Wild Gratitude (4 page)

               So the fever leans back in its icy chair

    and lies to her about the night. She thinks the

full moon is German; she believes the empty white face

    of the moon is saying that it wants to arrest her

               for plotting crimes against the light.

               And she can’t sleep. It’s as if the fever

    had dropped a cube of dry ice into her throat and

it is scalding hot. No, it is the smell of gas seething

    in her chest. And she keeps hearing footsteps,

               the wind pronouncing names in the street.

               She can’t get up. She is so drugged

    that she can’t focus on the living room wall

or see the stark painting that hangs above her chair.

    It is a picture of the sky above a stone house

               that is crumbling in a stony field.

               She can’t forget the night the fever

    interrogated her for hours. That was before

it flooded the country and left corpses in the trees,

    bodies floating face-up in the muddy streams.

               She can’t forget their faces, either.

               And she keeps hearing voices. Someone

    says the night is like a sick child who raves

and cries out in her sleep because her head is on fire

    and she sees the tall pines bursting into flame,

               waterlogged corpses going up in smoke.

               Sometimes she dreams about a red setter

    barking furiously at a squirrel who is racing

across the branches for its life. Always she can smell

    the singed brown fur and feel the thin squirrel

               finally losing its balance and falling.

               
She whimpers. And that’s when shadows

    begin to grow out of the wet floor, the water

rises along the misty walls. The windows are barred

    against the night, but the night waits calmly.

               Muskrats paddle in a neighbor’s yard.

               And now she is drifting in a shadow

    against the door; now she has fallen asleep

in her own chair. So the fever holds her in its arms

    and all night she dreams about the dark clouds

               and the white moon coming to arrest her.

               He loved statues with broken noses,

    the flaking white bodies of birches

after disease had set in,

                         the memory of peasants

               kneeling at garish, hand-carved altars.

               He loved old women washing laundry

    by the river, coolly slapping the

bedsheets senseless on the stones.

                         It was sixty years later

               and yet he still couldn’t forget them.

               And he was still ashamed of the damp

    bodies of men’s shirts filling the wind,

flapping about like chickens

                         at the signs of hard weather.

               Only a woman’s hands could calm them.

               My grandfather loved thunderstorms.

    He loved to see the restless weaving

of trees and all the small shrubs

                         kneeling down like penitents.

               As a child, in southern Latvia,

               he used to run through the streets shouting

    while the ominous clouds moved slowly

across the dark horizon

                         like a large foreign army

               coming to liberate the village.

               My grandfather used to stand calmly

    by the open window during storms.

He said that he could see lightning

                         searching the empty rooftops,

               rifling the windows for his body.

               
He said that rain is an ancient sign

    of the sky’s sadness. And he said

that he could feel the wind trying

                         to lift him into its arms,

               trying to carry him home again.

Here, in the night, I’m staring

At the photograph of a stranger faking

A brave heel and toe, a lyrical

Dance with the gypsy’s favorite bear

Stumbling in front of the dying

Campfire light

In a small clearing of birches

On the outskirts of Odessa. Tambourines

Flash like swords in the spoked

Shadows, and you can

Feel the drunken bear stagger

And weave with exhaustion

From too many cities, too many

Ringing triangles and suspicious eyes,

Too many bored adults, pawing children.

All the bear wants is to

Collapse in his own poor cage

Under stars scattered

Like red kerchiefs through the trees;

All he wants is to sleep. But

The stranger whispers something

Indecipherable, something convincing

In a fluent tongue, and so

The four thick arms continue to

Grip and lock and hug,

The four heavy legs stagger on.

Fur and skin. Dino Campana

And the bear. 1911. Russia.

In three long years the bear

Will have left his body forever

To travel easily, in another forest,

While the stranger will still

Be selling flowers and stoking

Furnaces, peddling songs in cafes

Out of hard need. But tonight

All he knows is that wherever

He is going is going

To be better than wherever

He is, wherever he was.

And so he tilts the bear’s grim

Forehead to the sky

And keeps on dancing and dancing.

He wants to feel the moon’s

Wild eye staring

Into their dark faces. He wants

To vanish into its hard, cold light.

I should have been the son of a wolf

and a bear; I should have been born

in a small cave in the forest at night;

I should have been licked clean by a mother

with thick fur and a fistful of claws,

with a roar and a howl instead of a voice.

I was named after a rampaging King of the Huns,

but Attila József isn’t a name; it’s a shout

from a corpse disguised as a man, it’s

the twelve naked apostles of a lie, an echo

that steams in the bowels of a mirror, a proof

that ghosts wear the clothes of the living.

My father stacked crates of soap in a factory

and disappeared when I was three, a watery bucket

with a hole in it, a slippery white arm leaving

a soapy trail of blood. I was an erratic circle

rotating from a country village to a mother at home;

I was an orphaned circle searching for its center.

There’s a black iron that burns in my lungs

because my mother washed laundry in an aristocrat’s

house; she ironed a gentleman’s white collars,

and creased his gray slacks, and steamed his jackets.

Sometimes my diminutive mother carried a skillet

of cold leftovers home for us to devour.

