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

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