I Walked Past A House Where I Lived Once - Yehuda Amichai

I WALKED PAST A HOUSE WHERE I LIVED ONCE



I walked past a house where I lived once:
a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there.
Many years have passed with the quiet hum
of the staircase bulb going on
and off and on again.

The keyholes are like little wounds
where all the blood seeped out. And inside,
people pale as death.

I want to stand once again as I did
holding my first love all night long in the doorway.
When we left at dawn, the house
began to fall apart and since then the city and since then
the whole world.

I want to be filled with longing again
till dark burn marks show on my skin.

I want to be written again
in the Book of Life, to be written every single day
till the writing hand hurts.

---Yehuda Amichai




I could mention the hippocampus and other parts of the limbic system. I could drone on about the importance of the cerebral cortex. Heck, I could even diagram how a memory is formed and retained within your brain. It would be nice to understand why we fixate on certain memories, while others rush away like rain water toward a sewer. Even a cursory understanding of the biology and psychology behind memory won't better help us understand Yehuda Amichai's poem "I Walked Past A House Where I Lived Once." No, this poem is most accessible to those of us who have lived, lost, and live with the memories of what we once had. The loss could be as simple as a favorite pair of shoes that were completely worn down and needed to be tossed out. The loss could be as grand as a person, a loved one you couldn't imagine life without. In the case of this poem, Amichai's loss is a composite of many things he no longer has, but it all starts with his house.

"I walked past a house where I lived once: / a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there." Am I the only one who thinks that is a haunting start for a poem? And the mystery is not wasted on me; in the poet's former residence the figures could be memories of him and his lover, or possibly his parents, or maybe they are two random strangers living in this intimate space that was once his. I often wonder about the houses I grew up in as a child. How did the families that came after mine see the house? Did they treat it the same way we did? Decorate it differently? Clean it regularly? Some of the questions I ask are foolish, probably because when viewed together they appear to refer to the house as if it is alive. Leaving a house behind for a new location, there is the undeniable feeling that your family is lessened and that something or someone is missing, a void that is only slightly filled by the new house. Amichai offers a clever metaphor of "staircase bulb going on / and off and on again" to demonstrate the emotional tension that comes with moving. The pain is reflected in the physical edifices of the house itself: "The keyholes are like little wounds / where all the blood seeped out." Certainly there is a loss in leaving a place and sometimes an even greater emotional strain in having to start over somewhere new.

While losing a house can be traumatic, there seems to be no greater trauma than losing a person from your life. When a friend, family member, or lover disappears from your life the pain is long-lasting and while its intensity might decrease over time it will never completely be washed from your consciousness. The sight of his old house has led Amichai back to memories of his earliest love: "I want to stand once again as I did / holding my first love all night long in the doorway." Amichai wants to return to a simpler, purer time in his life. He wants to recapture the hopefulness and optimism his younger, more naive self once had. I can't blame him one bit because I know I have felt the same way. When you realize you're mortal and moving past moments in your life that were colored with seminal greatness you want to hit the rewind button and experience them all over again. This desire has to be tied somewhat to the fear that life is passing you by and that you might not have many moments left like the instances of early love Amichai wrote about in this poem. In Amichai's case, once the moment ends that era of his life slams to a close in a dramatic fashion: "When we left at dawn, the house / began to fall apart and since then the city and since then / the whole world." He has tied his well-being in the present to a single night of youthful reverie, asserting that in leaving the house that one night everything in his life, including the house, began to rot before his eyes.

As the poem moves toward its conclusion I find it interesting that Amichai starts his final three stanzas with the phrase "I want." This recurring beginning acts as a familiar, prayer-like chant as Amichai details his physical and emotional desires. The "I want" constructs could be read as forceful demands and a valid case could be made for this, but I would argue that they are battered, desperate pleas. "I want to be filled with longing again / till dark burn marks show on my skin" are the words of a man who already has been burned and bruised, and if he's going to feel that way then he wants the payoff that comes with it. "I want to be written again / in the Book of Life, to be written every single day / till the writing hand hurts" are lines that acknowledge the imperfections of love and memory, and yet Amichai wants those bittersweet moments of life to return to him. Momentum clearly builds as the poem reaches its end and the momentum seems to point to one thing: Yehuda Amichai has had enough of his past memories, he wants to return to making them in the present.