George Szirtes
Hungarian Sonnet for an Irish Singer
For Gabriel Fitzmaurice
1.
Words withheld. Words loosed in angry swarms.
An otherness. The whole universe was
other, a sum of indeterminate forms
in motion. Who knows what the neighbour does
behind closed doors? You hear the chime
of the doorbell, the faint mechanical
music of the radio. It's supper time.
A window opens on a cry or chuckle,
the rest is half withheld - should it be loosed
the window's quickly shut, the door slammed tight
to seal words in. Guessed at or deduced
darkness arrives feathering words with night.
There they grow wings, like owls and nightingales,
screeching or singing till their meaning stales.
2.
Screeching or singing till its meaning stales,
the cold grey light has drawn you from your bed,
the words go scuttling homeward, their bright tails
between their legs and shelter in your head.
The airport. Night. December. Rough and grey,
a blanket covers you. The windows snore
half-way between dust and snow. The day,
trying to raise itself, creeps under the door
and offers you a cup of tea. Its alien milk
enters your bloodstream like the wizened face
of the old woman with her tray. That silk
ribbon of liquid confirms your sense of place,
and winds you in, a line that anchors, warms,
and lets you enter its own world of forms.
3.
They let you enter their strange world of forms
out in the playground, on the rough brick wall
where they have left their messages in storms
of chalk and paint. Their distances still call
for you, back in the classroom or a street
at some resort where you once spent the summer
among arcades, to the rock and roll beat
of neon lights, and further out and dimmer,
a buoy blinking through foggy yellow air
or the gentle drone of cricket commentary
in daytime heat which wraps you in blonde hair
and scent of oil, then dies in memory,
hovering in a haze before it fails,
like faint vibrations down deserted rails.
4.
Faint vibrations of trains along the rails:
where are we now? Abroad again or home?
Between two kinds of sound. Their echo trails
along behind you (words themselves won't come).
What did your mother say before you woke
to this? Her ribs vibrated with the thrum
of inner traffic. Something like a croak
surfaced at your throat and the hot drum
of her heartbeat made your heart dance. The slow
pulse of her blood blubbed and retreated, drove
your tongue before it with its enormous O,
and educated you to the word "love".
Like all words that apply and predicate
desire and loss, it brooked of no debate.
5.
Desire and loss do not permit debate.
Where do the inner journeys go? They end
in trails of words, a kind of nonsense state
you cannot trust. And true, it is no friend
to kindness or reason. Words were treacherous.
Do you remember how at school they made
you catch the worms you would dissect? The fuss
as they wriggled and stiffened in formaldehyde?
The Latin names that crystallized that weak
mulsh of muscle? The humours of the eye
that wept and spurted a transparent streak
of laughter between a language and a cry?
The Queen's English wrapped the pain in sound
that was articulate, in which the pain was drowned.
6.
Articulate, you know how pain is drowned
and resurrected, undergoes baptism
and dies once more. The vessel runs aground
time and time again, drawn to the bosom
that nourished it. First time I saw the sea
was in December at Westgate. Huge grey jaws
snapped at the rocks, the white seethed in fury
like a pan full of fat, but cold. One word draws
the sea up, another repels it. We met
in a hut on the cliff top, cub scouts with string
and diagrams of knots. The faint sun set
on the horizon. We were children playing
with water pistols. Food appeared on the plate
like clockwork and the clock did not run late.
7.
But clockwork sometimes runs down or runs late.
The words my mother spoke were rarely home
to her, or moved at another, slower rate
which could not follow her. Somehow the room
was never hers. When she was cross, her eyes
ran before language, even before her voice,
which issued from a deep, raw, oversize
mouth inside her. We knew she had no choice,
that it would be all kindness, kisses, tears.
After the terrors (the camp, the deaths, the strange
sexual crudeness) we knew that what appears
is merely a sign and yields life little change,
that mum was a sea that ran your ship aground,
her voice a channel for that kind of sound.
8.
A narrow channel. Now the empty sound
of a ship's engine, now a soft gull peeling
from the clouds, a bruise or an old wound,
plaster cracked across the bedroom ceiling.
The ceiling rose opens in a brilliant blur
and the bulb in the rose expands in purple
echoes of itself. The rain is damp fur
on the window. Your bedclothes ripple
in the night tide as you swim the sudden dark.
