Two Poems

Abstract

46 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 On Vision Wally Neuzil to Schiele Vision is God’s gift but to me it seems it was not given. All I see is you. This must be the devil’s last offering to me. Yesterday I managed to get into your house as far as the marble staircase but they dragged me out: Fräulein, where are you going? Do leave at once! A man stuck out his head at the racket, it’s you I hoped you’d rush to gather me up but it was someone else. Love is compulsive instinct, you used to say. I would have recognized your brown eyes, their green. Do you remember our Neulengbach landlord? Guess, he kicked me out, told me to find another painter. Do you remember the draught from the windows and how cold I used to get in my black stockings? Our polka-dotted cup, the bread crumbs slowly drowning in the hot bread soup? I imagine you embrace me, your other hand pushes the paint tubes on the floor. The girl-child with the big mane, your model was one half-crown dearer to you than a prostitute. The other day you set an anthill on fire in the park to show me the burning of Troy so they banished us from all public gardens. I thought the ban touched us both but it seems I’m wrong again. This one’s a sure suicide, the man in dungarees walking by me told his mate when I strolled into Praterstrasse. Trust me, I live by the river, I have an eye for ’em. Then the winter boughs lassoed back and held me in my place. You are walking with your wife in Paradise where I cannot follow. Still, for one last time I will sit for you. Wally in wet clothes sticking to her bare skin will be your most scandalous work yet. Of all the cover feature bodies in literature Two Poems by Zsuzsa Takács Masters Whose Doorsteps Masters whose doorsteps I approached in rapture and awe before ringing the doorbell that gave a ululant screech like a siren. A seedy woman let me in the ballroom flooded in chandelier light: the landlady, just reading the gas meter, writing in her chequered notebook, she kindly showed me the way strewn with roses. I knocked; something stirred inside. At the fatigued Come in!, I pushed the copper doorknob but a protruding nail ripped the skin on my hand. I was given coffee, hot and undrinkably strong. In a soiled mug by the cup there was sugar turned to stone; they insisted I take some, but no spoon was in sight. Stranded, I dug my fingers into the fossil: they watched me, mortified. That instant I saw the aluminum teaspoon halfhidden under the lace coverlet. I made to apologize: “I thought it was part of the pattern.” I stirred the dark potion for a while, but at the first sip I dropped the red-hot alt-wien cup back into its cracked alt-wien saucer. They slurped the flame-hot beverage with closed eyes. The muse was chain-smoking, her teeth spotted and yellowish like the fusiliers’ torch-lit cloak on Rembrandt’s Night Watch. The host’s dark eyes scanned me from head to toe, halting on my bleeding hand. His lips curled into a smile. I stood (sat) his gaze like one struck by lightning. I noticed he was wearing white summer gloves and knew at once it was for poetry’s stigmata. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 47 Editorial note: From Tiltott nyelv (Forbidden tongue), 2013. Zsuzsa Takács (b. 1938) is the doyenne of contemporary Hungarian poetry. She started publishing in the early 1970s. Her volumes address both private and historical traumas, the impotence of empathy and language when faced with the suffering of the creature—of a beloved person, or one’s own. She lives in Budapest. Erika Mihálycsa is a lecturer in twentieth-century British literature at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania, a prolific translator from English, and editor of Hyperion magazine, issued by Contra Mundum Press. Viennese girls I will be as you always wanted me to...