do "click" on his name on the left column to see why.  You'll agree and also see the biographical information on an amazing life.)   In this one, the analogy used in the last stanza to convey connectivity and isolation is just brilliant.  It takes Donne's "no man is an island" a step further, and that is just a great finish to the earlier lines' riff on permanence/impermanence.  There is also no doubt that Amichai is writing from deep experience.  It's the voice of a man who has loved well, loved deeply and loved completely.... and, thus, knows also the weight of loss.  What's striking to me about Amichai's love poetry is how powerfully and passionately he can write about both that state of grace that is being "in love" AND its aftermath.  (Sadly, just calling it a "state of grace" defines it as being a finite interval.  And do all "states of grace" inevitably have a "fall"? ) I envy that ability to express joy and sorrow equally well, as my own best writing is skewered towards the latter....
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In the History of Our Love

                                    transl. from Hebrew by Ben and Barbara Harshaw

In the history of our love, always one is

A nomadic tribe, the other a nation on its own soil.

When we changed places, it was all over.

Time will pass us by, as landscapes

Move behind actors standing in their places

When they make a movie.  Even the words

Will pass by our lips, even the tears

Will pass by our eyes.  Time will pass

Every one in his place.

And in the geography of the rest of our lives,

Who will be an island and who a peninsula

Will become clear to each of us in the rest of our lives

In nights of love with others.

                                             Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

A Mutual Lullaby - Yehuda Amichai

With this one, I think Amichai takes the lead with most poems here....  And is it any wonder? PLEASE read some of the others and you'll see why.  It's worth learning Hebrew just to get their full impact!

As for including this one..... read it.  

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A Mutual Lullaby


For a while I've been meaning to tell you to sleep
but your eyes won't let sleep in, and your thighs
won't either. Your belly when I touch -- perhaps.
Count backward now, as if at a rocket launching,
and sleep. Or count forward,
as if you were starting a song. And sleep.
Let's compose sweet eulogies for each other as we lie together in the dark.
Tears remain longer than whatever caused them.
My eyes have burned this newspaper to a mist
but the wheat goes on growing in Pharahoh's dream.

Time isn't inside the clock
but love, sometimes, is inside our bodies.
Words that escape you in your sleep
are food and drink for the wild angels,
and our rumpled bed
is the last nature preserve
with shrieking laughter and lush green weeping.
For a while I've been meaning to tell you
that you should sleep
and that the black night will be cushioned
with soft red velvet - as in a case
for geometrical instruments --
around everything that's hard in you.

And that I'll keep you, as people keep the Sabbath,
even on weekdays, and that we'll stay together always
as on one of those New Year's cards
with a dove and a Torah, sprinkled with silver glitter.
And that we are still less expensive
than a computer. So they'll let us be.

                                                                                     Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

See?  I didn't want to ruin it for you, dear reader, with extraneous comments/observations.

Advice for Good Love - Yehuda Amichai

 This is the seventh poem by Amichai that I have selected.   If you've read the others, you should be getting an idea about his "voice" and how strong it is.  As I have noted before, to read his poems is to stand in the shadowless landscape of a noon-day sun, when every rock is both sharply outlined yet also shimmering from the rising heat.  His poems are those rocks.
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Advice for Good Love

                                     transl. from Hebrew by Amichai and Ted Hughes (!)

Advice for good love: Don’t love

those from far away.  Take yourself one

from nearby.

The way a sensible house will take

local stones for its building,

stones which have suffered in the same cold

and were scorched by the same sun.

Take the one with the golden wreath

around her dark eye’s pupil, she

who has a certain knowledge

about your death.  Love also inside

a ruin, like taking honey out of 
the lion’s carcass that Samson killed.

And advice for bad love: With

the love left over

from the previous one

make a new woman for yourself,

then with what is left of that woman

make again a new love,

and go on like that

until nothing remains.

                                                                     Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

Like Our Bodies' Imprint - Yehuda Amichai

(#6 here from Yehuda Amichai.)  It's obvious by now that I like his poetry.  A lot.  Read the others - just click on his name in the side-bar - and you'll begin to see why.  His poems get to the essence and the core with not one extra word.  Meeting him that one time and knowing a bit about his life and his writing, he looked to embody a line by Aeschylus:  "The reward of suffering is experience".  And a lifetime supply of fodder for poems.  This one.... this one overwhelmed me on first reading and, even now, decades later, still stuns with its powerful imagery of negative space to show the fullness of what once was.
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Like our bodies’ imprint
                                                         transl. by Assia Gutmann
Like our bodies’ imprint                                                                               
not a sign will remain that we were in this place.
The world closes behind us,
the sand straightens itself.

Dates are already in view
in which you no longer exist,
already a wind blows clouds
which will not rain on us both.

And your name is already on the passenger lists of ships
and in the registers of hotels
whose names alone
deaden the heart.

The three languages I know,
all the colors in which I see and dream:

None will help me.

                                                                                  Yehuda Amichai- Israeli

In This Valley - Yehuda Amichai

With this one, Amichai now has the most poems (5) thus far in this blog.  If you read the others - go to the side-bar and "click" his name under "Poets" - you will begin to get a feel for why.  To write well about Love, one must experience it.  To write with passion about Love, one must also experience its opposite: Loss.  Each is the necessary reference point by which to fully appreciate the other.  His poems are infused with that appreciation, of which a distinctive part is an urgency to live/love fully. Being an Israeli who fought in three wars will do that. 
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In This Valley

In this valley which many waters
carved out in endless years
so that the light breeze may now
pass through it to cool my forehead,
I think about you. From the hills I hear
voices of men and machines wrecking and building.

