I make lists of things: soap, soup, batteries, film.
And piles of things: socks, maps, passport, compass,
a white stone with a hole in it for luck.
You’re not on any of my lists
nor in any of the mounds I make
of the makings of another journey.
The ordinary things come with me anyway –
stray hairs of the cat stuck to my pants
that will become far away memory of cat
demanding supper: tuna. Now.
Some music for the road, some photographs,
and always some of your dust, love.
A stray button that is something of you,
blue as your eyes are,
blue as the sky on a good day in spring is.
This is a dream.
This is not a dream.
The guards are by occupation suspicious.
An oriole is calling in the border strip.
Hills a blue glaze in the rain.
Wild flowers in the upland pastures,
buffalo wallowing in mud.
Wheat that will be bread, poppyseeds
and sunflower that will be husks in the teeth,
In the noon glare peasants huddle under trees:
rakes, hoes, scythes, as in Brueghel,
a landscape with Dürer through it.
And by the roadsides so many crucifixions,
blue Jesus hammered into tin, arms spread,
weeping for this grim potholed world.
Thunder through the mountains.
The road snaking up into pine forest.
White horse running through black smoke.
A dream, not a dream. Here and not here.
Perhaps this is a fugue, a fog, a fug,
the confusions of another journey
where the languages beat at the brain,
the maps suddenly another tongue.
It begins in a litany of the many names
of the seven Saxon towns of the Siebenbürgen
that is Erdéli, Ardel, Transylvania, each
a mouthful of argumentative syllables, guttural,
agglutinative, gobstopper names in languages
with knives in their teeth, it depends
who you ask, it depends where you’re coming from,
in what irreconcilable tongue
through the passes and the river valleys,
to the lands beyond the forest
forever in dispute and everywhere
as anywhere the neighbours do not like each other.
Each town a scrabble of names: Kolozsvár
that was Klausenberg that is Cluj Napoca,
Kronstadt that is Brașov and Brassó,
Hermannstadt Sibiu to the Romanians
and what the Szeklers call Székelyudvarhely
is their Odorheiu Secuiesc, Roman Apulum
their Alba Iulia a.k.a.Karlsburg and Gyulafehérvár,
Tirgu Mureș Marosvásárhely, Sighișoara
that was Schässburg that was Castrum Sex,
Fort Six, Hungarian Segesvár,
In the night cities walking
in the streetlights suddenly
I am a man of two shadows,
one before, the other after,
one hurrying east, the other west,
falling away.
In the hotel of heavy chairs
vodka solo listening to the rain
falling into the town, the traffic
hissing on the streets.
I drink to one shadow.
I drink to the other.
In the lobby a million banknotes
switch hand to hand, window
to window, drawer to drawer.
Always the paperwork.
I drink to one shadow.
I drink to the other.
The TV a hiss of snowy static,
signals from the wrong side of the mountains,
the screen a grey plaza of rainy shadows
shouting in their distant tongues.
Vague shapes running, the soundtrack
a crackle or is it gunfire?
Outside the heavy Transylvanian rain
falling all night into the leaves,
and long after the bars shut the two languages
shout each other down around the square –
proclamations, denunciations,
declarations of ill intent, old wounds
that go on being wounds, chants
Absent from the events of my life,
somewhere I recall little of later
home again in my right self again.
Once again the wrong story
wrong place wrong time.
In my pocket a round white stone.
Think of one who arrives in the square
in Brașov with no history no past
no plan no story at all.
It is the war of the languages
where the neighbours don’t agree about history,
too much bloody water, too much misery,
the Vlachs become the Rumanians
kin with Trajan’s soldiery
settled on the Dacian frontier
where begins the East, serfs
tolerated by grace, banished
from the proud fortified towns, forbidden
chimneys, windows, public office,
embroidery, furs, shoes, boots.
Therefore the wars of the flags that repeat on the wind
Romania Hungaria Romania Hungaria.
Therefore the wars of the tulips along the old ramparts.
Therefore the wars of the chestnuts and the walnuts
each claiming each was here first
and this old frontier their homeland,
the birthplace of the Rumanian
Matthias Corvinus, the greatest Hungarian king.
It depends who you heard it from.
It depends on the question you ask.
It depends how you ask it.
The wars of the statues and the wars
of my dog and of your dog
and each other. Same old.
Same old lebensraum scenario.
A living and somewhere to live it.
Same old poker game in a back room.
Chants of the victors in the game of losers.
