The Bells Are Calling for Me

From the Hungarian. 

Bells, bells—worms cannot touch their lips.
Bells can't be contaminated. The spasm
of a stroke doesn't shake them. Coronaries
don't kill them. Under sleeping stars and
tolling owls, the bells clang and shiver
on their crowns. Not the bells of poems,
those antique Schilleresque bronze helmets.
They came into the world, yet never grew
old. Real bells, born in Györ. They reached
the white tower by way of the hyacinthine
oxen's drool, on slow, wreathed wheels. So
that the tower might sound. The bells ring,
clang, pronouncing the unbounded poem of
time, keeping us from going crazy on its
wild track. They raise us from the mud,
marry the ragged imagination to the blue
bride, infinity. The bells lament, they
comfort. They advance on the tempest, boldly
striking the white heart of the hailstorm.
Sisters of the mothering marble breasts,
they give the soul sound to suck. From the
Mary-blue dawn's windows, between the platters
of hot ponds and the noon sun, through foliage
or the blouse of snow, whenever calm's needed.
There are no lonely bells, only lonely poets.
The bells converse over the seas. They rattle
lakes in Canada. Far-off fellow countrymen
are shaken beside dark firewalls supported
by whalebone. In remote, snowcovered camps
the bells hug tottering exiles. The bells
weep beneath the falling snow where frozen
boys were stacked on each other like firewood.
Bells, bells—they keep track of me, too.
The bells are calling for me.

Let's go, let's go with the sounding bell,
let's stroll home through the air. With
hair plighted on the lily, with a flogged
face, through smoke. Carefully stepping
on the crowns of poplars so the bird's nest
won't drip blood at our heels. I'm stepping
out for home. For tower and mother. I dare
to be reborn. Strewing my years from on
high. In the bell's sounding, in the blowing
wind, László's taking off his leather vest,
stripping his shirt, and his flesh. I hang
my mad, cracking Lear-face on an oak, like
a soldier's cartridge pouch. As a crib for
the thrumming, wild bees. To be rebuilt
with honeycomb chambers, filled up with honey,
honey. Because it's lost all its sweetness.
I'm not afraid of a sudden dwindling, not
afraid of annihilation. Because now I'm
light, I'm ozone, the stench of lightning
on stone. The star's distant stare, superstition,
moontide. I shine in my father's wine, I
live in mother's bread. Salt and vinegar
now, the small, willed whiteness of life.
A cellule as moved by a kiss as Attila with
his silver helmet and his whip, sentenced
to die at the head of his catkin-scented,
Milky Way Horde. But I reach my goal, I
win. The earth's quaking, the world's thundering
in my flesh. There inside, it's all mine.
I'm being constructed, getting set to be
flesh, bone, fist. I sally forth bloodied
on the damask mountain ranges. You're ugly,
ugly, ugly, they spit at me, the way they
do at the foal. And there I'm spilled out.
The merciless one, full of beauty. A red
thread round my wrist against the blight,
to keep the Woman who rustles through the
maize and smokes babies in a paunchy pipe
from taking me. The wheat's measured out
for the midwife so she can bake up a batch
of burning cakes and draw them like babies
out of the oven. I clasp the light of the
lamp, the sun, the moon, I yank my father's
hat off, pull my mother's hair. I persecute
them even in my dreaming, my fist coming
out of the swaddling clothes to clutch at
invisible reins. Their sinews are plucked,
their bones rattled. They are crippled.
Their knees wamble along through time. They
burn in the sun, drop in cindery sketchings
on the moon.

