Hollow

She is light as the wing of a bird when you

lift her in a hug—much too thin now, bony-hipped.

One day she has jet-black hair, the next it's blonde—

without that light band of freckles that bridge nose

and cheekbones, you might not recognise her.

She taught you to fly: under the railway bridge

in a lightening downpour, over spear-tipped gates

of municipal cemeteries, decaying playground walls—

high enough to scrape over the semis' rooftops,

not so high as to get caught in the telephone wire.

April 5 2014

Fly on the wall

I usually try to write at least one poem a year. This is my effort for 2011.

You wake at 5 am, ashamed. A rough
wind billows, unseating garden furniture
as next-door's mobile tinkles, shivers.

In the dream—a wild ride along the strand
in an open-topped car, black sand and dancing.
At a ball old loves, still beautiful, ignore you,

though you find yourself witty. A hump
on your shoulder grows to an inarticulate silence
as filmmakers, glad for the find of a circus act,

slide over the dance-floor, cheerfully afraid.
On camera in the washroom only one friend
will defend you, dabbing her blackened eye.

Staccato squeal of a fox's breathless terror.
The wind is blowing bed sheets into sails.
The plash of car tires. Another rainy day.


Jan 6th 2012

Heirloom

The escalating drone
of a moped accelerating
some way off
stirs up silence and the night,
thickening the mix,
as the dated woollen curtains
come to rest
on a varnished windowsill:
coffee-brown, with dashed threads
of spicy orange peel, are they still here?
They’ll do for now, we said, on moving in
eight years ago.

Those curtains sealed into a tomb
each Saturday afternoon
of your childhood,
slim panes of blazing summer
dividing the semi-darkness, the vortices
ascending from dad's Old Holborn rolls-ups
as the anthem began for Grandstand
and we joined in boisterously,
returning then to a reverent hush
for the reading of
the line-up card for the 1.15 at Haydock,
bought off with shared offerings—
a bag of dolly mixtures,
peeled prawns in vinegar.

Examining those years
between
thumb and forefinger,
as with a length of worn fabric,
through machine-woven squares
you can still see
their smoky light
shine through.

Wed 9th Feb 2011

My Gypsy Song

Found this old translation of mine of a song by the great Russian bard, Vladimir Vysotsky:

In the dream come yellow lights,

in the dream, I yell till I'm hoarse:

"Hold on! Hold on! It won't seem so bad

once the night has run its course."

Even then, though, nothing seems right:

where is the joy and the laughter?

Either you smoke before breakfast is done

or you drink on the morning after.

In the tavern: green bottles of vodka,

white napkins that have been there an age:

a heaven for jokers and scroungers,

though I feel like a bird in a cage.

In the church, there's a stink: the deacons

are burning incense in the half-light.

No, even in church nothing seems right,

nothing seems right, it's not right.

So I rush before anything happens

up a mountain, in full retreat.

At the top of the mountain an alder stands

and below it, a cherry tree.

If only some ivy had covered the slope

perhaps it would ease my plight;

it's odd, but something is missing…

no, nothing seems right, it's not right.

Then I'm in a field by a riverbank—

light as hell, but of God, not a sign.

In the untouched field of cornflowers

a long road beckons to the horizon.

And along the road is a forest,

it's dense, full of witches and hags,

and there at the end of the road that's long

is a chopping block and an axe.

Somewhere horses are dancing to a beat—

unwillingly, but not without grace.

On the road, nothing seems right—

at the end, it's even more the case.

And not in the church, nor the tavern

is there anything good or divine.

Oh no, it's just not right, my friends,

it's not right, oh friends of mine.

Big Girl’s Blouse

This is my (loose) translation of a poem written by Vladimir Mayakovsky almost 100 years ago. The original is underneath.

I’ve decided to sew myself black pantaloons
from the velvet of my voice; a yellow shirt
out of sunset. Like Don Juan, on the world's
main drag I'll strut my stuff and flirt.


And going to pot, let the earth exclaim:
“But you'll ravish the verdant spring!”
I'll fling at the sun: “But it's good to loaf
on the tarmac”—me with an insolent grin.

O, it isn’t because the sky is blue
or the world is my love in this festive clean
that I give you poems as bright as “tra-la-la”,
or like toothpicks, essential and keen.

So, girls who would call me brother
and girls who my flesh would arouse—
drench me, a poet, with smiles and I’ll sew them
with flowers onto my big girl’s blouse!

