After you left me / I let a dog smell at / My chest and my belly. It will fill its nose / And set out to find you. / I hope it will tear the / Testicles of your lover and bite off his penis / Or at least / Will bring me your stockings between his teeth.

On a little hill amid fertile fields lies a small cemetery, / a Jewish cemetery behind a rusty gate, hidden by shrubs, / abandoned and forgotten. Neither the sound of prayer / nor the voice of lamentation is heard there / for the dead praise not the Lord. / Only the voices of our children ring out, seeking graves and cheering / each time they find one, like mushrooms in the forest, like wild strawberries. / Here's another grave! There's the name of my mother's / mothers, and a name from the last century. And here's a name, / and there! And as I was about to brush the moss from the name, / Look! an open hand engraved on the tombstone, the grave of a kohen, / his fingers splayed in a spasm of holiness and blessing, / and here's a grave concealed by a thicket of berries / that has to be brushed aside like a shock of hair / from the face of a beautiful beloved woman.

A man doesn't have time in his life / to have time for everything. / He doesn't have seasons enough to have / a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes / Was wrong about that. / A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love. / And to hate and forgive and remember and forget, / to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest / what history / takes years and years to do. / A man doesn't have time. / When he loses he seeks, when he finds / he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves / he begins to forget. / And his soul is seasoned, his soul / is very professional. / Only his body remains forever / an amateur. It tries and it misses, / gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing, / drunk and blind in its pleasures / and its pains. / He will die as figs die in autumn, / Shriveled and full of himself and sweet, / the leaves growing dry on the ground, / the bare branches pointing to the place / where there's time for everything.

A man doesn't have time in his life / to have time for everything. / He doesn't have seasons enough to have / a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes / Was wrong about that. / A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love. / And to hate and forgive and remember and forget, / to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest what history / takes years and years to do. / A man doesn't have time. / When he loses he seeks, when he finds / he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves he begins to forget.

They amputated / Your thighs off my hips. / As far as I'm concerned / They are all surgeons.    All of them. / They dismantled us / Each from the other. / As far as I'm concerned / They are all engineers.    All of them. / A pity.    We were such a good / And loving invention. / An aeroplane made from a man and wife. / Wings and everything. / We hovered a little above the earth. / We even flew a little.

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.)

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion / And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy. / An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father / Both in their temporary failure. / Our two voices met above / The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us. / Neither of us wants the boy or the goat / To get caught in the wheels / Of the "Had Gadya" machine. / Afterward we found them among the bushes, / And our voices came back inside us / Laughing and crying. / Searching for a goat or for a child has always been / The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.

And we shall not get excited. Because a translator / May not get excited. Calmly, we shall pass on / Words from man to son, from one tongue / To others' lips, un- / Knowingly, like a father who passes on / The features of his dead father's face / To his son, and he himself is like neither of them. Merely a mediator. / We shall remember the things we held in our hands / That slipped out. / What I have in my possession and what I do not have in my possession. / We must not get excited. / Calls and their callers drowned. Or, my beloved / Gave me a few words before she left, / To bring up for her. / And no more shall we tell what we were told / To other tellers. Silence as admission. We must not / Get excited.

Do not accept these rains that come too late. / Better to linger. Make your pain / An image of the desert. Say it's said / And do not look to the west. Refuse / To surrender. Try this year too / To live alone in the long summer, / Eat your drying bread, refrain / From tears. And do not learn from / Experience. Take as an example my youth, / My return late at night, what has been written / In the rain of yesteryear. It makes no difference / Now. See your events as my events. / Everything will be as before: Abraham will again / Be Abram. Sarah will be Sarai. / trans. Benjamin & Barbara Harshav

A night drive to Ein Yahav in the Arava Desert, / a drive in the rain. Yes, in the rain. / There I met people who grow date palms, / there I saw tamarisk trees and risk trees, / there I saw hope barbed as barbed wire. / And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be / like barbed wire to keep out despair, / hope must be a mine field.