This is the music of no music.
You have to listen hard if you’re listening at all
to hear it out on the wind through the aspens,
faint as far off bells, as birds
on the edges of hearing, dogs in another country,
wolves working their way across the horizon.
It begins among the smashed stones
of some old Jewish graveyard glimpsed
in passing on the long roads somewhere,
some star in the window of a place
selling auto parts, a faint air
round the bare brickwork of a dead synagogue
in some town whose name you no longer remember,
where is no schul any more, no Sabbath,
no dark sidelocked men arriving on carts
with their shawled women, their solemn
children in long coats perched
like chickens, where is no kaddish said
for the millions who never came back,
where isn’t ten together who can say it.
The music of where music has been:
only the tall windblown grasses
in the abandoned yard that will fall
to someone’s else’s scythe
to the descant of bird song
before the summer’s over –
(for Erzsébet, Kisszelmenc, Ukraine)
This is your permission.
Your licence. Keep it safe somewhere,
these words will get you through.
You will need them to pick herbs
by the border wire, and a handful of flowers
to put on your mother’s grave
in the village where you were born
in the other country whose steeple
you can see from your yard’s end.
To get there you will need this paper,
and again when you come back to say
you have been there. You will need
these words to say you have read them.
This is your permission to be someone,
anyone, a person called Kovács
who says it’s all right to love someone,
to excess even, to go crazy,
to piss in the street, go to jail,
to one day die and briefly be remembered
best for the side of you that stood in light
at the gate of your house in spring
just before the sun went down, considering
the acacia blossoms and the onions
and your own diminishing options.
This is your permit, your passport
to the other side of anywhere.
Signed, sealed, delivered,
dated this day vaguely in May.
Of course, the signature’s illegible
and on the wrong side of the paper.
And the rubber stamp cut from a bar of soap
was stolen long ago. And in any case
as to delivery there are no stamps,
the post office became a nightclub,
and the postman if he’s been paid
since January, and if you still
have a letter box, he might just deliver it.
Maybe.
(for Zelei Bori)
They are listening in the wires,
in the walls, under the eaves
in the wings of the house martins,
in the ears of old women,
in the mouths of children.
They are listening to this now.
So let’s hear it for the secret police,
a much misunderstood minority.
After all, they have their rights,
their own particular ways of seeing things,
saying things, cooking things,
they too have a culture uniquely their own.
And we think
they should have their own state
where they could speak their own
incomprehensible tongues, write
their confessions, their unknown histories,
cultivate their habits of watching
by watching each other, and fly
their own flags there, at attention
on parade in their medals at their monuments
on their secret anniversaries, making speeches,
singing praises to the God of Paranoia.
And at the end of the day
bury their dead, publish their coded obituaries
of each other, and rest at last
There is a bird in here, an oriole perhaps,
a nightingale trying to get out still singing
across the border between sleep and waking,
bringing the dream along. Sometimes
a solemn joyful music from the church
in some village of black widows clutching
prayer books, the black crows of sorrow.
Then a high chant from the music school
in was it Munkács?, and round the back
the strings tuning up, and once
in the muddy street of the Gypsies
the boy’s high soprano above accordion
and badly tuned fiddle.
Wind
around the small sandblown hills, the reeds.
In the vaults hacked deep in the rock
the cold wine sleeps, that will become
a sharp memory on the tongue, the cold
tug of the air on the body. Elsewhere,
István the First sweeps bees from a honeycomb
with a long grey bird’s wing, the bees drink
at the watertub and fill the air with sound,
honey spills into jars, one the beekeeper
gave me to sweeten my mornings, its gold light
shining here now on my windowsill.
The lives we live, always taking us
over some border, we spend our years
trying to get there, in the tracks
of the old migrations through the passes,
west and out from the land between the rivers
Everywhere old borders, countries slithering
on the maps, on their rafts of magma
never still for long. Everywhere memorials,
the dead of wars and Stalin’s Terror
in these parts, the starry graves
of the drunk heroes of the Soviet Union,
and others unknown. Along
the roadsides crosses for those
who hit the brakes too soon, swerved,
hit a bus, burst into fire, went over
into the brown flood of the Tisza,
a bunch of fading plastic flowers.
We took the river road into the mountains
through the towns of closed factories,
where even the salt mines were shut,
a stork preening her ragged nest
on the tall brick factory chimney,
up through the high villages of the shepherds.
Fleeting: the fast river full of rain,
plank bridges hung over the flood,
wires and watchtowers over in Romania,
halfway up a steep impossible hill
a man in a blue shirt climbing to the sky,
the villages shifting into other tongues.
