madam today the sky is starshooting today once more
too much clotted blood in my mouth while you
dance to happy music I sink into thirsty sand
and dream of our endless lovemaking.
things could be bleaker that's for sure
by the time this poem's finished the day will have broken
you'll be already in a swooning sleep under tousled hearted
cypresses death drills its tool between your parted thighs
the sky is starshooting madam today the woodland strays
from beneath our window the sad warmth from beneath our heads
my identity card expired my last extension expired too.
for police for love I'm the villain free to be whipped. like
murderers--dilettanti cast their dice on my cloak
on faraway shores dead listless girls strip and cover
my face with their shirts. just fine to be someone's memory
the tram soars above trees sleepily you fly there
and burst into tears when you casually glance down

I address myself: write a poem to your mother
which doesn't resemble you and doesn't resemble
any other poem ever written to mothers
at most it resembles water the morning light
the painful frown on your face which sinks into sunshine
hard woman you should disown me
slam your doors before me
when you behold my shadow lurching round the corner
and dazed street-lilacs admiring my fluttering hair
I'll pass away sooner than expected
I'll pass away in finer way than you think
only I'm afraid you won't realize it:
perhaps I'm too good
but just like a clown in the sawdust's gold
bliss and life stumble over me
kindness abandons me too like a hungry rat a house
with boarded up windows
later mother I'll write a poem to you
like the ones other people usually write to mothers
you'll put it away a treasure until it yellows
until the last happy afternoon turns yellow too
and what are planted in the sky turn yellow the
great white great white great white dahlias

1. What is to be and can re-act, is.
2. What reacts on itself, knows itself as its cause.
3. He who returns to act as his own cause, makes himself.
4. He who acts as cause of his own cause makes himself as he already is.
5. He nevertheless could not have made himself as he already is had he not
   already made himself as he is, although he'd made himself as he is by himself
   as he had already become.
6. What is afterwards reaches back to before to become afterwards.
7. So it makes itself as it is by what it is.
8. Therefore to be free to be free is to be free in time.
9. If you live believing you can reach back to every instant of your life, you live
   saved by yourself.
10. One is thus subjected to one who knows one best: oneself.
11. Fear thyself.
12. What is to be, already is.
    

1. Whatever is, is lawfully so.
2. Law is law by chance.
3. What's fortuitous comes naturally.
4. What's lawfully so is not naturally so.
5. It changes.
6. Hence law alone is naturally so.
7. Law makes the same things the same when things are the same.
8. What happens again does not happen.
9. Whatever happens happens because law makes it happen again, consequently cancelling it.
10. Law naturally being law, happens again, consequently cancelling itself.
11. Hence what is, is what it is by chance.
12. Hence it is so naturally.
13. If law is lawfully law,
14. then law is not naturally so:
15. it changes.
    

I live in storage. In a shack. A film archive. To give it more class: a film factory. By day, my office. Evenings and nights, my living-, work-, bath-, and bedroom. (re this setup, cf. Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener.)
Furnished: desk, 2 chairs, 1 shelf, regulation cot, and a film worktable, at which table sits my "technical assistant," Aunt Margie, splicing endless filmstrips.

Aunt Margie's okay. Nice lady. Useful co-worker. Makes a good brew. Hums to herself now and then.
Desk: raw wood. Right-hand drawers: essays by Béla Hamvas, a bibliography. Diaries; Literature and Education. Left-hand, a film catalogue; typing paper, envelopes, pen, rubber stamp, order forms.

3,500 reels preserved in cans or paper boxes in this storage. Subjects like animal husbandry, culture and tradition, occupational-healthcare, safety--environment-hazards, geography, juvenile literature, agriculture, arts, teaching techniques, sports, history and politics, scientific-industrial-technological.

Pigeons, my boss raises. Once he went on bitching endlessly about a terrific, white 1 lb. bird. He had to go all the way to Esztergom to find the right grain (no feeding his flock on commercial birdseed) because he couldn't get it in Komárom or Tata, not even Tatabánya.

As head of the archive, I'm the man who drops by personally to discuss lending problems and how to get more use out of our film-holdings.

No loans Saturday.

At the edge you stop,
like that, easily,
though in your head
you let the pen run on,

tracing its airy arcs,
its peaceful, lighthearted
jogging run over
the undulating endless

smooth white blank
page of paper,
you let it run as though
running over the sea,

your feet touching
the tops of the waves,
treading their troughs,
arcing over their crests,

the pen, your pen it is,
half-dreaming, half-falling,
and yet still:
almost awake.

