A Tao of One’s Own II. (excerpt)

In our heads there is
the memory of an ancient world
from the time before our birth,
a sight emerging
from the time of closed eyes.

Landscape with Raft (short story)

Nowhere else will you find as many angel-faced children as there are up there. And nowhere else will you see as many adult faces ravaged by decay and crumbling with rot.

Belong to each other (short story)

If there were a God, and if he had time to cast a glance into the married lives of couples in Budapest, his cheeks would flush red with shame, assuming he had cheeks, assuming he were not merely a waft of air like most spirits. Course he’d immediately deny all responsibility, since marriage was not part of his original design. Man had invented it, cause man had thought it would be a good idea. 

Will I visit your grave? Is there anything there? If there is, it must be, I believe, something utterly different from what is engraved upon the headstone: may the deceased be tied to the bonds of eternal life. Rather this: totus homo fit excrementum. As all else in self-loathing, you hurried this up, making it happen while you were still alive.

Bread Tags (poems)

Ferenc Szijj

At times there is something surprising even in harmless scents. / For example, the scent of urine in roasted coffee. / In everything that perishes, there hovers something / of us, and suddenly, when nobody / is even looking, what happens / or slips away?

At the Western Gate (short story)

I should at first point out that in the two or three years previous, the blows of fate (drought, earthquake, floods) had followed each other in rapid succession. At that time, my father was still an active dancer at the Opera, although it was growing ever harder for him to lift his partners.

the return of the letters (poems)

"The letter / D was the last to arrive. It played in the doorway with / a spotted kitten, took it onto its belly, played hide-and-seek around / its leg, then settled down on a broken-edged / stone bench, and for a long time could not fall asleep."

Flower Eaters (excerpt from a novel)

Hungarian Bride (poems)

Should there be no echo, only noise
We’d miss each other terribly"

like the illuminators (poems)

"so who would dare to name anyone as
father, or kin? like a brook
continually changing its course,
but everywhere reaching the same depth,
so does time step from body to body,
it has no death, no resurrection."