To the Tatar Pass of savage raiders
with no place to go back to. To the
Verecke Pass, where the seven tribes
of the people of the ten arrows came,
long ago though in any case the date
is debatable, the stone monument
lost in all the paperwork in far Kiev,
in any case unfinished. Up here the air’s
foreign and thin, the first flash of lightning
among the peaks, the misty distance.
What of the 18,000 driven through here
in August 1941 to be shot on the other side
dead at Szolyva of cold and hunger,
typhus and TB and dysentery for being Hungarian?
For half a century no one could speak of them,
put chisel to stone. Here it says
on the boulder over the mass graves
Here one day will be a monument.
The materials in any case have been stolen.
I hear one man reading from the stone,
another say here should be a monument
to the unknown thief. Then wind again,
the mountain river rushing to its meeting
with the ocean, half a continent away.
Villages in the high valleys, a tall
long legged people, come early summer
they walk off into the distance,
grazing their sheep among the clouds,
making cheese in their high solitary huts
over the old tracks of the transhumance.
This must be one of their jokes,
this busted flush of a country
with its government of shadows
in leather jackets and shades.
This is another:
from peak to peak
across rocks and fast water, birdsong
and bleating and the far glitter of bells,
one Hucul is asking another for news.
Haven’t you heard? comes the voice
carried on the distance the sound travels:
The Russians have gone to the moon.
No, just one of them.
So what’s to shout about?
I would have sent you a postcard, love:
view of the castle on the river
that is all the names of this place:
Ungvár/Uzhgorod. Dusty streets
hosed by rain, scrawny horses,
the market, old town, old doorways.
Faces of shepherds or a long shot
of the mountains, Gypsy women
in red flowered dresses, the footbridge
over the river. A few snapshots
of desolation: an old woman selling
two toothbrushes, a lightswitch
and a heap of shrivelled radishes,
empty plinths where Lenin stood,
the biggest wolves in the world,
the old synagogue across the river.
But there are no postcards.
No stamps, no post office,
and in any case it would never reach you
bearing its message Oh I love you
from the collapsing country
across the shifting borders.
It would have said Furthest point
Europe from three seas/the pole
of continentality/670 Km. equidistant
Adriatic Baltic Black Sea./Oh
lovely River Uz/thou givst me such a buzz/
Oh gorgeous River Ung/thy praises we have sung
in good Slovak beer.
And who
siftings of the stars I’d be here,
an old man with his tobacco?
Surely we are all heaven’s dust. All’s well.
No, I am carrying no contraband,
no firearms, Kalashnikovs, missile launchers,
no drugs, no coils of copper wire from Minsk,
no nuclear materials, no body parts,
no bodies, no bullion, no known diseases.
Yes, I would like to leave your country now
and put its broken roads and rusty monuments
behind me, and Yes I’d like to leave
in less than the 36 hours it may take
for this performance on the border at Uzhgorod.
Act One: The first gate. The actors
are police and tough leather men
who shake each others’ hands, swap
cigarettes, their parts and uniforms
interchangeable, short of speech
and not much eye contact, men of few words
and blank faces and all they say is No. Wait.
What’s happening is difficult to tell,
some drive up and drive away,
some wait hours, some straight through.
This for the first hour when suddenly
it’s action time, we’re in the cage
and in the second act called Wait & See
at the soldiers’ gate where we wait,
wait, where nothing happens much, money
changes into money, a blue beer truck
passes for the second time and back,
guards mooching down the border strip
through vines, the watchtower watching,
Hours more until it’s hurry up and wait again
down the long hill of traffic, uniforms,
exhaust gas, another hour to the last act
and the exit and the exit stamp.
Yes, this is my own face, the one I usually wear
to these occasions, Yes this my bag,
Yes this my emergency tin of sardines.
And then we go. Not recommended.
A seven-hour performance all about itself,
and we say we’re lucky. There’s no applause.
(for János, Nagyszelmenc, Slovakia)
‘Over there in the other country
my sister had daughters I’ve seen once
in forty years, nor visited my dead.
It’s too late now, they’re poor there,
and here I’m just an old working man,
and the only thing left for me to do is die.
‘These are my blunt carpenter’s hands,
and this on their backs the frost
that gnawed them at Szolyva, three winters,
two years I was a prisoner there.
Monday I build doors, Tuesday put on roofs.
Roofs. Doors. My life. Vodka.
It was the priest told me to go,
three days he said, a little light work,
malenki robot, two years building roofs,
and that because I had a trade.
I survived wearing the clothes of those who died,
after a while I survived because I had survived,
The wire runs through the heart, dammit,
therefore we will drink cheap Russian vodka
in János’ kitchen, and later take a walk
down to the border and look back
into the other world, the village in the mirror
that is the other half of us, here,
where the street stops at the wire
and goes on again on the other side,
and maybe the Gypsies will come to serenade us.