like a row of white sails joined
by two red sighs, love words
I took my mind from to be here.
I waited until the night
before, as long as I possibly could,
and then I found them, your eyes
for windows:
You took a good look at me. You saw me. I know you saw.
Kind hands must be holding
them up, where drift the violet drifted lovers miss.
It
isn't far back to the house,
and your not being there in a borrowed wood bending the road
is what I have
to love to love.
Yehuda Amichai
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1952
My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard
and I left it once, before I was finished,
and he remained there with his big, empty worry.
And my mother was like a tree on the shore
between her arms that stretched out toward me .
And in '31 my hands were joyous and small
and in '41 they learned to use a gun
and when I first fell in love
my thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons
and the girl's white hand held them all
by a thin string - then let them flyaway.
And in '51 the motion of my life
was like the motion of many slaves chained to a ship,
Editor's Note: "Autobiography, 1952" is from
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai,
edited and translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, to be published by
Harper and Row.
