Ágnes Nemes Nagy

POEMS

Translated by George Szirtes

Between
Között

The air's enormous empty sleeves.
Air supporting birds and the whole panoply
of bird-lore, ornithology,
wings on fraying winds of argument,
the unpredictable, inconsequent
boughs that a moment of sky relieves,
trees of living mist, spiralling desire
to the topmost branches,
breathing, twenty to a minute at a time,
vast angels barnacled in rime.

The mass below. The plain with mounds
of earth, juddering, huge, immovable,
where ridges and hump-backed cliffs lie down
or kneel-geography's sculpture hall-
the vale a moment of forgetfulness where
attention wanders, and then more
masses and forms from skeletons of lime bone
to the far perimeter, a single core
of being, crumpled into stone.

Between the earth and sky.
Explosions in deep mountain bores.
Meanwhile the sun's transparent ores
turn stone to metal, almost to themselves,
and when beasts walk across them, their claws smoke,
and smoke-ribbons of burning hoofs
wind round and round above the cliffs' sheer roofs,
till night falls on the desert plain,
night that quenches and extends into the tight
core of what was stone, sub-zero night,
among the splitting and collapsing
of cartilage, joint, flagstone, set,
flexed in an endless
decimating unconsciousness
by white and black quotidian
lightning flashes without sound-

Between the day and night.

Those decimations and incisions,
droughts and visions,
inarticulate resurrections,
the unbearable vertical tensions
between up-above and down-below-

Various climates and conditions.
Between. The stone. The tracks of tanks.
A line of black reed on savannah border,
written on pond and sky in lines, in double order,
two dark stones with cryptographs
stars' diacritics, acutes and graves-

Between sky and sky.