Кофта фата
Я сошью себе черные штаны
из бархата голоса моего.
Жёлтую кофту из трёх аршин заката.
По Невскому мира, по лощёным полосам его,
профланирую шагом Дон-Жуана и фата.

Пусть земля кричит, в покое обабившись:
"Ты зелёные вёсны идёшь насиловать!"
Я брошу солнцу, нагло осклабившись:
"На глади асфальта мне хорошо грассировать!"

Не потому ли, что небо голубо,
а земля мне любовница в этой праздничной чистке,
я дарю вам стихи, весёлые, как би-ба-бо
и острые и нужные, как зубочистки!

Женщины, любящие моё мясо, и эта
девушка, смотрящая на меня, как на брата,
закидайте улыбками меня, поэта,-
я цветами нашью их мне на кофту фата!

(1914)

The fugitive

1
We didn't know he was in his death throes
as he lay all afternoon on the flatbed trolley in A&E,
the furtive little Woody Allen doctor
glancing back over his white-coat shoulder guiltily,
answering the nonchalant young nurse rattily
as she folded her plastic apron for disposal—
there was nowhere for him to send him to—
phoning around again for a free space,
but with no luck.

2
And we didn't realise, as the chrome bars
of the trolley-bed locked around him,
and he mustered his last strength
for a break through a gap in the fence
he'd spotted in the bed's lower left corner,
that a burst main in his capital
was flooding its streets slowly,
the rising waters unhooking gently
from the walls of the emptying terraces
the frames of sepia portraits, washing them
with curled, bright holiday snapshots,
black doormats, brown leather jackets,
with betting slips and pay packets,
with race meetings and nightshifts,
down the affluvial street.

3
Again he was a boy in grey shorts
and a school cap, collecting like seashells
the spent and unspent bullet casings
washed up on the shores of dockland ruins,
the deconstructing victualling yards,
igniting with a spyglass and the sun's
weak rays the lined-up rows of cartridges
for a transgressive whiff of cordite,
as the engine overhead of a doodlebug
made way for a mortifying silence.

4
The ambulance cornered the unfamiliar
junction unsteadily, its siren trumpeting
wearily its one pop hit. From a window,
we watched the late September leaves
fall silently from trees that lined the streets
of a sludgy twilight. With diligence,
the green-dressed paramedic consulted
displays of liquid crystal, made clipboard notes,
as he writhed, moaned softly, his good arm
trying weakly to snap out of the straps.

5
Captured at last, and with the torrent
now breaching the walls of the dog-track,
lapping the steps to the Chinese takeaway,
he watched impassive as his hopes sank
with the outlines of the city—but a scent
of sea salt was in his nostrils; on his cheeks,
the sting of a coastal wind. From where?
Bobbing for a while as the rising waters
sucked up to the lip of the high stockade,
he slipped off his body like a wet suit
to push out over a tall perimeter fence-post
into a featureless ocean, an expert breaststroke
propelling him now with ease and speed
over the surface a noiseless deep, without
the burden of a life to slow him down.

(November-December 2009)

Smashed

"Have no fear," I said as I strode over the flooded park.
School kids were ganneting chocolate bars, hooting like wildfowl,
while the wildfowl were motionless, desolate, stark,
and just stared at the lake like Oliver at his bowl.
It was winter and the lake was beginning to ice
as the Canada geese, reviewing the situation,
the thin and fuzzy rushes, completing a quick analysis
ticked off the pros and cons of economic emigration—
though the sun still managed a spark on a muddy bottle,
reminding me of my own mind, on the blink
(also, we were broke, both drained, both a bit brittle;
both of us once had been up to our necks in drink).
"If the fates would see us ragged and shattered, that's fine!
Just have no fear"—this urged from behind a jagged smile.
But the pep-talk felt ancient as, in truth, I'd lost my shine:
neurosis, you see, had been at my teeth with its file.
Was anyone free of anxiety? How should I know!
Bleak birds hung like my own doubting hmms on the huge
gusts of wind over the trees lined up as suspects in a row
as the estate rose on the horizon like a prison barge
and I turned away. But in doing so, in the mud and ice
the smashed glass turned kaleidoscopic in the sun
and the light on the fractive lines looked up like lively eyes
so I thought of a place, a bright space, where children
in attentive groups are a delighted audience who focus
on the bright red balls of the miseries we juggle.
There was plenty of room for enjoyment in that locus
and the tricky enterprise was easy, no trouble.