Whisper of banknotes,
the bad breath of money,
pages in the book of guile.
How limited the sounds of the world:
how limitless, the oriole still singing in my ear
as the radio cuts in.
In the muddy village of Salt
Mari néni is singing for the lost world
her laments for those who are leaving,
left long ago over the oceans
to Mexico, Australia, Argentina,
their news growing fainter till they vanish.
In her songs the colours of the Székely women
deepen as they age into blood red
into mauve into purple into the black
she wears, she has a tape hereabouts
of when she was famous, she has
no machine she can play it on.
She is singing for those still going away
beyond the border, construction
in Budapest and Balaton and beyond.
And in the 7 Csángó villages
set at the mouths of the passes
where they watched for the barbarians –
Pechenegs, Bulgars, Kazars, Huns,
Tatars and Mongols and Turks
arriving in waves of savage unstoppable water –
they recall watchtowers, alarms
they rang, their name Csángó
from the chang of a bell, or it means
to go off alone. Solo. They say.
Abandoned villages of the Saxons
gone to Deutschland
falling to crows and Gypsies
and entropy and gravity
and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In the Bolyai house a beaker
of the ashes of a poem said to be a love poem.
At Petöfi’s monument a boy singing
Flowers in the Spring. The ruins of ruins.
By order of the Minister of Ruins
all the monuments are to be rearranged,
all the junk that tells us who we are
because we were who we were, whoever.
Ceaușescu becomes Chaplin. Some
will be raised a metre, some lowered, names
added or erased, some switched the other way,
shifted to another part of town,
removed indefinitely for renovation
or posing in the statue park of yesterday’s heroes,
splattered, greening over, their obituaries
After the revolution the proof
is in the documents, somewhere hereabouts,
mislaid, lost, burned round the back
of the police station, or the translation
not yet checked, not yet authorised. We have a video
that when we find it is another white
blizzard on the screen, static on the soundtrack.
A revolution. Not a revolution.
The one hand and then the other.
It depends who you ask. The red
has faded from the star, the sickle
come away from the hammer
and the carnival is over.
Not much changed says the professor,
who watches the watchers in next door’s
Securitatae yard, only the names,
the faces have not changed.
Csaba says now is better. If now I cannot
sell a beer, back then I could not find a beer.
On the one hand and on the other
says the man of two shadows.
On the one hand on the other.
In the great square in Brașov
the miraculous reappearance
of the children of the Pied Piper
a likely tale.
And anyway you’re out of film
when the procession goes by
and the action starts, the tape run out
the batteries flat, the moment passes
into the history of all moments,
and anyway all the long way up the long hill
you forgot it’s Monday and the place is closed,
Far away now, far away then,
here and not here, messages
written to my fleeing self
in some Transylvania of the mind.
Hung out in the distance
like a lamp, the fading light
of stars fainter and further
in the borderless beyond.
Flowers in the upland pasture.
Pebbles in a yard marbled
into the letters of a word
in some long ago language.
Come back I hear my voice call back
on the long road home.
Bring a few thing to say you were here –
a milkweed pod, a leaf from a walnut tree,
a flower from the upland pasture,
a handful of stones that spell out someone’s name.
Night cries startle my heart.
Music dulls me into sleep,
the bird still singing in my brain.
Not the journey but it’s recall
fading in the remembrance,
the slow falling into time.
Not the shadow but the other shadow,
death’s, falling fore and aft, its agenda
in the swish of time on the watch,
brief as a kiss in passing, voices
shouting down the rainy night street
some name, some message.
Photographs fade. Tapes fade,
the words will come away from the page,
the same that comes with us everywhere
and eclipses us, swallows us whole,
deletes our names in other people’s address books.
Think of the snail with a boat on his back
he carries all his days that one day
he will drown in.
Farewell all those I never met,
faces that flit across a mirror,
echoes on the phone, the hiss of stars.
There are the sweet songs of lovers.
There is the wild music of the mountains.
And there is death, suddenly.
There is the chanting among the wild-eyed rag-haired saints,
an unaccompanied singing addressed to eternity.
And there is death.
That knits us all into the ground,
caught up with roots and shards and spent ammunition,
into the names of stones flaked away in the wind.
We live a while in the tales of our children,
their children, gossip and rumour, in the dreams of the sleepless,
the memories of the forgetful.
The knife. Fear of the knife. The cancer
clawing at the guts, or on a narrow mountain road
a fast truck swings onto the wrong side of the road, goodbye.