Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Dawn Drunkenness

114 | Light within the Shade Dawn Drunkenness I will tell you. If you won’t be bored by it. Last night—at three—my work just wasn’t coming and I quit. I lay down. But the brain’s machine kept humming, throbbed as if it couldn’t stop its drumming; I tossed and turned, bitter, exasperated; no dream awaited. and though I summoned it with foolish words, with counting, with caustic sedatives, it fled my hunting. What glared at me in fever, I had written. With forty cigarettes my heart was smitten. With these, and other things. Coffee. Everything. So I get up, quite reckless now, start pacing, clad in my nightshirt, up and down, unresting. Their mouths slack with the honey-glazing of sleep, my family, nested, lies embracing, and so I stagger here, drunk brain still racing, stare through the window-casing. Wait. How should I start, how can I make it clear? You know what it’s like here: you’ve seen the house; if only you recall the bedroom, then you may imagine well how at that time of day this bleak Logodi Street lies poor and lonely. Where you can see into blank rooms through their windows’ vacancy. People lie blind and tumbled around me; struck flat by sleep, their closed eyes roll round beneath the eyelids into each head, into the dream-world’s fog and glittery lies because the daily brain-anemia has bled de z ső kosz tol á n y i | 115 them of consciousness. Tidied away, their shoes, clothes, all they possess, and they themselves, lie locked up in the room, a box which, when they waken, they’ll trim and groom, a dreamlike task in itself, but—truth to tell— every room’s a cage, each chamber is a cell. The clock ticks out of silence, turned by its springs, limpingly hesitates, and suddenly rings; the roaring alarm that says to the drowsy sleeper: “Wake up to what is.” The house too sleeps now, corpselike, senselessly, as, in a century, collapsed and overgrown with weeds it shall; when nobody knows to tell our own home from the stall of an animal. But up there, my friend, up there is the lightening sky, a clarity, a glittering majesty, trembling, crystallizing into constancy. A heavenly dome the blue of my mother’s eiderdown back home so long ago; the water blot of monochrome that smudged my paper-pad with an azure foam, and the stars’ souls breathe and glitter quietly in their shoals into a Fall night’s lukewarm mildness—which precedes the colds and whites—; they watched the files of Hannibal, today look down at one who, having fallen from the rest, am standing at a window in Budapest. And then I don’t quite know what happened to me, but a great wing seemed to swoop over me; the past, all I had buried, bent down to me its breast: childhood, infancy. 116 | Light within the Shade There so long stood I to watch the vaulted miracles of the sky that in the east it reddened, and the wind set all the stars to quivering; sparks thinned by the distance, they’d appear and disappear; a vast thoroughfare of light flared up, a heavenly castle door opened in that fire; something fluttered then, and a crowd of guests took places to begin deep in twilight shades of dawn the measures of the last pavane. Outside the foyer swam in streams of light, and there the lord of the dance bade farewell on the stair, a great nobleman, the titan of the sky, the glory of the dancing-floor; by and by there is a movement, startled, jingling, a soft womanly whispering miraculous; the ball is over; pages ready at the entrance call for carriages. Under a lace veil streamed a mantle, fairy-tale, from the frail deeps of twilight, diamond-pale, blued with such a blue as the morning dew, which a lovely lady dons for her surtout, and a gem, whose hue dusts with its light the pure peace of the air, the otherworldly raiment she would wear; or an angel pins, with virgin grace, a brilliant diadem into her hair, and a fine light chaise de z ső kosz tol á n y i | 117 rocks to a soft halt and she glides in, quieter than a dream, and, its wheels agleam, on it rolls again...