Found in Willow Springs 94
ABOVE / BENEATH
in memoriam—László
Still here he is sitting on his three-legged stool with his secateurs beneath
His grape arbor, my friend, László . . . full of cancer, he says,
And there’s nothing they can do. Not when the cancer’s every place.
And every place there is the foxy scent of fully ripened
Swenson grapes. There’s the Rába gliding toward its meeting place
with the Danube, past László’s father’s vineyard’s rows.
The family tailor shop is on Bükk Utca. Not far from the basilica.
For all at once we’re in Györ—along with musical accompaniment—
Two humming Berninas, their spindles riding up and down. And heels
And soles. The lovely dance between the husband and the wife. Foot pedals.
Shoes and hands. Then German storm troopers. Aerial bombardments
Then. Then Red Army troops. His parents’ deaths. And László,
Seventeen, condemned to Siberia. ‘45 – ‘48. And for starch, not for
Sizing but to stay alive, here’s László eating popular bark. As all the gulag
Wood-cutter-prisoners. And bleeding gums. Scrofula. Unrelenting flux.
Here is the eucharist bestowed in a freeze-killed flock of rose finches
Found beneath a pea shrub bush. Men pocketing and eating them with
Everything inside. And lived and died and died and lived. Relocating here
To St. Paul. To resume tailoring. Growing grapes. Stirring up Bordeaux
Mix. Trees exploded nights. The temperature dropped below 30° Celsius.
What’s true is true. A perfect zigzag stitch. Us now. Drinking Pálinka.
How else. It must be so. Like two starving lynx. Like five starving rabbits
Panic-frozen in their wickered osier pen. Beneath the backyard mulberry tree.
