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 though this flat border country.
It could be here in the Bácska 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.
Meet Sándor the gypsy. He is a poet
in his own kingdom, under the reeds.
Today he is building his winter house.
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 Gypsies,
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.
Nem jó he shrugs: doesn’t work.
He waves at the flies, complaining
you see how it is here with us
the Cigány? 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. Róka the fox.
The leaves are drifting from the trees.
Soon will come the bleak zima of the puszta.
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.
I will sing 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