Your parents' voices merge with traffic. They
are arguing. Their harsh words leave no mark
but fade into the dream of every day.
The clock goes ticking on but your life runs
straight down the hill of poetry and puns.
9.
Most poetry runs down the hill of puns -
that is what makes it treacherous and yet
so utterly persuasive. Mothers and sons
can mumble ambiguities and let
that rich thick soup of meaning nourish them.
The language outside meets the ur-language within
with the consistency of dream
which sits like a faint moisture on the skin.
My father's voice. A gentle coaxing lost
in the depths of his chest. His musculature
is iron swelling in his arms. Thin frost
covers him in a Russian forest. Pure
narrative lines run through him. He stands
in the street with the city in his hands.
10.
Out in the street, the city in his hands,
he crosses and recrosses, hard at work.
He builds his tongue of vowels and consonants
with ifs and buts, emerging from the murk
of winter. He gathers them up like notes
shuffled through the cold hands of the dead
who smile at us from under heavy coats
of dust and snow. The coins bear his own head
as guarantee. We're at a football match
above the river. The Brylcreamed players race
about the pitch in baggy shorts. We watch
the old men on the terraces. I see his face
darkening as we walk home. The light runs
along his arm which could be anyone's.
11.
His arms and mine, both could be anyone's.
We're only bodies, bodies are what we have.
We float in them among the crowd in patterns
down the tidal street towards the grave
caverns of the tube. We are a small cell
in the organism which encloses us,
lost travellers, a tiny human smell
that thickens when we rise, like Lazarus,
spectral and intimate and normal, home
among the words that mean us and reflect
our faces and possessions. We are the Rome
that all roads lead to, the dense idiolect
of heavens where we sleep and wake. It stands
in the world, half Hungary's, half England's.
12.
This tiny world, part Hungary, part England,
is the macaronic my parents speak -
my dad especially. There is no bland
unbroken stream. The words seem to leak
in drips, wearing away all sensible matter,
making minute impressions, exhausting them.
I see this and am lost in multicoloured chatter
that seems to spread and deepen: spit and phlegm
and croak and fricative whose sounds mean me
and everything that can be concentrated
into the me I vaguely sense, that free-
standing monument, marble and gold-plated,
sole owner of my lexical demesne
of spotless glass where words may sit and preen.
13.
A spotless glass where anyone may preen
when it is dark outside, the window throws
your image back at you. Who is the unseen
and uninvited guest in your dumb shows?
Only the skin - hands, legs, face - remain
hanging against the house opposite. Hair
disappears, clothes vanish. And now the rain
jewels and fractures till you're hardly there.
Trying to say "you" to those smears of light
seems inappropriate. Recall the face
of your mother, that hollowed out, tight
mask in the photograph, almost a grimace
in forty-five? It creeps under the screen
of language, blankly refuses to mean.
14.
The language here blankly refuses to mean
what it's supposed to. The signs are lost.
If you could only read the space between
or babble in fiery tongues at Pentecost.
What's gone is gone. Parents might be the first
to vanish but children soon follow. The winter sun
flashes off snow and the icy trees burst
with light. The world is what cannot be undone
nor would you wish to undo it when it speaks
so eloquently out of its dumbness, when
its enormous treasury of hours and days and weeks
resolves to this sense of now and never again.
It comes at you now in syllabic storms,
the words withheld then loosed in angry swarms.
15.
Words withheld. Words loosed in angry swarms,
screeching or singing till their meaning stales
have let you enter their strange world of forms
like faint vibrations down deserted rails.
Desire and loss do not permit debate:
articulate, you know how pain is drowned.
You slept in beds when day was never late,
your voice a channel for the kind of sound
that rolls downhill in poetry and puns.
Out in the street, the city in your hands
lays down its arms, which might be anyone's -
Hungary, England are verbal shadowlands
of spotless glass where all may sit and preen,
blank languages whose words refuse to mean.
George Szirtes's
Selected Poems 1976-1996 was published by Oxford University Press in 1996. Hungarian Sonnet for an Irish Singer is the title of his forthcoming collection from OUP, to be published in the Spring of 1998.
