Fire, We Say
“What kind of spirit, what sort of fire?”
“What kind of spirit, what sort of fire?”
Flesh, we say. Though I don’t know
your flesh. It isn’t mine to know,
merely hidden, bloody, decaying stuff.
Bone, we say. I hide and lightly touch:
I know its articulation, its perfect
mechanism but it isn’t you, not half enough.
Eyes, we say. My lips feel the rapid
trembling motion of your eye beneath the lid.
Inside your mouth the gentle pink
silkinesses where your body heat
pulses, transfusing tissue,
the eddies of your navel, the secret
valleys between your toes, the spiral
windings of your ears, the cradle
of collarbone and shoulder-blade
where I can drown in your scent
and sleep, those muscles of yours
so toothsome, your heat, your excitement,
the overpowering smell of fresh sweat,
your fierce tight embrace—still none of that is you.
You are living flame. Bone, flesh and blood,
you blaze where decay may not touch you,
you are movement itself, the prime mover,
occupying your body as you might a nest,
my body too, the way that you push onward,
let nothingness too have life, let flame lick sky
it powers and fills, with no source left to light it—
fire, we say: what we feel is the burning.
Anna Szabó was born in Romania in 1972 and moved to Hungary in 1987, where she studied Hungarian and English. She translates into Hungarian, and has worked with Joyce, Plath, Yeats, and Updike. She published her first volume of poetry when she was twenty-three, winning the Petofi Prize for promising young poets. Her poetry has since won every major Hungarian literary prize.
George Szirtes emigrated with his parents to England from Hungary as a child, following the 1956 Budapest uprising. He has published over twenty books of poetry and numerous translations of writers including László Krasznahorkai, Sándor Márai, and Magda Szabó. His translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango won the 2013 Best Translated Book Award.
