Archive for the ‘Kemenes Géfin László’ Tag
This way to Sàghegy…
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: Canadian poetry, ecopoetry, Kemenes Géfin László, poetry, poetry recordings
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One of the editors here at Poeta Doctus is synchronicity. And, after all, what poetic sensibility isn’t tuned to the rime of meaningful coincidence?
To wit: a friend recently shared a photo from a small town near where he presently lives in Hungary, Celldömölk. Now, it so happens I visited Celldömölk in 1991 to honour the publication of a friend’s avant garde epic work Fehérlófia (the son of the white horse). In the upper right hand corner of the picture, you can see directions to the nearby vulkán, the extinct volcano Mount Ság (Sághegy).
Among other claims to fame, Sághegy is where the epic’s author, Kemenes Géfin László, hid out after participating in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, before he was able to flee to Austria and eventually to Montreal, Canada, where I was fortunate enough to make his acquaintance. Returning to his home town and the flanks of Sághegy thirty-five years later, Géfin was struck by the lushness of the locale, so much he was moved to remark, “There is a god here!”
To honour the occasion, I sat and furiously composed some forty different iterations (I still have the small, black notebook) of what eventually became the second Budapest Suite. To honour this most recent synchronicity I reproduce Budapest Suites II, below, and share a reading of the poem.
Budapest Suites II
for Laszlo Géfin
“There is a god here!”
In wild strawberry entangling thistles,
In maple saplings, a shroud on loam,
In chestnut and cherry blossoms over tree-line,
In goldenrod and grass, every green stalk, bowed with seed.
And there is a god who
Quarries slate for imperial highways,
Mines iron-ore out of greed,
Who would have Mount Ság again
Ash and rock.
And there is a god
In the seared, scarred, spent, still,
For lichen, poppies and song
Here rise from the bared
And broken rock to the air!
“Now who is there to share a joke with?”
The words in this post’s title are Ezra Pound’s when he heard of T. S. Eliot’s death.
By chance, I was reminded that eleven years ago today, 10 June, a friendship of mine ended, one of that kind mourned by Pound at the loss of his friend.
Understandably, this friend, “Laszlo” in the poem, below, shows up in no small number of my poems, by various names. I share here this one, a joke, for those who might get the formal allusion, memorializing the last time he, I, and the third of our trio, all lived in the same city.
A sonnet is a moment’s &tc.
Laszlo, I wish you, and George, and I
were in that calèche, stalled in traffic,
left, McGill’s gate, Place Ville Marie right,
you flying to love in Holland. Straight out
Upstairs you hailed the passing, empty carriage.
We stopped at a dep George ran in for beer,
our cool québécoise driver declining
a draw or drink. Who can say why
she took the route she did, knowing you‘d
lived here forty years? Just, there we were,
Guiness sixpack shared around, a blue smoke
cloud coughing fit, riding high, our post-
Stammtisch Triangulation Finale
for all rush hour to see, invisible.
Poeta Doctus 