Wild Gratitude Read Online Free PDF Page A

dancing.
    He wants to feel the moon’s
    Wild eye staring
    Into their dark faces. He wants
    To vanish into its hard, cold light.
Curriculum Vitae (1937)
    I should have been the son of a wolf
    and a bear; I should have been born
    in a small cave in the forest at night;
    I should have been licked clean by a mother
    with thick fur and a fistful of claws,
    with a roar and a howl instead of a voice.
    I was named after a rampaging King of the Huns,
    but Attila József isn’t a name; it’s a shout
    from a corpse disguised as a man, it’s
    the twelve naked apostles of a lie, an echo
    that steams in the bowels of a mirror, a proof
    that ghosts wear the clothes of the living.
    My father stacked crates of soap in a factory
    and disappeared when I was three, a watery bucket
    with a hole in it, a slippery white arm leaving
    a soapy trail of blood. I was an erratic circle
    rotating from a country village to a mother at home;
    I was an orphaned circle searching for its center.
    There’s a black iron that burns in my lungs
    because my mother washed laundry in an aristocrat’s
    house; she ironed a gentleman’s white collars,
    and creased his gray slacks, and steamed his jackets.
    Sometimes my diminutive mother carried a skillet
    of cold leftovers home for us to devour.
    She slept on a rotting straw mattress on the kitchen
    floor and never thought about the clouds of steam
    rising from her lips, the filthy red kerchief
    knotting in her chest. My mother always slept
    poorly, but she was sweet and respectful and
    kept a clean white apron ironed in her dreams.
    I stole chickens for mama; I stole firewood
    and coal from the Ferenvcáros freight yard; I
    snatched red apples from the baskets at Market Hall;
    I swiped bread; I waited in line for cooking lard;
    I scrubbed boilers in dank basements; I sold paper
    whirligigs and drinking water at the Világ Cinema.
    But nothing helped. When my mother finally died
    I dreamt the full moon was a tumor of the uterus,
    my body was pressed under the purple iron of night.
    Etus and Jolán thought we were starving suitcases
    packed for a house of detention. We were so scared
    that one night we sliced a ripe pear into thirds
    and offered its three soft faces to the darkness
    as a gift of appeasement. The darkness refused to
    acknowledge the fruit, but scavengers accepted it
    gladly. And yet no one—not even the crows—can
    pronounce the misery of a childhood floating
    through the streets at night, hanging on dark windows.
    I served faithfully on the tugs Vihar, Torok, and Tatár;
    I trained as a novice with the dwindling Salesian Order
    at Nyergesujfalu; I taught the Bible to an idiot savant;
    I guarded the huge cornfields at Kiszombor; I clerked
    in a tiny bookstore and trafficked in postage stamps.
    I finished the sixth year of gymnasium stifled by boredom.
    My favorite colors were always blue and yellow:
    the blue of self-forgetfulness, the yellow of suicide.
    At nine I drank a mug of starch in the kitchen
    and faked convulsions to get even with my sister.
    I sobbed, howled, stamped and raged; I foamed
    spectacularly at the mouth, ready to die for revenge.
    At fifteen I put my right elbow on the iron tracks
    and waited for the freight train to sever my arm.
    But the train never lumbered through our village:
    It had already killed a girl farther up the line.
    Oh white owl of paranoia, I was young
    and histrionic, but somebody died for me.
    I was freedom’s serious, dark-haired son,
    a scandalous thief, a tough Hungarian punk paroled
    to a life of corrections. At seventeen I begged
    for radiance between hard covers, and a high court
    accused me of blasphemy. Later, I was prosecuted
    for claiming I had no father and no mother,
    no country and no god, and I was expelled
    from the university for shaking an anarchical fist
    at the world in a small magazine. I was denounced,
    but someone called me an infant prodigy in print,
    a lyrical spokesman for the postwar generation.
    No, I was just an orphan tutoring