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István Turczi: Selected poems



SOMEWHERE BUDAPEST

A Chapel Opens In the Heart

Morning’s As A Child’s Doodling

If Only You Were Here

Anna

The Late R.V. Truszova’s Message

As If Motionless

Explorers

Primitive Love

Let’s Talk About Those Women Too

On the Highway

Three Smacks

Nude, At His Fingertips

The End of A New Story

The Sea of Ammonites

The Outsider

E.T.

Friendship

The Shadows of Rubén and Alfonso Converge

Jean Genet

Czeslaw

I’m Thinking of Those

Metamorphosis

Poets Rummaging In My Pocket

Tha Last Gangster

Six Lines About History

Plato’s Dinner

Videre

Two Minutes of Hatred

The 121. Psalm of Geneva

The Gospel According to Matthew

Somewhere Budapest


ANNA

Let me make the moment eternal

when you first clawed into

the flesh of my vanity

your nails unearthed the root

unveiled the hood of my maleness

and you let me blieve you were real

and that in your lap

a silence existed

where cells jumped the synapse

to the marrow of my spinen

then you laughed at me and mourned

our first intimacy drowning

in the eager nest of your wetness

you listened to me and you silenced me

you wrung me out to hang

limp like a bloody loincloth

once you cut the love out of me


THE LATE R.V. TRUSZOVA'S MESSAGE

To Kurtág György's music

lots of lofty thoughts run through my mind

and lots of craziness to live to die to hope to love

add to that more profound words merciless like

childhood fever and a heart heavy on empty

six thousand atomized levels of loneliness

locked out with nothing to hold on to

I am homeless to myself with nowhere to go

what my youth carved crashes around my neck

I no longer feel the undressing fingers of spring

without the strength required to cut myself

dreamless sleep clouds settle into my room

roaring with the incessant roar of silence

ornate frescoes of failure taunt me

to live to die to hope to love languishing

in the ashes of memories to become words

of all the things we've done only to be reworked



A RENAISSANCE MOMENT


The bathrobe falls.

A decadent display of gleaming pearls.

In an instant my great tiled hearth glows,

the fresh soap smell assails my senses.

Your hair is tied up, a loose strand or two

fall on your bare neck. Artful by design,

meant to ignite the center of my sex.

Your demanding glanc slips

Through the wisps of smokey air,

the tense wait that will not take a no.

Suddenly you pull a book off the shelf,

I think it's Moravia, then with maddening

Slowness draw it to the goosflesh of your breast,

Your eye innocently sly. A Rennaisance moment,

the gesture all the more transparent.

You stand in the center, bathed in afternoon light,

Each contour splinters into silver daggers

and transfigures your body, a throbbing Medusa.,

to augment the silence with its sharp geometry.

Pull away the curtain, I'm ready to say,

pull it away akready. I will show you to the world

As a way of making amends.


THE END OF A NEW STORY I lie and whine like a puppy in silence stuffed with your sibilance in the crosshairs of a far-away smile strapped without mercy to memory yesterday I couldn't have imagined I'd get so taken by the wink of a moment I'd scream and smack my head into a wall words that burn burst in my throat and I end up gulping down my shame a cowardly sadness creepss through my veins running would be in vein: my weakness stalks me like a shadow if only I could see you naked once again the shudder of your shoulders that demand for it never to end for your tears to salt my night for your laughter to lie in a jumble tossed all over my bed the hardest is to be able to forgive myself



*Istvan Turczi (1957) internationally acknowledged Hungarian poet, prose writer, translator, university professor of creative writing, editor-in-chief of Parnasszus poetry quarterly and publishing house, Secretary General of Hungarian PEN Center, Chairman of Poets' section in Hungarian Writers' Association. 3rd Vice-President of the World Congress of Poets since 2010. His poetry published in 21 languages, his last poetry volumes came out in Albania, Turkey, France, Taiwan and Rumania. In his country and language he has been published 25 books so far.



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