George Szirtes

The visionary moment comes just as it is raining , just as bombs are falling,  just as atoms burst like a sneeze in a city park and enter the dark as if  it were the waiting ark. You open your hand and blow the dust. You pick and throw the stone. You make the round  O of  your mouth perfect as light and the tree bends and stands upright in the stolid night.

The eye is drawn to that single yellow star that no wise man will follow. The hunched men in caps, the grimacing woman her eyes screwed up, cheeks hollow. We look and look again until we burn a hole in the paper. We strive to learn from their resignation but it is beyond us. We let them burn.

Love, we were young once, and ran races over rough ground in our best shiny shoes, we kicked at stones, we fell over, pulled faces. Our knees were filthy with our secret places, with rituals and ranks, with strategy and ruse. Love, we were young once and ran races to determine the most rudimentary of  graces such as strength and speed and the ability to bruise. We kicked at stones, we fell over, pulled faces, and doing so left no permanent traces because we fought and fell only to confuse love. We were young. Once we ran races in ghettos, in camps, in the dismal spaces of  the imagination reserved for  Jews. We kicked at stones, we fell over, pulled faces at elastic braces, shoelaces, empty packing cases as if  they were the expressions we could choose. Love, we were young once, and ran races. We kicked at stones, we fell over, we pulled faces.

I have seen eternity and it is like this, a man and woman dancing in a bar in a poor street on an unswept floor. It clings and plots and is desperate, at a point between violence and abjection, between warmth and agoraphobic fear. Let me reverse this and accept the fear. Let me drop all objections to abjection, since life itself  is desperate and has to tread the unswept floor carefully, lovingly, while the bar hovers in eternity. Like this.

What you cannot see through those windows beyond the bare hill is the hand resting on the table, is the man lying still on the bed, is the vague gesture of  the young woman in the hallway as she remembers something that happened yesterday, is the mouse hesitating under the draining board, is the twelve year old boy putting on a record of Wiener Blut that he once saw his parents waltzing to. All that you see is the all-but-naked child on the all-but-naked hill against a naked sky, as if  what you could not see were the question and she the reply.

1 Four poilus in a wood austerely shitting. Death watches them, laughing, its sides splitting. Life is a cry followed by laughter. The body before, the waste after. 2 Could one hear in that wood the gentle click of  the shutter like the breaking of a stick or the safety catch on its climacteric 3 Like the four winds. Like a low fart that rips clean air in two, like urine that drips. Four squatting footsoldiers of  the Apocalypse. 4 Kiss them lightly, faint breeze in the small  leaves, be the mop on the brow, the sigh that relieves. Let them dump and move on into the dark plate of  the unexposed future, too little and too late.

Were I to fall in love all over again, it would be with this low ceiling, with the calm  faces of  the two men going about their craft, and with her, now twisting towards them, beautiful, defiant and free. Because we forget how beauty was once itself and nothing else, how it held its stellar moment in attic and cellar. Because that is what beauty is, this compact with time and the silence of  concentration on one subversive operation, that requires courage and sacrifice and never comes without a price.