A Smile I’m going to die and pretty soon, too. This makes me feel slightly dizzy—not unlike what I felt as a lad when I’d just started smoking: the first few drags I’d take at a cigarette on the balcony in the morning. It’s long since passed, of course, as so many other things have. Now, though, of all those things just one has stayed and (God be thanked for it!) it is still there. The keen, inquisitive hunger of the eye, the pleasure of looking—everything seen pure joy, each thing in its own way: equally beautiful—clear honey and tar and the intertwining pipes in a boiler-room wrapped round in fibre-glass and silver foil. Or the turquoise silence of a mountain lake amid blue pines in glass-cold air. Or on the asphalt a fag-packet, chucked away, that’s aimlessly, noisily, flapping about at the will of the changing wind. The smile of a small, pale, old woman with sunken gums, a teardrop like yellow resin in the corner of her eye, as also the hint of a double chin on a firm-fleshed young girl flashing white teeth and doing so, perhaps, just a little too much. But this does not matter: flaws are the source and spice of beauty. Then, too, the legs of working women embroidered with varicose veins and the fishwife at the market, her frozen, purple hands slimy with catfish mucus and carp blood... For the angel is in the detail. What a Shame What a shame to die this way, just now, when things could be OK -- though even like this it’s not too bad: I’ll go quietly, almost glad to mix with water, leafmould, clay, thawed snow, showers of a summer’s day and autumn leaves that smell like booze. The quiet hill waits for my repose -- and say, Will the muses of my song rest there beside me before long? (I’d go there right away, but who will care for Mari if I do? And who will bring her flowers home when I am gnawed at by the worm?

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György Petri
has had two volumes of poems published in English translation. (Night Song of the Personal Shadow: Selected Poems, 1991, Eternal Monday, 1999), both translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri, and both published by Bloodaxe. The poet died on July 16 as this issue was going to press.