(Grahame Park, Barnet, Winter 2000)

Caledonian Road daydream remembrance

I should really be writing some new poems, but I need a new, perhaps more prosy, style, and I haven't found it yet. This one, which I wrote about ten years ago, I've copied out of my notebook—with some difficulty, since my handwriting is so bad—reconstructing it as best I could according to the spirit of those days, and leaving unchanged its slightly idiosyncratic punctuation.
If I remember rightly, I had a thing about Shakespeare, blank verse and "the line as a unit of measurement" back then—all of which seems a bit quaint to me now. Nor would I be so tempted to use the device of the "fictional I" anymore, I think.

A warm wind tickling my features
as I rose on the escalator staircase,
I closed my eyes like a child enjoying affection,
at home in the moment for once,
emerging from the depths of a dark mood
as I emerged from the underground.
The ticket machines I leapt, no problem;
all inward insuperable cowardices I also cleared
easily, or mentally belted like Super Mario
so that they shattered to fragile shark teeth
briefly, before exiting harmlessly the screen.

Rain fell in the swallowing gutters
as I leaned on the Piccadilly railings to see
the numerous, hatted office workers scuttling
in mackintoshes through the slanting rain,
refreshing lights of the Carlsberg billboard
fill and empty, green beams of the lettering
igniting the drizzle into little green flecks of flame;
the wrinkles in the yellowed rainwater
that trickled in the guttering completely absorbed me
so that my mind swam like a curious fish
through the white ruins of a crinkled moon.

What would it matter, said my free-wheeling
brain, if I woke on a blustery night that's dark
to find a new flood rapping at my door?
An elegant lady angel, I had the feeling,
would be dispatched to the disaster scene
with nails and toolkit to knock up an ark
and, gathering clean and unclean thoughts
in pairs, she and I would sail safely
over the submerged pubs and clubs of Soho—
taking time out, maybe, for a relaxing cruise
until the worst of it had blown over.

(1998)

Vinegar Hill

Unfortunately, I don't get many chances these days to write poetry, but I can't let another year go by without having a crack. I know what you're thinking: still using rhymes, at your age? It's a bit rum, I agree. But beggars can't be choosers, and it's the best I could do at short notice. I've decided not to use rhymes again, though.

Spat out each evening through the glass
revolving doors, he speeds like a dog-track hare
between shivering fronds and dripping shrubberies,
fleeing glaze-eyed through the urban square
the duff reggae as the festival crowds disperse;

glaze-eyed he slips down a narrow thoroughfare,
avoiding the outcasts in winter macs
who, standing in solitary pub doorways, stare
into ragged puddles as though at treasure maps:
mimicking vents, they wheeze an atmosphere

that chases him once more up Vinegar Hill;
again from a flowerbed bordering the fence
come pebbles flung by the grabbed handful
as if by a skulking, unseen malevolence:
the day's humiliations rain down like hail,

though if images wobble as on a screen
in front of him to roll like ripened pears
down into gutters and over the cobblestone,
the lines of the bards of despair are the bars
he grabs for his treadmill's steadying frame,

which means his gaze won't break, composure
sustained by the zesty scent of the limes
that line the walkway to the top, where
he's just in time to see in the mind's
intense Greek sunlight a galley disappear

over a blue sea between carnivorous rocks,
which doesn't ruffle the oarsmen, who are skilled
and determined—though this vision drapes
like a turf-green tablecloth over scaffold
hauled taut by a system of pulleys and knots

so that shaving each morning in the dim
half-light pre-dawn, it’s the jackdaw's caws,
ironic, mocking, cut through the illusion:
as he's plunged back down, the spectres
of the hellish tomb-world come back to him.

(December 28th 2008, Holborn)

The drunken bath

I've always liked poems of journeys, perhaps for the same reason that, in a detective novel, I like a good description of the scene—urban or rural, I'm not bothered—in which the action takes place. I want to take in the sights, noises, smells, have a peek over the shoulder of the characters—especially if it's somewhere exotic in time or space, where life is lived differently, and where I'm unlikely ever to go—medieval Italy, for instance, or California in the 40s, or ancient Rome, or Tsarist Russia. As poems are a cross between music and words, for the senses as well as the mind, they can be particularly successful in this endeavour.

Yesterday, I got in touch again with my old mate from university, Burt, with whom I went on a number of travelling holidays around Europe—one fairly wild one, if I remember, to Hungary in about 1992 (I think), where I wrote this poem, which is a pastiche of Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre (in those days, it had a compelling significance for me, and I wrote two or three things that were inspired by it).

