Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Ode

at t i l a józ se f | 157 Ode 1. I am alone on these glittering crags. A sinuous breeze floats delicious, the infant summer’s suppertime simmer and ease. I school my heart into this silence. Not so arduous— All that is vanished is aswarm in me, my head is bowed, and my hand is vacuous. I see the mane of the mountain— each little leaf-vein leaps with the light of your brow. The path is quite deserted, I see how your skirt is floated in the wind’s sough. Under the tender, the tenuous bough I see you shake out your hair, how it clings, your soft, trembling breasts; behold —just as the Szinva-stream* glides beneath— the round white pebbles of your teeth, and how the welling laughter springs tumbling over them like fairy gold. 2. Oh how much I love you, who’ve given speech to both the universes: the heart’s caves, its trick-weaving deepenings, sly involute lonelinesses— and starry heaven. As water glides from its own thunderous fall you fly from me and we are cleft and parted, whilst I, among the mountains of my life, still call, 158 | Light within the Shade still kneel, and sing, and raise the echo with my cry, slamming against the earth and sky, that I love you, step-nurse, mother-hearted! 3. I love you as a child his mother’s breast, as the dumb caves their own bottomlessness, as halls the light that shows them best, as the soul loves flame, as the body rest! I love you as we who marked for death love the moments of their living breath. Every smile, every word, every move you make, as falling bodies to my earth, I press; as into metal acids eat and ache, I etch you in my brains with instinct’s stress, beautiful shapeliness, your substance fills the essence they partake. The moments march by, clattering and relentless, but in my ears your silence lies. Even the stars blaze up, fall, evanesce, but you’re a stillness in my eyes. The taste of you, hushed like a cavern-pool, floats in my mouth, as cool; your hand, upon a water-glass, veined with its glowing lace, dawns beautiful. 4. Ah, what strange stuff is this of which I’m made, that but your glance can sculpt me into shape?— what kind of soul, what kind of light or shade, what prodigy that I, who have long strayed in my dim fog of nothingness unmade, explore your fertile body’s curving scape? at t i l a józ se f | 159 —And as the logos flowers in my brain, immerse myself in its occult terrain! . . . Your capillaries, like a blood-red rose, ceaselessly stir and dance. There that eternal current seethes and flows and flowers as love upon your countenance, to bless with fruit your womb’s dark excellence. A myriad rootlets broider round and round your stomach’s tender ground, whose subtle threadings, woven and unwound, unknit the very knot whereby they’re bound, that thus thy lymphy cellbrood might abound, and the great, leaved boughs of thy lungs resound their whispered glory round! The eterna materia goes marching on happily through your gut’s dark cavern-cells, and to the dead waste rich life is given within the ardent kidneys’ boiling wells! Billowing, your hills arise, arise, constellations tremble in your skies, lakes, factories work on by day and night, a million creatures bustle with delight, millipede, seaweed, a heartless mercy, gentle cruelty, your hot sun shines, your darkling north light broods, in you there stir the unscanned moods of a blind incalculable eternity. 5. So falls in clotted spatters at your feet this blood, this parched utterance. 160 | Light within the Shade Being stutters; law is the only spotless eloquence. My toiling organs, wherein I am renewed over and over daily, are subdued to their final silence. But yet each part cries out— O you who from the billioned multitude, O you unique, you chosen, wooed and singled out, you cradle, bed, and grave, soft quickener of the dead, receive me into you. (How high is this dawn-shadowy sky! Armies are glittering in its ore. Radiance anguishing to the eye. Now I am lost, I can no more. Up in the world I hear it batter, my heart’s old roar.) 6. (Envoi) (Now...