Vater by Suzanne Levesque
Translated from Hungarian by Erika Mihálycsa
Summer rebelled but had no rose, no march.
We wrapped ourselves in rains in October, watched run-over
dogs scattered along the road: spilt guts,
blood, hair. Talked in the car of marathoners
of unhappiness who, painting the green blossom of their
three-year loves’ skies nicotine yellow, now sit
with beer can and ashtray in puffy old armchairs
saying, ’here at least we’re home’. Their eviscerated
loves moved first into the bridge’s broken railings, into
a picture, the wall of an unwashed glass and when that
broke too, the pieces were cleared away. We flee
with shreds of summer between our teeth, the weight
of cobwebs on our brains, but on the first mountain slope
a truck forces us into queue. No getting out of here
unless you catapult. Stray movements will not scare off
the shadows. Here, history is but a disused industrial zone. No-one
thinks of eternity after the iron age, they invoke ever
faster dissolving spectres against madness. Outside,
an empty landscape. But the cobwebs are all of wire
and because the victim never sees the execution,
of the death-grinding machinery we are
still in no position to say anything.
~ Gábor Schein