The air in the bedsit was damp
and cold and smelt of gas, but it was home.
She dropped her bag as the front door slammed
and chose the yellow bathsalts saved from the fallout zone.

She poured herself into a bath and never
noticed as the chipped enamel bathtub filled
and the day, a beast immensely cold and clever,
dissolved on the bathtiles where the yellow bathfoam spilled.

Her face in a sodden flannel's shade,
she never saw the bath detach itself and float
as the citizens in the flooding districts prayed
and the bath slid from the window like a chipped enamel boat.

As the clawmarks in her skin healed over,
one more city sank in the sea. Alone,
she never saw the cliffs dissolve at Dover
or the Channel gulping the poison yellow foam.

And the Netherlands and Bohemia could not escape,
and Belgium held its nose as it went down
as a girl in a bath sailed through a sunken town
and an oilslick in hammer & sickle shape.

And Europe dropped from her mind that day
as the rich drop food from their plates.
Little she thought of why the ceiling had gone grey
or of escalating water rates.

Still more continents fell from the world that night
like clay pots from a windowsill,
but she never asked: Who turned off the light?
And she never said: Who ran up this bill?

And Death asked: Who dares at this ungodly
hour to creep in my room?
But all that remains of him is a cape and, oddly,
a wisp of smoke shaped like an ostrich plume.

(Rose Hill, Budapest, 1992.)

Europe in a coma

I was the only child on that plane, apart from the children:
the jets powered up and I braced myself for the climb
as passengers up in business class were getting to grips
with the price of zinc in Die Welt or Frankfurter Allgemeine,
but I just studied the nicks on the flexible armoured wing—
what were they for? Well, I wasn't exactly sure, but felt
reassured by the captain's polite Etonian intonation
("safe pair of hands") and the phrase "precision engineering".

Inwardly I whooped at the excellent sights below me—
whole rows of town roofs wound like African braids,
then fawn and ochre farms laid out as abstract art,
and on the coast, sports complexes curled like hearing aids,
as even nature began to put on a pretty good show,
eg with her fascinating light/dark 4:30 tremulations
as we swooped up over the greeny undulous sea.
Under us—mermaids, dolphins. (A dream? I don't know.)

Great clouds over Vienna, the misty tarmac: one thinks
of sinister gasses, the flight control an aussichtsturm,
or Freud with his dreambook doing a runner; one sees
the plague cathedrals, blue plumes on state bureaucracies
(Marxist senses tingling under the superstructural weight);
one uses the word "one" for the first time ever
and one's sentences move firmly to their inexorable conclusion,
apparently civilised and sedate.

And there in the charming half-light beerkeller,
you drink ein schwarzer Kaffe and, spying the LUKoil
office, the Soviet monument, your mind stares back and east—
gangsters in both directions hurtling over the good black soil,
forests and barns on fire in your eyes amid the harmless (?) talk:
"So, what do you think of this Haider thing?" (you overhear)—
consider then "the racial question", and stroke your beard,
noticing now on the menu a disturbing fixation with pork.

(Vienna, April 2000)

Spontaneous wishes

Thanks be to whatever-it-is that is
the nuclear fuel at the core of this
calm but nervy hunger I now
feel, restoring me to poise and power.
What high ideals are they I wish
as I sit on a broken bench one sad July
by grotty litterbins where the wishbone road divides?

Agonising overthought, paralysis:
these I'd side-step, these I'd give a miss,
have my desires negotiate, shake hands, or
see my spirit get up from the floor
cool and collected, wearing sunglasses.
What is there I've got to do but be?
How much I'd like to lose what's left of me

and just enjoy the clink of keys,
the dark green mass of trees
that shimmer above the underpass—
even the black bins lined up on the grass,
bolt-upright like buzzbied sentries,
bored stiff as me by rubbish duty
(hang in there comrades I say and give them a workers' salute).

O, why point the finger or be bitter?
Just sit and watch a piece of litter
blown free like a crumpled swallow—
there is the thought that you should follow
as it blusters over the perimeter
of bushes—shorn as for intensive care
last autumn, each now with a full head of hair!

(Blackheath, 1997)

The grappling hook

I write this poem for survival,
flinging upwards the grappling hook
as the ground gives under me: I still hope
for a spectacular, minute-to-midnight arrival
at the gates of bliss. Calm detachment is vital,
I've heard, if you want to get through intact.
That's why my reasoning floats in a white tunic
above my shoulder; for luck I've named him Virgil.
The ferocity of our attackers frightened me
as we both peered back at the hellhounds below us.
"I think it's the optimism they found offensive,"
laughs Virgil with the pastoral charm of a wise peasant—
his look assuring me we'd once again be stretching our toes
on the pleasant shorelines of enlightenment.