Earth: ecce terra. Am I gazing at it from
the surface or marveling from the skies?
From dust first, then from the tree, the
tower. Next from a rearing colt of a cloud
at the zenith, intending rain. Sitting on
a grain of dust suffices me, at the foot
of a sweet-scented stalk of dill, and now
I've a tree, land, a little horse, a little
plow, a little crop. But I'm growing up,
earth! To the blacksmith I take iron wings,
a colter. It goes red in the forge, is honed
on the anvil. I trudge in the track of a
wheeled, deadweight iron bird in the furrow.
Blossoms of stubble take a nose dive, alas.
And up come rustbitten rings, Pannonian trash,
rotten spokes, and ringlets of fingers. Earth,
you vomit the spoons you swallowed. I drive
through shrews' nests and ant castles.
Ping-Pong balls: lively lizard eggs lashing
my ankles. The hare bounds from me in its
piss-stained shorts—salt in its ear, pepper
in its eye—I call. But from its barley-
gold coach a chipmunk stares at me like a
landlord. And the bell starts tolling in
me. Earth, you humus, you gray clay you,
expressing and delivering blessing when you're
cultivated, sown humanly. Rows of fat vetch,
clover, and lucerne wallowing on you. Stacks
are your knots of hair, crops the great gold
crosses on your breast. You pour out corn,
potatoes, carrots, and pumpkins. I sit below
the bridge and hear blessing rumbling over
me on wheels, horseshoes overhead. But earth,
you bleak, you stony bench of basking waters,
you pebblefield, you sandy plateau, bridgehead
of drought, where deaths march off in yellow
hats and trousers: to glean what green remains.
Earth, cultivated even under the surface
by unseen little creatures and ugly yet holy
worms, soft, silver-lipped worshippers, composters
of the soil. And ants, building always and
so often in vain. Seated atop Red Mound,
I reach out into the valley with tweezering
fingers, into the throngs, among ants: so,
this one's Uncle Miklosh, Aunt Julie, Aunt
Gisella, that's Imrush, busier than ants,
little Marishka, Ilushka. And these white
pupas? Babies the bustling, the work's all
for. How often they have to pray, to beseech!
When even the bells helplessly fight the
hail clouds. I snatch at ice on the ground,
the image of Mary's there, the saw runs,
like the blue forget-me-not in Carnival candy.
But what I see's Haynau, and Zapolya
with his crown and all that.1 Forget-
me-nots. Even the snake in the garden scarcely
disturbs a flower. But have you seen an
iron chain dragged across the gillyflowers?
I have, and there's no forgetting that! Hungary,
my wrath frames the image of your terrible
gardeners. I'll grow up too, flash across
their windows, my unshorn hair floating with
the moon, my horse leaving no hoofprints.
Although the spy, the dog, is onto my scent,
the cop's been hunting me a good long while.
I keep my vigil on the basalt hill. I drink
the star in the wine above the spring where
the amorous hops embrace. Keeping my vigil
at dawn too, I look at the verdant crop where
naked virgins following hags spread the
wide cambric to soak up the medicinal dew.2
Oh, if only superstition's mares, these women,
raw-green scented, would haul me along: I
could weep as clean as the suffering, wrung-
out cambric in the valley! Here are three
chapels: Margit, Ilona, Anna; with their
whiteness they cover the rascal. Slander,
envy, betrayal: if these don't ruin me, I'll
build churches atop the hill for other names
too, above the gold vines of the volcano.
You earth, what an illusion this world is!
I stroke and thwack the earth.

Doom-doom duh doomdoom, the contrabass grumps.
You must come for the bride before Lent.
They glide on sledges toward Zala over slush,
mouths stuffed with Carnival cakes.3 The
bride's legs muddied, lace bloomers mudsplashed.
Because snow melts under the runners, my
Lord. The wedding guests trudge through
the slop. The tuft drops from the drooping
heads of the horses. The horses sticking
their tongues out, the only decoration displayed.
Doom-doom duh doomdoom, the contrabass grumps
when it's primrose time. The
little mutt slouches off into the grass with
the discarded moonblood napkin. The fly
flies doubled, a great green ticking in the
world. The lake swells, putting on a frog
spittled vest, a green one, gold-enameled
pocketwatch ding-dinging from how many pocketwatches
upon pocketwatchles in its pockets. From
root to crown a string's stretched in the
tree, a string in the bird, a string in the
egg. A string in the boy who spurts his
sperm into a little jar he buries at the
foot of the cherry tree, maybe a drop of
blood will form there, maybe it'll sprout!
Chicks will hatch beneath the shaky beds.
The hen brooding in her basket knocks her
knot of hair awry in her stupor, the bed
creaks because its legs are rosemary, its
legs. The girls whitewash the stable into
a white palace, they scrub, they wash with
tiny hands, and curtains will be wafting
on what were once the piglets' windows. The
sofa's hemlock leaf, lacy green all over—
there we lie, but the old ones thrust us
out of Eden, making room for Yorkshire hogs!
Girls, girls, the dearly clumsy potato-Madonna in their palms.
But ringed fingers grab it, breaking off
the baby's head. Why on earth have so many
bad children! whatever for! There should
instead be plenty of peas, poppy, and cereals.
Chicken, goose, duck, pigs innumerable. Horse's
brat, cow's brat. On with them, on with
them—after which man's brat may breed.
Oh even the bells are astonished, oh. And
doom-doom duh doomdoom, the contrabass grumps.
Long live stallions, bulls, billy goats,
rams, cocks! Long live cows, heifers, mares,
sows, hens, ewes! Long live pairing, mounting,
covering! Long live littering! Long live
the Crop! Excited, kids lie on rabbits,
kissing the wheat's tiny genitalia. And
scratching signs into the great pumpkin,
and shoving at it, tossing it like a Willendorf
Venus, oh doom-doom duh doomdoom, the contrabass
barrenly grumps. I chop the cradle to pieces
in my fury, yet come alive in its ashes.
In the bells' Sunday pealing, I'm joined
to my mate on the needlegrass-covered hill
and we go rolling down to the valley, moaning,
quivering, whinnying in public. Doom-doom
duh doomdoom, the contrabass grumps amazed.
The Boba Gypsies play it beneath a fraying
tent. The contrabass shakes the dust beside
the cemetery. As though a slanted headstone
had been strung for today. The dance in
the dust goes slowly, like an old man. Though not
bitter. The beer's tepid, the wine's mean,
but you can get drunk. Pursing his lips,
he sighs, pondering—the words come faster
then: My dear Latzi,4 my dear gentleman friend,
are you enjoying the Fels-Felsoiszkas Fair?

