who can hear without ears,
and who can feel with their slumbering temple-veins:
where pearls roll from the seas
and blood from the tapped bodies.
Borders? Borders? Torturing dispersals?
Poor hymns, homelessly hiding?
And the wild, pacing falcons
on Bartok's nearby statue-head
seem to them as distant as the flutist of death.
Leaning against a tree, I'm watching
their bumblebee fingers flitting in the afternoon.
I can see they own
thi s day, as well as the sky.
Who can say it's not the hearts
of my new torturers growing stronger in them?
Translated from the Hungarian
by
Len Roberts and Maria Szende
REBECCA SEIFERLE
Welcome to Ithaca
Since "metaphor" derives from transferring
a burden from one to the other, it
was clear, then, from the beginning,
that blood-drenched hall, that it would be easier
to sil ence pI eas for mercy
if heard as the unintelligible
chirping of birds-easier
to string servant girls up like pigeons.
So, Odysseus' heart was a 'dog,' its hackles
rising when he saw the women caught up
in the suitors' arms, someone else's pets,
and only in a dream did Penelope weep
for
her
slaughtered geese, their soft white strewn
round the water trough. When Telemachus strung
a wire between two trees and began hanging
the servant women, one by one, noosing
