Sunday, August 18, 2013

August 15, 2013

Only when you leave – you love! In two weeks and three days my friend and I will move into our new home – a townhouse thirty some minutes north of the city. So seemingly fictional - so actually real!
        
Meanwhile, the summer seems to already hint its end. Its warm air makes room for a cooler caressing morning breeze, endlessly pleasant and evoking solemn sadness due to the summer which had past like sand between our fingers, and old memories of romantic loneliness which wrap the soul like the inner layers of a tree trunk. This morning I already had to wear a sweatshirt!

My present apartment downtown is slowly starting to become empty of belongings. Every few days, my friend and I are moving another load. Before we started, I videotaped the apartment, so that I can remember how it was when I lived in it. How astonishing is the amount of details which surrounds our lives: the pattern of the fabric which covers the pillows of the sofa in the living room, the texture of the old wooden floor in its midst, to the feet of the old Brambach piano which was in the apartment already before I moved in. Wherever the eye looks, it meets an incomprehensible wealth of details, impossible to grasp and hold – each one of them is like a fraction of time within the endless continuum of time, one grain of sand out of the sand on the beach along the seashore, yet within it alone complete happiness lies; one moment which you could write a whole book about, opening to eternities - a moment in which eternity is concealed!

This is also how I felt a couple days ago when I went out for a walk in order to enjoy the singularly wonderful evening air. Seemingly, a simpleminded walk, but in reality an entire opera filled with dramas and eventful moments: all the people I have passed by, all the thoughts which have crossed my mind, all my physical sensations…

And last night, already at seven-thirty in the evening I lay down in bed, to look at the leaves in the window fluttering in the first wind of autumn, and at the light bluing before sunrise the wall adjacent to my bed, with blueness which seems to belong to another world – the world of dreams. I thought I would lie like that for an hour, but only this morning I found it in myself to get up and write.

(From “One-Time”, Volume II, by Eyran Katsenelenbogen; translated from Hebrew)

Saturday, August 3, 2013

August 3, 2013

            Quarter past four in the morning
            And the world has come to a rest
            Outside, there’s a wondrous silence
            And it is balanced with
            The peace within the chambers of the soul
            Only a lonely bird
            Is trying with its chirping to disturb it from afar

            The rain which came down earlier has ceased
            And cool air, unbearably pleasant
            Enters into the room through the slightly opened windows
            Caresses my soul
            I feel fatigue
            Relaxed and relaxing
            Under the sky-blue quilt
            The soles of my feet caress each other

            Now
            One can feel closer
            To the eternal-moment
            Listen to its murmur
            Sense its presence
            Time has reposed from its race
            Like a tired horse
            It walks in the paths of the forest
            While around it the trees are breathing
            Under their wet leaves
            And its hoofs are touching above
            Their thick roots
            Which intertwine exposed

                                                June 12, 2013
                                                                                               
(From “One-Time” by Eyran Katsenelenbogen; translated from Hebrew)