Last night lying in bed, you were reading poetry. You are reading books again, you suppose, after a fashion these days. One must do something when time opens up and spills through the gaps, and reading as good as a way to pass time. So yes, you were reading Amichai, whose poetry is quite like a branding iron, for once you press your tongue against certain metaphors in his lines, you carry them with you like can intimate icon. Or as Amichai wrote in one of his poems:

"On Rabbi Kook's street I walk --your bed on my back like a cross-- though it's hard to believe a woman's bed will become the symbol of a new religion."

So that later, much later when the weather has changed, say from sunny to cloudy, one of these brands will resurface, and glisten on the tongue like a piece of live coal. Another strange thing is that some of these poems, which are really sad, which are almost laments, come packaged in a book called "Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems". Go figure that out. Is it becuase love, which is also dissolution of the ego, is a painful alchemical process when it happens, and even more painful when it doesn't?

Then this mind game, of trying to remember the details. What was the color of her t-shirt the day you met? What about the first thought in your head? "Good god!" or "god, thy goodness overfloweth"? So little is remembered, which is good because too much weight might kill you in your dreams. But still you must try to remember some details:

"Try to remember some details. For they have no face and their soul is hidden and their crying is the same as their laughter, and their silence and their shouting rise to one height and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees and they have no life outside this narrow space and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing and paper cups that are used once only."

...

Then you remember a voice, a woman's voice, rough and smooth at the same time, like the hollow of a stone pestle. A voice to grind down the days of youth into dust, which can then be sprinkled on wings of song, as well over sea surf. But you don't remember the voice, you only remember these sensations under your hair and you eyes that can somehow still evoke that perhaps are similar to that time when you were sung a song. You know, in spite of your cynicism, that doesn't happen everyday. But perhaps it is necessary that it not happen everyday for otherwise will the eyes widen or the hair stand on its end? And you read:

"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."

...

Later when you are done with eating morsels, bit sized pieces of poems, you lay on your back, and try to blank your mind, your eyes are already blank with the heavy secrets of nights. Nothing happens. There is no difference if there is a roof over you head. You still see stars aligning themselves into impossible angles, meteors going back into cosmic dust, which is also light, which is also a wave, which is also thought. So you wake up, and play this song because the woman's voice has a tenderness similar to that you knew by a sea. And then you disappear.

"In vain you will look for the fences of barbed wire. You know that such things don't disappear. A different city perhaps is now being cut in two; two lovers separated; a different flesh is tormenting itself now with these thorns, refusing to be stone."