THE COLD AND THE HEAT Poem by Israel Pincas

1
It was impossible to hold onto anything.
I didn't even embrace my mother as one should
And didn't part from her as one does before a trip,

When we sat and spoke all night
And said warm things,
Sometimes excited,
That ‘would last for the years to come'.

"There was no time to prepare you,"
She would later write, from her ‘new house', interpreting
The words ‘in the desert'.

Nor did I manage to tell you.

2
And the woman who glowed once
At intermission, in the concert hall,
Le Casque d'Or,
Far from the blast of The Trojans,

Is gone. Amazing how she left no trace
Or evidence,

Aside perhaps from an invisible groove
In a greying cell of the brain,
Like wagon wheels leave
In the mud and slush, in autumn.

"It was impossible to see you".

3
And the heat that once was in me became a liquid that froze:

A dirty block of ice,
Halley's Comet,
An evil omen, they said,

A rare visitor in our skies,
A tourist in the Solar System,
A subject of wonder
Once every few years.

Everything came by surprise, like a sudden gust of air,
A heat wave or a cold wave
And as it passed, was gone.

4
And the years were pressed and dense and swifter than we were,
People entered and left in them
In a hurry,
Uttered something and disappeared.

In the closet objects were left and the clothes
Of some who no longer were with us,
The heart was done with them,
Some saw it as a proof.

It was impossible to understand a thing.
There was no time for anything. It was impossible to hold onto
Anything. But we acted as if we were ‘immortals',
And as if there was time for it all. And for the absence,
Or the good word, or the silence.

5
And by the time it was my turn to testify, I had forgotten most of the details.
The words did not respond to those I remembered.
I wanted to say a few things in honour of those who fell in the war.
Something inside me got confused. The words were locked in my throat.
I was told to stay in my place. Instead of remaining seated I got up.

I thought I would speak about joy,
About injustice, about beauty,
The oppressed and the tear.
There was also something I'd repressed for years and which for some reason suddenly seemed important.
Perhaps I should use indirect speech here,
After all it's not me who is the accused,
And who am I to pronounce myself about the State and its Law.

Others spoke before me. Things were drawn out.
Positive and negative sides were brought up.
Something got tired; wanted to return to a still,
Like a wall that had crumbled, a part of a speech
Or a sentence, an image that was lost, a private form of
Resignation -

In any case the testimony was no longer complete,
The judges were young,
Also the desire to say something, now, was gone.

6
And the child I once was
Remains. Now chewing on a pipe,
Whose mouthpiece is eaten like all those years,
As if acid were poured on all those years.

And the phone call I was waiting for all week
And that made my heart jump -
Turned out to be a ‘wrong number'.

Meanwhile, that too has been forgotten.
And the mail we were waiting for didn't come.
And the image reflected now in the mirror is no longer credible.