The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy:The Touch of Longing is Everywhere

Yehuda Amichai

translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

from Open Closed Open, Yehuda Amichaia

1

I sit in my friends' garden on a chair made of hollow

bamboo reeds. Other reeds were turned into flutes to be played

in other places. I sit at ease, I sit shiva for time lost

and time that will be lost, and my heart is calm and quiet.

The spirits of the dead visit me in the light of day

and the spirits of the living haunt my nights.

I sit on a chair made of bamboo reeds

that wanted to be flutes, just as the flutes would have liked

to be calm and quiet in a chair. I think about bamboo reeds

that grow near the water. There's longing everywhere.

The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy.

 

2

In my garden I saw jasmine blossoms carried by the autumn wind,

clinging to the bougainvillea. Oh, what a mistake, what a waste,

what a loss to no end. I saw a sun setting in the sea,

I saw God, what a mistake, what a hope!

I saw two birds caught in the lofty halls

of an airport. In despair they flew over the chaos below.

Oh, what a mistake, what a flight, what a desperate love,

what a way out without an out, what a vision of the Shekhinah's wings!

And high up, above it all, a plane is circling. I'm trying, it says,

I'm trying again. Try, they tell it

from the control tower. Try again, try again.

 

3

Each year the melons are sweeter than the year before.

Is it forgetting last summer that makes me say this

or some great weariness? When a voice gets worn out

it grows sweeter. Even hoarseness is like white sugar,

and seedless melons are the sweetest of all.

"Let not the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree"-thus the prophet,

long ago, consoled those who have no offspring

and never will. Even seed spilled on the ground

may one day sow a human being.

Comfort ye, comfort ye, Er and Oman, you will be resurrected yet.

 

4

I saw a yellowing photo of Jaffa, from the time

before I was born, and in the photo a tower

and on the tower a clock, and on the clock: quarter to six.

The tower was precise and the time precise.

Oh dirges of the hours, weep ye for all the seven o'clocks that will not return,

grieve for the lost half past twos, woe for the six o'clocks

that were gathered unto the hours in their prime,

in my prime, a bitter wailing for all the hours that have passed away,

an elegy for the good times, a hallelujah howling for the bad.

Mourn ye quarter to six. Mourn quarter past six. Even half hours

and quarter hours will find perfect rest

in the ascension of ordained times and memorials

under the wings of forgetting.

 

5

To erect a monument in the wrong place, like the Tomb of Rachel,

to call someone by the wrong name, to say words that were not meant

to miss or to hit, to move things from one spot to another,

stones from the quarry to the construction site,

to pump water into pipes, to surprise, to change—

these are the true longings. When a window curtain wants to be a flag outside,

when the past wants to be the future,

when tears yearn not for laughter, nor for the eyes

that wept them, nor for the cheeks they wet,

but for the sea, for the salt in the sea-these are the true longings.

 

6

At a pay phone, I saw a woman making a call,

and crouching at her feet, a large musical 'instrument in a black case,

like a dog.

 

7

I think about the joy of clothing in the store window

that no one has bought, and the joy

of furniture that has not been sold,

but I also think about the sadness of the clothes and the furniture

and about their longing to be inside rooms with human beings

to sense the warmth of their bodies.

 

8

We remember the past

and God remembers the future.

Then we forget the past,

God forgets the future,

and the world returns to chaos.

 

9

Sometimes my soul wants to get out of my body for a little run,

like a dog, and return calmer to the body. But it worries

that it won't find the way back.

 

10

Godforsaken people meet godforsaking people;

people who forsake their childhood love those who remember.

Both have straps of every kind on their clothing, straps fastened tight

to support them and their souls on their journeys.

 

11

King Saul fell upon his sword in the last battle on Mount Gilboa

and died at once. So too we fall upon

our sharp-edged souls when we are born,

but we die only seventy or eighty years later.

All those years, life writhes within us, every motion

and emotion pierces deep, but we grow used to the pain.

Sometimes we call it feeling alive, even joy.

The soul that quickens us kills us in the end

and lodges there, like the sword.

 

12

When the sun sets in the west, the hope of the night rises red in me.

So too, with the security of a seesaw, we tell about the things we did,

the places we saw. Even wars and loves

steady us and give us that seesaw security, the up-down

of whatever was.

 

13

In a Jerusalem courtyard I saw seeds

spread on a cloth to dry in the sun, and I said:

Let me be their historian and tell them about the watermelons

and pumpkins they came from. I insist that the sand

remember the stone, that the stone remember the great rock

and the rock—the lava and the fire.

And I myself forget what took place last summer

even what took place yesterday, which happened to be

a Wednesday. But I remember

the psalm the Levites would sing each week

in the Temple on Wednesday.

 

14

Longings are the fruit.

Words and deeds that truly happen

are the flowers of the field that wither and fade.

The fruit remains a while longer, bearing the seeds of longings to come.

The root lasts, deep in the ground.

 

15

And all the while messengers keep running back and forth

to my childhood to retrieve what I forgot or left behind

as if from a house that is about to be demolished,

or like Robinson Crusoe, from the slowly sinking ship

to the island—so I salvage from my childhood provisions and memories

for the next installment of my life.

 

16

The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I'm thinking

how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor's office.

Even those who haven't learned to read and write are precise:

"This one's a throbbing pain, that one's a wrenching pain,

this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain

and that—a dull one. Right here. Precisely here,

yes, yes." Joy blurs everything. I've heard people say

after nights of love and feasting, "It was great,

I was in seventh heaven." Even the spaceman who floated

in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, "Great,

wonderful, I have no words."

The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain

I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness

and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.