Yehuda Amichai: The Bull Comes Home

The bull comes home from his workday in the ring
After drinking coffee with his fighters
And leaving them a note with his exact address
And the place of the red handkerchief.
(The sword stays stuck in his stiff-necked neck.
    And it stays.)
And that he's at home now
And sitting on his bed, with his heavy
Jewish eyes. He knows 
It hurts the sword too, when it plunges into flesh.
In the next reincarnation he'll be a sword:
The hurt will stay.
('The door
Is open. If not, the key is under the mat.')
He knows the mercy of evening
And true mercy. In the Bible
He is listed with the clean animals.
He is very kosher, chews his cud
And even his heart's divided and cleft
Like a hoof.
Out through his breast break hairs
Dry and grey as from a split mattress.


Tr. Harold Schimmel, with the collaboration of Ted Hughes. More a human poem than an animal poem, I guess: quite likely a poem about Amichai himself. From a recent review by James Wood of his selected poems: “When we encounter a natural style, Pascal says, we are surprised and delighted, because we expected to find an author and instead found a man. Yehuda Amichai, who died in 2000, at the age of seventy-six, and is still Israel’s most celebrated poet, possesses that natural style: a human being speaks, in frequencies audible to all, and the discovery is a spreading delight, a shelter and a steady accompaniment to our own lives… Or maybe we should be more brutal about the whole matter? Some writers are likable, and quite a few are not. Amichai is intensely likable.”