Earth, where fate equipped our parents for
one mortal dash. The snow melts on their
backs and by summer their skin clatters.
The butterfly can't crouch on them, the bird
can't cry for them, they hear only insect
music and the screek of their sinister stars.
Head first they sprint against spinning clouds
of gnats, beetles run into the juice of their
eyes, their foreheads are ruined by frost.
They stub their toes on stones, they walk
into thistle, tread on snake bones. They hop on
one foot, ludicrous, lamentable. They crawl
on their knees, on all fours, competing at
gathering potatoes. They run with bag, basket,
hurricane lamp, nostrum. The hat has to
be held in the wind, the swan's egg of the
ruptured belly's crust has to be crammed
back in with a fist. They trample the stack
underfoot, panting—and the household cold
clay, their legs attracting the spasm's glittering
grip of iron. Our parents are muddy, full
of chaff, stained by offal and must. They
bend to tie up the green shoots, how they
thump. Their bundle of raffia hisses to
the ground: horsetail at their buttocks.
Their clothes the blue of copper sulfate,
feet the green of May's dung juice. Out
of the polliniferous fields they come in
boots gold to the knees. Bloodstained to
the elbows at pigkilling. Limewhite at limeslaking
as the Angels of the Lord in Sodom and Gomorrah,
averting their faces from the seething. Walking
veiled in mulberryblue when the erysipelas
epidemic is raging. Red with anger. Black
with debt. What's heaven like? They steep
camomile tea there, roast barley to have
malt for coffee. There my father chainsmokes
Herzogovina cigarettes.5 We float on the
smoke of marbled whorls. Arm in arm the
paired parents walk. There's a board made
of cornflower in the pan, a golden-paneled
icon face, my mother's, in the silver of
sugar, ruby of grape. Heaven is the scent
of pine, the Christmas tree in its mangelwurzel
stand. Figures hang there, the cookie dolls,
the edible timepiece, the boot, the embroidered
rooster and gaudy hussar. The stage is lit,
my sister in white stockings jumps from
heaven, her crepe wings useless to her, her
legs give way, never mind, she crawls from
the stage, her this-worldly panties flashing.
Garden of Eden, I'm dazzled into the infinite
when my face nuzzles the rose. After lunch,
when blood descends from the brain and my
viscera thrive, I lie down on a bed of gillyflowers.
A flower's there: its stirring stigmas are
nails, and a little mallet poises over them:
the Golgotha flower. And Palm Sunday's a
horror: I go ahead between windows on the
stubborn donkey of my blood and glimpse my
beat-up face in the mirror, my present and
my future. That's how you end up—a voice
says—when you try to do better, if your
taste's superhuman. Black-and-blue marks—
that's your field of violets.—A souvenir
of hell, souvenir—the devil cries, and
my heart's on a string, sleazy with dread.
I'm translating the signs so you'll know
what I've lived through: I'm lying in the
manger, rats slipping from my drowsy lips,
dropping in my ear because they're also dribbling
from the horse's upturned muzzle more terribly
than glanders. And the horse's hide's on
the scales, only his tail hanging into the
pantry's dust, over him five bitter wounds
on the crosses in the breadboard. And I
tell you that you may know, my mother runs
from the naked weapon in thunderbolts up
to the tower, puts on the bell, the bell
with Mary, terrified. In the bell's pealing,
I pick her hair out of the splintered boards
of floor and lathing. And my mother's the
bell at my feverish sickbed, above the eiderdown—
in hot weather and the Dog Days—
but she too drops at midnight, only Mr. Spielman's
tractors hammering like the devil at my eardrums.
I go on resolving the devil's hellish embellishments
because my father and mother are rummaging in
ruffles like the stomach of a hog dead of
swine fever: the carmine fat, the blackviolet
loops of bowel, the fetid floating hoopskirt's
net! The fata morgana of danger quivers
in the air because a puppet theater stands
in every threshing yard, because hands are
dressed, dressed in pestilential ruffles.
And the dancing and shrieking's loud: cops
beating up on gypsies in the Culture Center
for being apostles of pestilence—who merely
wanted something to eat. We reek of carcass
fat, we make soap. Hellish soap, our cheeks
and hands aching from its granules, the water
rosy in the poplar basin, in the bowl.
Dearest, hell's here on earth, but heaven is nowhere—
says a prince degraded into a drover who'd
give four bits for my whip. Who then boils
like rage in the Devil's or God's iron pan?
Only us, all kith and kin! Our hands in
the air, parents' the highest: the calloused,
the chapped, the dulled by soil, marred by
lye, by soda ash, the eagle-clawed and
the thorn-scarred, the throbbing, the hilly,
the ditchy, the streamy, moony, starry—
the hands of a sorry atlas of the world.