At the edge you stop,
infinite waters before you
infinite watery surface,
and you glance at it,

contemplating the waves,
their life rising, falling,
resurging, panting, dashing up,
and crashing down again,

and up above! the gulls
screeching in the air,
albatrosses, and
all those other birds

flying and floating by
as you gaze at them,
envying their easy flow
over their own pages;

and watch your pen
run on, on yours,
your laughter as they
run, racing up

from out of nothing,
your words, the waters,
their deepest deeps,
the repeating rhythms

perhaps, of the waves
falling again, and new again,
the crashing tops of the waves,
and the longing,

the longing to utter
at last, to be able at last
to utter, to tear out of yourself
out of yourself

rend from yourself that
What is this? Infinite waters...
and a still sea.
The light voice!

The sea cannot be uttered,
whether heavily, or
lightly, the prankish
pen runs nowhere.

But the birds! They know
why they are wheeling
overhead, and they know
who called them here,

and who it is
will gently see
to them when their
loveliness is gone.

Think I'll forget, think I'll forgive you,
my bred-in-the bone murderer?
Think I just slid from under your heel
as it came down monstrous on me,
think I'll let you stroll with your sweetie now
down the tender aisle of grape leaves?
As I lie spinning on my lacquered back
an inch away from your town's gigantic shoes?
You actually think I'll just fade away
like a drizzle if you look at the sky?
Still don't know me, my little June-bug?

o happy days
rolling out of those little clockwork gears
fading away from the face of the clock,
happy days, rambunctious watermelons,
the burlap sack slung over time's shoulder
is bulging--let's go!
happy days, the sun's shining
right through my five fingers,
o you voracious dumb-bell happy days,
pressing my ear against your swagging belly
nights I listen to your happy, burbling guts

The stop sign did its job. She scanned the movie schedules until I caught up with her. Naturally, the last thing she'd said made me keep on going: "We'd better not speak for a while." I couldn't tell whether five whole years have opened the door.

Good thing was that movie wasn't showing. The few people there seemed to be there just so I could sit in my usual seat and feel our hands meeting under my arm the way they met then. She shed her coat a few rows in front of me and lifted her hair from the back of her neck, though not--unbelievably--for my lips to get at it.

Before the film came on I saw all the movies we'd seen together and all the theatres. And then the projector started rattling. I knew what she was thinking through every scene. How she'd manage the dialogue, answer questions. What the writer, what Christmas, what the priest's sermon all reminded her of. Did Lumière ever dream of a show like that?

Up and down the bank he walks, the old man. Flexes one arm oddly, holding it away from his side. (It's here that someone took it from him forty years ago.)

Walks down the river. Looks out, surprised, as though something were coming on the the current. (She would come wearing gray in springtime, red in summer,
violet in fall.)

In wintertime takes his cap off, raises it before him tilting his head to one side, sets it just so there. It drops from his fingers to the snow. (He'd lend her his cap in the cold because her head was always bare.)

Wades into the water in all four seasons. Sits. Grins. Spreads one arm, then both. Turns about. Kneels. Stretches his legs out. (They would bathe together. She would soap him.)

Back on shore, he makes odd movements with both arms, bends over, takes two steps forward. (She would slip into his robe that way in his room. The zipper was jammed.)

I'm comforted by none at all
if you my lord won't comfort me
and nothing needs my hands or me
if you have not asked for me at all

yours it is to judge, my lord
to stop these quarrels and trials,
to stop this life and its trials
if life makes no sense, my lord

my lord, permit me to leave this place
permit me to make my way back
with hopes torn to rags on my back,
where pity, not justice, holds place

where neither humility rules nor pride
but mercy alone and peace, my lord,
open that eternal house, now, my lord
bring me to its threshold, let me step inside

snow covers the garden, the night is gray
we see mere nothings as in a mirror
calm have I always sought, and not terror
it's not the Blessed Virgin's Lenten way

silence waste and peace to be found nowhere
the snow sifts down the trees stand bare and still
the signs we leave are signs of signs that will
say we are or were all the signs once there

the city looms a yellowed dome of light
shreds of a tattered sky go slipping past
what gleams above the snowy garden's night

wings of silence ever heavier wings
heavy portents that we too fall at last
thought I sought in calm just what dying brings