Andrew Singer
(USA)
a migrant worker’s mild march
Here at close of day the tide’s undertow
of a day’s thoughts and conversations glow
foaming to long, white-limned consciousness –
little closures, triumphs and advances
lap soothing at the twin avalanches
of self, clearing the shore’s sandy mess.
Ready now to put away excuses,
nor cast off the insane mirror twin
who cringes when they tread on innocents
and has not reached desire’s farther shore
– has not reached because cannot swim
and this “I” has not carried him
across (an excuse both true and poor).
I’d had a sense the world matured, but no,
walking in the public garden I know
that the lot of behaviours from the playground
have simply been taken underground.
I do not wish to go through there
with neo-Arpads foisting tricks
designed to repulse Bolsheviks
twenty years after the Cold War.
Measure your reality against mine
and gauge how far we’ve progressed:
some 30+ wars bleed adamantine
across the planet now, taxing the blessed.
There’s a fascination with the ilk of porn;
ferrules mingle in capricious glow unborn,
showing carpenter-wisdom, held in place,
restoring a first held-over meeting
and physically sleeving greeting
in a state like incantatory grace.
Yet here I am very near the border,
the first stop into Austria by train
and many Hungarians are here too
(it was theirs until 1922) –
this week is my Next Defining Moment
though coming next on a continuum
(rather than a splashing grand event
as last summer was, visiting my mum)
and so this border – porous, fickle, kind –
opens and reanimates my mind,
having been prepared by earlier,
deeper jaunts into Austrian terrain –
and by reading Seamus Heaney on Auden
and of course by reading Auden (out loud) –
now there’s a fine new furrow to be plowed
reforming the line for conversation.
Here I’m not freed as-if hypnotically
from traumatic Hungarian concerns
as I have been when working less “locally”
in Austria with other teacher friends –
their native Englishness to couch me down –
and having been in “purer” inland towns.
A storm is brewing over London
the likes of which we have never seen.
Clouds are gathering on Tokyo
(the resonant base of harm we know)
and clandestine harbingers
from a chance bar meeting lingers
leaving soldier blades to realign
some pax illyriana with a finger sign.
And yet here I’ve been with friends
and yet like us will always be:
We gather in appointed inns,
on mountainsides, dancehalls, or by the sea
working out fat and differences,
swapping recipes and yanking pains,
helping to heal Bob, who has saved us
yet once more from our own bad rubber jeans.
We trust that it matters, and it matters,
and how it matters is crazy to say
as a dialectic rain is spurting patters
each on our separate roof along our balding day.
Chris’s strategy is to court death –
he’s shaved his head to meet the rain halfway.
Franc would rather mutter small random epithet
– it’s cheaper and he doesn’t need to pray.
Oh and there’s reality out there:
some kids we seem to teach every day,
staggered, jagged peaks in crisp cool air
and a next fridgeful of petit dejuner.
Is this where I last left off,
when I was last free and alone
i.e. in a state of wholer grace
before the killers locked me down? –
they who express cleverness as moral
to those whom they have wronged
as if considering to reconcile,
in fact just feigning till the talk moves on.
This need (and technique) of integrating
my Hungarian and my other mind
was prefigured (I won’t say it was planned)
by an exercise in live-translating
I gave an advanced class in Budapest:
We’d been working entirely in English
(which for some is a form of stealth,
perfectly false, in which to hide their quest)
when a few weeks ago I photocopied
(remember paper?) a short technical
IT-industry magazine article
for them to translate sentences in class.
What a horrible skein, a cross-neural mess
was cast upon the air in this exercise!
My goal here’s not to blame or criticise
for on that lower shelf of reality
there is no blame, just a biology
of state – electromagnetism
in harmony or not like an off-rhyme.
But the long, years-long reorganization
(not just reconstructing) of my psyche
(endured gratefully following oppression)
has shaken me to a new realization
of the how-to-cure, not only of the why.
Comfortable now on firm white bedding
(an electric church bell chimes half-hours)
and buoyed by a Bahá’í month of fasting
(it helps to hone and concentrate the powers)
I complete this circuit as I elide
the two realities I crave inside,
engaging and seeing, in life all around me,
in border towns throughout this once rent
and deeply scarred, now healing continent,
Europeans meeting each others’ destiny halfway.
Another ritual entry into Spring’s underway.
Long past carnival, Lent ending, past St. Patrick’s Day,
after ides of march and Hungary’s divisive melée,
the Bahá’í fast soon finished at the vernal equinox
and speeding along once more in Euroliner short hops
I write to the mild rattle of the cars’ coupling
and the vacuum-rise and chuffle of things passing.
I’ve a panoramic window on a cobalt sky,
crumble-darkening hills and vast low shopping parks,
shot past complex business cubes
and the countryside’s matte darks. . . . .
Here in the depths of a song we made our peace.
At last the space around me again is me.
I have adopted in positive guise
the conditioning of new Hungary.
This is the application
of my Austrian journey’s kippled balm,
a long local bridge’s instantiation
made possible in present perfect form.
Now it will couch me and no longer harm.
Briefly she thinks of me now as one of you
and London somehow is made safer thereby
as Spring (the music says) has helped Jesus
break up through the mafia life of ice –
breathe air in peace, walk fields, and feel calm.
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BIO
Andrew Singer is a Faculty Lecturer in the English, Comparative Literature, and Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Departments at The Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches courses in European and world literary cultures, literary translation and creative writing.
He directs the Trafika Europe literary project, showcasing new literature in English and English translation from the 47 countries of Council of Europe. This project, affiliated with The Pennsylvania State University, includes an online quarterly literary journal as an ISSN-indexed publication of Penn State University Libraries, as well as a calendar of European literary events, a European literary bookshop, and preparing to launch Trafika Europe Radio, Europe’s literary radio station.
Andrew Singer has an MA in English / Creative Writing from Boston University, where he mentored with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott.
He has taught survey and graduate-level seminars in the history of Anglo-American poetry at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and an advanced three-semester Literary Translation Workshop for Master’s degree candidates at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba, Hungary, as well as assisting British Council with its two-year university poetry translation workshop series in Budapest. Among hundreds of international cultural events, he organized and hosted the principal day-long centenary event for W. H. Auden, in and around the poet’s main residence in Kirchstetten, Austria.
Andrew Singer has also worked as a poet and fiction writer, literary translator and critic, cultural journalist, radio and television host.
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