Oh moon of Alabama

The girl at the front who mid-song turned to discuss
the more compelling nuances of that day's soap instalment,
was it her or the players' plummeting conviction, kerplonk,
in the sincerity of their venture that began the wave
of indifference that soon engulfed the entire audience
who, tight-scarfed and back-packed, started in groups
to abandon the performance by way of the corkscrew stair?
The bass is holed below the waterline
and the band are blow-up lifebuoys rapidly leaking air.

When the singer looks round, he's lost at sea;
as if to the valve of some last-hope dinghy, he blows
with desperation into an unresponsive mic.
But his voice cracks like glass and the sharp notes jag,
deflating expectation, piercing the dinghy's skin
so that the hissing punctures now are legion
and the penetrating melodies buckle or lose their point.
The thump from the toms is that of a doomed galley.
All non-essential personnel make gratefully for the alley,

although stalwarts in the remaindered audience hold tight
to meet the end-set silence with relieved applause.
The cellar drains. Songs twitch like fishes on the floor
and the weary writer, thankful of the darkness,
slumps on his amplifier, wondering what went wrong.
He hardly recalls his earlier buoyant spirits
and it's only the face of his loved one—
brought to his remembrance ideally bright and shining—
keeps him afloat as he too skulks quietly to the door.

(Summer 1999)

Of butterflies and bees

I stood to one side of a supermarket car park
and sat for a smoke on an abandoned rust-brown girder
enmeshed in vigorous wild-grown grasses, hardy shoots,
as the melancholy shoppers in red shorts/ saris/ sandals
wheeled to each vehicle a high-stacked silver cage.
The sun unEnglishly vital, I remember, the clean smell of tar
as I watched fat bumblebees excellently hovering/
pollen shopping/ in and out of the grey-haired perfect thistles,
and my mind unfocused, an orange butterfly fluttering
in thorn-to-cabbage-bloom unbroken movement, aptly random,
until drawn in by a single plant leaf, lustrous, waxy,
on a single irrelevant plant stem—as in the fizz of some
wondrous relaxing tonic I sensed my guilts dissolve
so that a puff of animated pollen held in suspension there
and the butterfly stopped still in the motionless air.
And visioning all about me as desolate-peaceful—
the suburbs rubbled, the twin towers of Tesco's now decrepit—
I sat in a greeny Eden raised like a hill above time,
and I thought I saw below me, down the hill, souls in torment
circling, monsters in the trashcans refining anguish,
survivors in the ashes suffering the same; mine too
was down there in the thick of it as the Spanish horseman
galloped by on his way to fantasies impregnable to mere reality—
but how could I hope to help or intervene, as only
in the ad hoc haven I'd invented, in the greenness of it,
could I stub out anguish as easily as the embers of a cigarette
to watch both ash and filtertip nourish in the soil
the tawny bushes as an ideal home for butterflies and bees?

(1999)

Considering good and evil

Death had just polished off the last sponge-finger
when he had an idea for a verse: chewing the dirt beneath
his nails he scribbled the words down lazily—or spontaneously,
whichever way you prefer it—as he looked out
over the clean imagined fields of Hampstead Heath.

Death, of course, had absorbed the pacifist lessons
from the poems of World War One; some of the lines
he’d even memorised, and the one about coughing up blood
in a green sea of gas he liked so much that he’d do it
at birthdays and weddings, at Christmas, on Valentine's.

Leafing through the paper’s pages wearily,
the Sunday news wasn’t all that he’d hoped
in the first days of a fresh campaign. No elitist,
it wasn’t for nothing that they called Death the Great Leveller.
But nor did he think himself unpatriotic, or a defeatist,

for though he’d violently opposed the war of liberation,
he’d supported it too, wishing the troops well: all views
to him were an equally valid expression of subjective
experience. (Later, behind the gauze of a confessional,
he’d earwig a soldier’s session for strategies or clues.)

So if Death is a tank commander, he’s also at home
in jeans and slippers, or propped up on a study chair.
That’s why, when he entered the ancient city, it was no surprise
as he removed his goggles and dusted himself off
that it was his own strong hand that shook his welcome there.

After all, wasn’t he born here, where mum and dad
first pinched the fruit from the master’s private trees?
That landed them in no end of trouble—ie with sex
and death (a "mixed blessing"), an eternity of hard labour;
but also little naughty Cain, and Abel, so eager to please.

