from The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets

Come back, my own son, come back

     for I am no longer as I was,

     I am a used-up shadow from the inner visions

     that flare through the thickening organs

     like an old cock’s crowing, on winter dawns,

from a fence of shirts hanging board-frozen.

I am calling, your own mother,

come back, my own son, come back,

force new order onto the anarchic things,

discipline the savage objects, tame the knife and domesticate the comb,

because now I am only two gritty green eyes

glassy and weightless, like the dragonfly,

whose winged nape and mouth, that you know so well, so delicately clasp

two crystal apples in the green-illumined skull,

I am two staring eyes without a face,

seeing all, and one with the unearthly beings.

Come back, my own son, come back into place,

     with your fresh breath bring everything again to

     order.

     In the remote forest the boy heard.

     He jerked up his head in an instant,

     his spread nostrils testing the air,

     his soft dewlap throbbing, the veined ears pointing

     tautly to that lamenting music

     as to the still tread of the hunter,

     as to hot wisps fronding from the cradle

     of a forest fire, when the skyline trees

     smoke and begin to whimper bluely.

     He turned his head to the old voice,

     and now an agony fastens on him,

     and he sees the shag hair over his buttocks,

     and he sees, on his bony legs,

     the cleft hooves that deal his track,

     sees, where lilies look up in pools,

     low-slung hair-pursed buck-balls.

     He forces his way towards the lake,

     crashing the brittle willow thickets,

     haunches plastered with foam that spatters

     to the earth at his every bound,

     his four black hooves rip him a path

     through a slaughter of wild flowers,

     sock a lizard into the mud,

     throat ballooned and tail sheared,

     till he reaches the lake at last,

     and looks in at its lit window

     that holds the moon, moving beech-boughs,

     and a stag staring at him.

     For the first time he sees the bristling pelt

     covering all his lean body,

     hair over knees and thighs, the transverse

     tasselled lips of his male purse,

     his long skull treed with antlers,

     bone boughs bursting to bone leaves,

     his face closely furred to the chin,

     his nostrils slit and slanted in.

     The great antlers knock against trees,

     roped veins lump on his neck,

     he strains fiercely, stamping he tries

     to put out an answering cry, but in vain,

     it is only a stag’s voice belling

     in the throat of this mother’s son,

     and he scatters a son’s tears, trampling the shallows

     to drive out that lake-horror, scare it

     down into the whirlpool gullet

     of the water-dark, where glittering

     little fishes flicker their laces,

     miniature bubble-eyed jewellery.

     The ripples smooth off into the gloom,

     but still a stag stands in the foam of the moon.

after the Hungarian by FERENC JUHÁSZ