She slept on a rotting straw mattress on the kitchen

floor and never thought about the clouds of steam

rising from her lips, the filthy red kerchief

knotting in her chest. My mother always slept

poorly, but she was sweet and respectful and

kept a clean white apron ironed in her dreams.

I stole chickens for mama; I stole firewood

and coal from the Ferenvcáros freight yard; I

snatched red apples from the baskets at Market Hall;

I swiped bread; I waited in line for cooking lard;

I scrubbed boilers in dank basements; I sold paper

whirligigs and drinking water at the Világ Cinema.

But nothing helped. When my mother finally died

I dreamt the full moon was a tumor of the uterus,

my body was pressed under the purple iron of night.

Etus and Jolán thought we were starving suitcases

packed for a house of detention. We were so scared

that one night we sliced a ripe pear into thirds

and offered its three soft faces to the darkness

as a gift of appeasement. The darkness refused to

acknowledge the fruit, but scavengers accepted it

gladly. And yet no one—not even the crows—can

pronounce the misery of a childhood floating

through the streets at night, hanging on dark windows.

I served faithfully on the tugs Vihar, Torok, and Tatár;

I trained as a novice with the dwindling Salesian Order

at Nyergesujfalu; I taught the Bible to an idiot savant;

I guarded the huge cornfields at Kiszombor; I clerked

in a tiny bookstore and trafficked in postage stamps.

I finished the sixth year of gymnasium stifled by boredom.

My favorite colors were always blue and yellow:

the blue of self-forgetfulness, the yellow of suicide.

At nine I drank a mug of starch in the kitchen

and faked convulsions to get even with my sister.

I sobbed, howled, stamped and raged; I foamed

spectacularly at the mouth, ready to die for revenge.

At fifteen I put my right elbow on the iron tracks

and waited for the freight train to sever my arm.

But the train never lumbered through our village:

It had already killed a girl farther up the line.

Oh white owl of paranoia, I was young

and histrionic, but somebody died for me.

I was freedom’s serious, dark-haired son,

a scandalous thief, a tough Hungarian punk paroled

to a life of corrections. At seventeen I begged

for radiance between hard covers, and a high court

accused me of blasphemy. Later, I was prosecuted

for claiming I had no father and no mother,

no country and no god, and I was expelled

from the university for shaking an anarchical fist

at the world in a small magazine. I was denounced,

but someone called me an infant prodigy in print,

a lyrical spokesman for the postwar generation.

No, I was just an orphan tutoring orphans.

I went to Vienna with a suitcase of bruised

manuscripts, a stick of salami, a loaf of bread

and thirty shillings. All winter I shivered

in an icy room and attended somber lectures

on the sublime in German. I sold newspapers

and scrubbed floors at the Collegium Hungaricum

until a Mæcenas sent me to the Sorbonne.

That’s when I lived at 10 Rue de la Huchette

and wrote in French about the iron world of factories,

our inheritance of empty lots and slums. One night

I shouted from the rooftops that I was homesick—I

wanted the distant earth to roar in my lungs

and I missed the dark vowels of my own language.

But I was a lost European at home. In 1927

I fell in love with a wealthy girl whose parents

snatched her away from me. Oh Márta, my poppy,

I’ll confess to anything but your betrayal:

indecent exposure, sedition, espionage, poverty.

I went mad twice. Once I saw the wind

kneel down in the soot like a crazed preacher;

once I saw the large red claws of darkness

scratch out the eyes of night. I hid in stairways

because I believed that the streets were on fire,

every street lamp was a warrant for my arrest.

I wanted an insurrection and in the hospital

I yelled that the rugs on the floors of all rich

merchants are the scalps of our young brothers,

the animals; I screamed that the bright roses

flowering on coffee tables in their living rooms

are the scalps of our sisters in the garden.

After that, I lived on the rim of a grave city

with an illegible scrawl on my high forehead.

My comrade and I passed out fervent red leaflets

and argued about the Paris Commune of ‘71, the Budapest

Commune of 1919. I joined the underground Party

but I was expelled for Trotskyist leanings.

Every winter I watched the snow gather in the streets

as the wind stripped down the stark December trees

and every year I spluttered like a village idiot

during the first hard agonies of another spring.

Every day I watched the same sun struggle out of three

smokestacks with the same smoke nestled in its arms

and every night I watched another wide moon

congealing in the clouds. I was always hungry.

One year I ate every other morning, one year

I ate every other afternoon. My darling and I

shared a double fever and slept on a narrow couch.

One night she tried to swallow a bottle of lye

and I raved against God like a blunt descendant

of Satan, or the gaunt edge of an old sickle.

Sometimes I don’t know if I’m a nail or a hammer,

a handcuff or a pen, a secret or a blind omen.

I’m like a sad bear dancing in an empty forest.

I’d give my legs for a salary of two hundred pengös.

I’ve pawned everything but my own flesh and blood.

Today when I stood at the blank window, I discovered

a thousand wooden crosses blooming in the cemetery

and when I stared at my own reflection I realized

that my mother was a young woman when she died.

I know that I am Freud’s deviant, starving son