The Approach of War, and: The Disasters of War, Spain, 1810, and: On a Visit to Budapest, and: Night in Clamart, and: The Roman Arbor, and: Death of the Tyrant, and: The Jumping Figure

THE APPROACH OF WAR / E.C. Hinsey That morning, dayUght was the same. Everyday rituals, observed by no one, left the bedroom door open as a jaw in sleep. The faucet's three-four time went unnoticed. At midday, a ragged curtain shifted in the breeze. The paper's checkered voice quietly yeUowed. When afternoon arrived, there was soot in the air, and birds stayed nested in the dark, thatched groves. Across an open field, a querulous voice called once and received its answer. The road was empty. A car, wrapped in dust, swept the lane, vanished. The wUlows were still. A door mated a latch. At dusk the smeU of pears rose, and a mist trawled the lake. A match was cupped under the dome of a palm. Night, not yet soüed, made its way across the lake and into the arms of branches. The Missouri Review · 165 THE DISASTERS OF WAR, SPAIN, 1810 I E.C. Hinsey After Goya The fires were low, and because it was night, the engine of foUy had taken to flight for a time. I walked the rows, roaming as one would a ruined place, my lantern not Diogenes', but seeking a recognizable face among the carnage. My lamp swung low, a censer of Ught. I stopped, for a hand reached up, Ut for a moment in its dreaming. What my hand touched I didn't know—I pieced through bodies as a river goes, threading myself, as if around the rocks: dark bodies lay Uke slate in that empty cleft of night. AU the world's passion spent, left to rot on the ground. Day alone would see me faUen. There perhaps I lay with you, as only my empty lantern knew, casting its last flame on your back, your hands entwined, your jaw gone slackpraying face down in the mud. Para eso habéis nacido (For that you were born.) 166 - The Missouri Review ON A VISIT TO BUDAPEST / E.C. Hinsey One cannot Uve without love—this statement so simple, so mundane, came to me in that city where we roamed around the baths. I hadn't known it until the tilt of your head, suddenly, in shadow, confirmed aU I knew, and though my chUdren and husband waited I let you lay me down whüe the wind berated the dry leaves overhead. What I hadn't known was how, at forty, the heart can reanimate—and how plans, even one's own flesh can drift, suddenly out of focus, seen from the wrong end of a telescope. When I returned, my husband hadn't noticed. The chUdren looked up from their play murmuring their own eccentricities. I thought about you night and day, until it seemed I would burst with words unsaid, unraged. DayUght transfigured aU I knew. Every motion seemed absurd—clothes packed in trunks seemed Uke funeral chests where once I lay down and gave myself away. Tm not the same as I was at twenty-two, yet once I was glad to walk the streets at night and Usten to how dawn would hght on my sul. I hear it stiU, but before today it was the far-off echo of a voice faded behind a waU, distance claiming its toU. If life is hazardous, this the greatest one of aU: the heart cannot be led Uke a dog but rises up, and seeks its goal. The Missouri Review · 267 NIGHT IN CLAMART IE.C. Hinsey Marina Tsvetayeva, 1933 As if the first night, hyacinths are speaking color to the darkness. As when you walked, head down, head hung with stars, along roads written as afterthoughts, threatened with dissolution by dirty rains. Contretemps your lot, passion its antidote. The empty roads tonight look for your shadow, but you are neither form nor voice, unable to describe their makeshift rifts, their part in the joke loss and circumstance played on you. If one could caU to you tonight! TeU you it's all beginning, the rivers starting again from their sources, your native homes, Moscow, 168 · The Missouri Review Prague, moving Uke bridge ice into water. For a moment there is laughter, and the moon...