Journey without maps

 

 

Night train

The moon’s wide open mouth, its

thin light over fields and woods

that could be anywhere, distant names

of cities chanted on the speakers –

their two notes born free, born free.

 

Outside the same night: lit windows

flying backwards through the dark,

the streetlamps of little towns

lighting empty roads no one

is walking home, late, tipsy.

 

And in a flash of sudden neon

a tall crane in a field of wrecked cars.

It is the night of old shoes, their mouths

slackly open: where now brother,

how long ago was yesterday,

how many days until tomorrow?

 

September distance

A blur of birches. Borders

that are more than what you feel there,

wind rushing the reeds, long wing

of wild geese flying south, sunflowers,

poppyheads and milkweed, forest,

mile after mile the tall fields of maize,

the long plains measuring the distance,

west to east autumn yellowing the leaves.

 

It is a place called Russian Horse,

a place called Shoemaker in Iron County,

a city of bells and crippled gipsies.

the Gold Boys in an out the bars.

The streetsweeper sifts his broom

for flakes of fallen gold.

The dancing whore in Goat Town calls

oh tonight I want a man between my legs.

 

What Feri said

In the far distant relation

between Finnish and Hungarian

 

one sentence is the same

and only one and though

 

we don’t know what it is

we know it is about fish,

 

a live fish swims underwater.

And in Vogul a sentence

 

The same as ours it says

Twenty women’s horses go on ahead.

 

Glimpse

Of a man tapping his finger

on a map: here, I live here,

not much of a place, a crossroads

with a light that doesn’t work

a store that doesn’t sell much

and a closed petrol station,

nowhere in particular but we think

it’s the centre of the universe:

Podunkstadt that was before the wars,

thereafter called Amnesza.

 

After the changes the beer is better

but still undrinkable. Things are not good

but they are not unhopeful Here

we have the best of everything

but you can’t have any of it.

 

Closed border, Slovenia

Over there the flag of one country

blowing in the wind of another

beyond the closed checkpoint:

fields, river, birchscrub, the same.

 

This is the border where the road runs out

into a tractor trail of snowy mud

to the last house by the wire,

and all the dogs are barking.

 

Nothing between me and the wind,

tall reeds and border fences,

here to say I’ve been here,

take a snapshot and turn home,

 

a traveller with his keepsakes-

a man’s bone from an old battlefield,

a bent bullet from Mostar,

weary with the weight of myself.

 

TV in the East

On SKY and SAT late night images

passing for desire and its flesh,

the play of light wherein they kiss

and soft things flutter to the floor,

a mouth begins its snail of a descent

to the promise of a breast and cut

to the commercial: all the lives

we may not want and cannot have.

 

And on the Russian channel mirror script:

mountains, a place far to the east

of open sky and early snow, a swift

upland river and slow drummers,

chants, horses and horsemen, women

in a long line through windy smoke,

led by an old man wearing skins,

on his head the antlers of a deer.

 

Waking in Heroes’ Park

Too many days counting coup on the borders:

countries sucking on their stones,

some gone rusty in the rain,

another sulking on its wounds.

 

Markets and stations, crossings

where the police jump on the vagrants

and the fugitives, everyone’s a suspect,

everyone an item in their career moves.

 

In Heroes’ Park I wake to white noise

and the world sailing its ocean of dirty air,

across a bridge men carrying planks,

copper pipe and scaffolding, tea kettles,

 

sheets of clear glass. And through

the autumn trees a line of bright

schoolchildren, babbling like a river,

where I wake, dreaming of chickens.