sandor csoori

A Thin, Black Band

Since I don’t wake with her,
since I don’t sit at the table to have dinner with her,
since death flowed into my laughing mouth
and I am caught between the rains,
as between slats of the iron fence in my childhood days:
I can see a thin, black band wavering for a long time
before my eyes.
It comes closer, vanishes, once again rises,
as if an eye’s swaying bloodshot vein hypnotized
me from morning till night.

I can se it, too, among the museum’s massive columns
in the slanted, falling sunshine,
before the January statues’ snow-mouths,
and near women’s faces in the market, in the street,
standing on the escalator of the subway.
America fades away within me, the Great Lakes’ light,
like when the lamp is tuned off.
Startled, I look about, and haltingly I begin to believe
that the dead, too, are fickle,
and they won’t sop their secret game
once, while living, they’ve started it.

The wind whirls, whirls upon the lean docks,
tips hats and roofs,
lures water from the middle of the Danube aloft,
and that black marvel dances there, there too, about
the prancing waterspout,
it draws my eyes, lures hem after it,
like a strand of black hair that cannot be caught.

trans by len roberts and tibor tengerdi