And there are loves which cannot
be moved to another site.
They must die at their place and in their time
like an old clumsy piece of furniture
that’s destroyed together with
the house in which it stands.

But this valley is a hope
of starting afresh without having to die first,
of loving without forgetting the other love,
of being like the breeze that passes through it now
without being destined for it.
                                                                                                 Yehuda Amichai -Israeli

Once a Great Love - Y. Amichai

#4 from Yehuda Amichai.  For the others, "click" on his name on the left column in the "Poets and Categories" section.)  It's poems like this one that make me read him in small doses.  There is no shade from its light and heat.  You are exposed because he has exposed himself, as that is the contract: to get the most from the gift of the poet's experience, the reader must also be willing to stand naked.

The first time I read this poem was just before a great love.  It had light, but little heat: I had no reference point.   The second time, its heat was unbearable: not enough years had passed after my life was cut in two.  Even now, before reading it, I gird myself first, like a furnace-worker putting on an asbestos suit.  

Note: This translation from Hebrew is noteworthy because Amichai worked with Ted Hughes, the English poet, who will forever be better-known as having been Sylvia Plath's husband than for his own writing....
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Once a Great Love

Once a great love cut my life in two.
The first part goes on twisting
at some other place like a snake cut in two.

The passing years have calmed me
and brought healing to my heart and rest to my eyes.

And I’m like someone standing in
the Judean desert, looking at a sign:
“Sea Level.”
He cannot see the sea, but he knows.

Thus I remember your face everywhere
at your “face level.”
                                                                                       Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

Quick and Bitter - A. Amichai

#3 from Yehuda Amichai (also here In the Middle of This Century, A Precise Woman  thus far). I wish that I could read them in the original Hebrew: if it's this powerful in translation, it's hard to imagine how it must be in the original.  I do not know another poem that is as perfect as this one for its subject matter.
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Quick and Bitter
                                                             transl. from Hebrew by Guttman
The end was quick and bitter.
Slow and sweet was the time between us,
slow and sweet were the nights
when my hands did not touch one another in despair
but in the love of your body
which came between them.

And when I entered into you
it seemed then that great happiness
could be measured with the precision
of sharp pain. Quick and bitter.

Slow and sweet were the nights.
Now is bitter and grinding as sand –
“Let’s be sensible” and similar curses.

And as we stray further from love
we multiply the words,
words and sentences so long and orderly.
Had me remained together
we could have become a silence.
                                                                                      Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

In the Middle of This Century - Y. Amichai

Another by Yehuda Amichai (see also Quick and Bitter,  A Precise Woman).  A graduate student somewhere has probably done a thesis contrasting and comparing the effect of war on the love poetry of soldier-poets of the 20th century.  Or should. 

Amichai would be in unique in that group: he fought in three - 1948, 1956, 1973 - being from a country (Israel) that is on permanent war-footing.  I never forget that and how it must permeate every aspect of connecting with another person: from heightening the urgency and the sensory/emotional experience to the hyper-reality of loss.  This poem speaks so much to that: the need to connect, the uncertainty beyond the moment, and how two form an oasis when they meet... It evokes the total arc and experience of a love affair: beautiful and brilliant as that Judean sun, finite as the inevitable sunset, yet hopeful (and cyclical) as the also inevitable sunrise. It leaves me with the same feeling as watching "The English Patient" and the final scenes of "Black Orpheus": drained, sad, yet hopeful.
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In the middle of this century we turned to each other
with half faces and full eyes
like an ancient Egyptian picture
and for a short while.

I stroked your hair
in the opposite direction to your journey.
We called to each other,
like calling out the names of towns
where nobody stops  
along the route.

Lovely is the world rising early to evil,
lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity,
in the mingling of ourselves, you and I,
lovely is the world.

The earth drinks men and their loves
like wine,
to forget.
It can't.
And like the contours of the Judean Hills,
we should never find peace.

In the middle of this century we turned to each other,
I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me,
the leather straps for a long journey
already tightening across my chest.
I spoke in praise of your mortal hips,
you spoke in praise of my passing face.

I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey,
I touched your flesh, prophet of your end,
I touched your hand, which has never slept,
I touched your mouth, which may yet sing.

Dust from the desert covered the table
at which we did not eat.
But with my finger I wrote on it
the letters of your name.
                                                                              
Yehuda Amichai  (Israeli)                                 

A Precise Woman - Y. Amichai

Amichai is regarded as Israel's best modern poet in a life that also included being a soldier in three of his country's last four wars and a professor of literature.  His writing is ironic and direct, the imagery unforgettable.  Reading his poems about war and love is profoundly affecting and helpful in understanding Israel (and Israelis) a little better.  I had the privilege of meeting him when he was in Philadelphia a couple of years before his death from cancer in 2000. In this one, the last verse, particularly the last line, always brings a smile.   
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A Precise Woman

                                                                      (transl. from Hebrew)

A precise woman with a short haircut brings order
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
the wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.

A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet
her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)                                                                                

Yehuda Amichai (Jewish)