Hungarian Quartet

 

 

The night anywhere

is just a car choking into life and idling

as he nurses it to warmth, the window ice

melting as he buckles in, the flare

his lighter makes in the inner dark

and she chiding his late drinking,

hoping he will drive slowly on the black roads,

and he will let her sleep tonight.

 

There is a man’s far away shout, a woman’s cry.

it could be anywhere: the cold night stars

burning overhead, the silence of the snow,

a horizon of dogs recalling how they ran in packs

long ago through this flat border country.

It could be here in the Bacska running south

with the great river down to lost Vojvodina.

 

It’s late, after palinka and fisherman’s soup.

Then for hours the thump of the bowling balls

the local skinheads and the Serbs downstairs

roll half the night between long telephone calls

to somewhere far away. It could be now.

It could be anywhere in this northern winter

before sleep. It could be anyone’s song.

 

Sandor the poet

Meet Sandor the gipsy. He is a poet

in his own kingdom, under the reeds.

Today he is building his winter house.

This is his pig. Thankyou he says.

 

Thankyou for coming to see me.

Would you like to marry my daughter?

You are a rich man from the West. Be kind to her.

Buy her chocolate and pink champagne.

 

Someone is shoving a wire through a pig’s nose.

Someone is revving a motorbike

up and down the dusty alley. When the screaming stops

you hear water pouring from the pump,

 

you hear the wind over the waste and the reeds

where his people live by the old Russian barracks

at Kiskunmajsa. They could move in there

but the government, the government.

 

The bitter eyes of the gipsies,

empty pockets, empty glasses. Soon

it may be time to go to jail again.

Soon again winter, when some will die

 

in this village without a name.

A special tribe, he says, their leathery

wee women are blue eyed yellow haired

daughters of the Red Army, 1944.

 

Namyo he shrugs: doesn’t work.

He waves at the flies, complaining

you see how it is here with us

the Cigany? Look at the flies on the bread.

 

And picks up his instrument and plays

a lament for the ancient distance,

at night a sky burning with stars,

every one of them Hungarian.

 

Alma the apple. Roka the fox.

The leaves are drifting from the trees.

Soon will come the bleak zima of the pusta.

Thankyou for coming to see me.

 

Mishi’s song

I will sing one song

from Novi Sad. But this

this is not a song.

 

The words: difficult, different.

I can’t remember: la la la.

Oh my love.

 

My beloved landscape and the landscape of my beloved.

I was born to it.

I should die there.

 

Each night the phone rang.

Sometimes silence, breathing. Or a man

cursing in Serbian:

 

why don’t you go?

You have a wife, children,

we can kill them.

 

You we will impale.

Land I was born to.

This is not a song.

 

Dmitri’s song

I will song now the lost song

in the lost voice from the lost time

 

if I can find it

if I can find where I left it

 

the old song from the old time

of an old man who is young again

 

ah but always

 

something is wrong in exile

and the heart is bloody always