Oragna figa marina gaminafa—Mozart's not
making music here but calling for me like
the Others, because they whispered in one
another's ear and I was led away from the
grasses of the Barbarians. Mozart's not
making music here, I'm just catching his
childlike image on the wind, from the droning
cicadas. Because it floats there before
me, descends, rises again, and would wing
along like a delusory bird—paper's a little
bird. I press its creases with my pinky,
lo, a doll with hair, death standing behind
him and turning the leaves of music. But
he's watching me alone. I also stare at him
with the calves. We read his sweet, milky-
pearly composition, his very first:
oragna figa taxa-fa ma-rina ga-minafa. The
wind can't carry it anymore. I fold it like
a wing, hide it in my satchel. I collect
wings and don't even know I'm collecting wings.
They're white, black, angelic, demonic. Wings
of the skylark who crashes into my aimless
slingshot to make me sob so that sorrow and
grief should also give me wings. Why do
I wade in the rye field soaked to my chin
with dew? Why do I poke around in cradles
in corners for swollen blister-
beetles? Why do I gather diamond-green ashflies—
teeming, fetid hell in a jar? To buy paints
with them so that the wings of color might
be mine too. To paint me a peacock, a mare,
and Ferenc Rakoczi with a flag. To become
a student. Behind me the bells, encouraging
me, supporting me with their foreheads like
bison. Forward, only forward, bravely. And
why did I have to see that dead girl? Whom
the midwives put away with her baby, away
into death? Whom the expert white team's
dissecting in the locked cart shed. The bells
go mad too while I watch it through the crack
in the attic, while the bloodpoisoned body's
dressed like a bride and the depraved dear
forehead's bound with the myrtle wreath.
The Magdalen-black wings will carry me. Because
I, I alone undertake her as a bride. We
fly, but below the earth, in the netherworld,
my mate, my country with a black womb, black
veins. Magdalen, Magdalen. Magdalen wanted
to live. A crag, a crag it is with liongrass
where I turn and turn in love and wrath,
revolving around a herdsman's whip, weeping,
losing weight, without food, thirsty, day
and night unceasingly. I make my halo from
a thunderbolt while my ears go deaf and the
forest's green ears are splitting, the birds'
eggs shattering, while Sag Hill sunders before
me and Daniel, the poet,5 steps forth,
opens his book, it's white as winter,
and hands me his snow wings: the brown brows
of his Lolly.

My mother's washing my hair—washing it
for the last time—with lye made of aspen
ashes so that my head will ring like silver,
like the aspen's silver matting. For the
last time she's ironing my shirt too, and
now I'm saying good-bye. Farewell, you inner
recesses furred with autumn's flies, stable-
and kitchenwalls. Now I'm passing beyond
even the vaulted corridors of schools, on
a flinty-odored journey even longer than the
roads … ma-rina ga-minafa. … I drop
words. Call for me now, bells.