How shabby Eden was looking now—
and a lot less lush than he remembered; for all that,
he noted the hilltop palace he’d somehow managed to wangle,
complete with Olympic-size pool and good views
over the arid southern plains, the ascetic Ziggurat.

Now Death stands up, scratches his bony behind,
looks in the mirror. Sensing he’s lost some weight
he adds vitamins to a mental post-it. Into the absence
where moments before had been the last sponge-finger
he conjures up a new last piece on a simple stoneware plate

and, scoffing the cake down greedily, he sweeps
the crumbs to the floor so his wife won’t see them;
returns to the papers, where the problem of good
and evil just makes his eyes glaze over into two marbles:
these roll off down Skull Hill, looking out for a stratagem.

(April 2005)

Cheerful rebel

Cheerful and playfully arrogant,
done up in his boots and his good felt hat,
the slanting leaves that shared his accent
in the wood were smiling like sharpened axes
as he made past the barn and the sheepfold,
his weapon slung over his shoulder
as if he was heading to work in the field,
as per usual, though he was heading for the war.

Yet May fell within weeks and September
went AWOL; now he can’t for the life
of him, as he peers in his bag, remember
the ferns that waved him off: one loaf
of bread is left, and the devious enemy
is taking pot shots from ridges in the hills,
so he can't see their faces—if they have them.
Also, his boots pinch and his hat has holes.

So he crawls on his belly, he's flat on his face
on a slope of crumbling sand and mud
as the clattering hoof-beats of riders race
past above him on a raised dirt road,
and he’s holding his arms in a pincer
about his head, as a child, for camouflage;
he peeks up the mud-bank, where the air
and earth split his vision, half-and-half.

The sky still seems hopeful—if empty—
though the way out leads through a marsh.
He rubs at his side where the hardy
shoots of marram grass dug harshly
into his ribs, and he thinks—on rolling over,
once the riders are out of range—
"I would have laughed when I was younger:
now I just shake and cringe."

A ravenous wolf troop will sweep
through the countryside, ravaging hedge
and crop. Will the copse get the chop
along with the tree of knowledge
of good and evil? To use for another spear
shaft? To lighten a while the dismal mood
around that evening's pitiful campfire?
To ruin the gloom with the surplus firewood?

(Dawlish, 2001)

I really love you, Attila

About ten years ago, I did a reading course in Hungarian (it was supposed to allow us to make use of economics material in the original language, but the lecturers also covered some literature), and I translated a handful of the poems of Attila József. This was a labour of love, for which I sat in the old SSEES library with my English-Hungarian dictionary, splitting the words up one by one to discern their grammatical functions—consulting whatever English translations I could get my hands on for fresh possible connotations.

The best translations available in English at that time were by John Bátki; I still prefer the results of his first effort to those of his second, since the original formulations often seem to me to have more resonance—though perhaps that's because I read them first. (In one brash poem, called Attila József, he addresses himself: "I really love you, believe me. It's something I inherited from my mother".) Since then, the excellent Scots poet Edwin Morgan has produced a pamphlet, though it's difficult to get hold of and I've only seen a few of the individual poems.

As to my own efforts, I hadn't looked at them for some time, until reminded by the title of one of the posts below. Here is the poem in question, with its characteristic "list" form, illustrating the multifarious possibilities of action that the poet seems to be weighing up—illustrating too, perhaps, the anxiety and the luxury of choice. In Hungarian, it's in couplets, but that proved a bit too tricky.

To sit, to stand, to kill, to die
To shove this chair away from me,
to squat in front of a speeding train,
to climb a mountain carefully
or tip my bag out on the plain;
to feed a bee to my pet bug
or with some granny, snuggle close;
to have a tasty soup to sup,
to sneak through mud on tippytoes;
to place my hat on the railway line
or skirt the lake shore in a rush,
or sit on the bottom, looking fine—
or with the breakers, in a flush;
to bloom with the flowers of the sun
or merely to let out a lovely sigh
to drive away a fly—just one—
or dust my book of grit and grime;
to clean a mirror with my spit,
to make a truce with deadly foes—
or knife them all and from the slit,
study the blood as it overflows;
to watch a young girl as she turns
or sit around and twiddle my thumbs;
to light up Budapest so it burns,
to wait for a bird to take my crumbs;

o life, that's writing now this verse,
you tie me up, you let me loose,
you make me laugh, you make me curse—
o life, you make me choose!

(1926)