Witch's Island and Other Poems

By Peter Hargitai

PETER HARGITAIs work, both in scope and in style, remains well outside the pale of current poetic fashion including the McPoems of MFA mills and the lip- tongue- ear literature of hiphop. Influenced by the great Hungarian poet Attila Jzsefs obsession with the eternal mother as a metaphor for all human longing, Hargitai probes the nature of spiritual exile on terms that are neither Freudian nor Jungian, American, or Hungarian, but on terms that are uniquely personal and movingly human.

Praise for Peter Hargitais Mother Tongue: A Broken-Hungarian Love Song:

If traditional confessional poetry, now considered classical, had its halcyon days in the work of Roethke, Lowell, and Plath, it can be said to have reached a new, ethnically charged peak in the work of Peter Hargitai.

Pembroke Magazine

Peter Hargitai is a remarkable versatile and humanely touching poet with a truly distinctive style and voice. These deeply probing intellectual poems exhibit an impressive range and vivacity of genres."

Laurence Lieberman Poetry Editor University of Illinois Press

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475974591

Peter Hargitai

Dianne Marlene Kress and Peter Hargitai teamed up 48 years ago as high schoold sweethearts in Ohio. She taugh the Hungarian refugee how to speak English so well that he eventually landed a job at the university level teaching English. Retiring after forty years as an academic who even taught Hungarian literature in translation (his own), he plans to spend more time teaming up with his wife as writers in Gulfport, Florida. www.approaching-my-literature.com

Book preview

Witch’s Island

and Other Poems

by Peter Hargitai

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

WITCH’S ISLAND AND OTHER POEMS

Copyright © 2013 by Peter Hargitai.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-7458-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7459-1 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 03/15/2013

Cover: Dianne Marlene Hargitai

Contents

Acknowledgments

Witch’s Island (1728- )

Bird Bath

Wrinkles

Crafting a Kaleidoscope

Electric Sacrifice

Uncommon Cold

MTV Budapest

Wheedling Into Being

Living to Kiss the Page

Mother’s a Racist

Polyphemus

Mad Dog 20/20

Mother’s Visit No. 29

Broken Hungarian Love Song

Trilogy for an Opera Student

Letting Go

ICU Poet

Under the Tongue

Go

Torture of Phineas

Münch’s Scream

Lay Teacher

Unlike Brueghel’s Icarus

After One Martini

She’s 85 and He’s 50

Ezra by the Pound

Hera and the Peacock

Ode to an Owl

Aphrodisiomania

Blood on His Apron

The Conch

Bed Bug

Strangelove

Lithium

Widows and Sons

For Sylvia Plath

Writer’s Block

Arrhythmia of Innards

The First Litter

Seeds

A Brother to Emulate

Balástya Station, 1953

Waving Goodbye

Rebels

Monument

Ode to Beauty

Thumbing a Mannequin

Sleep-Over

A Hero’s Death

Virgin and Child

Cats

A Recitation

Jamming w/ Radio Free Europe

I Call You a Life

Accepted at Oberlin

A Vita

Wildcat Strike

Palimpsest

Inaugural Ball

Facial Tick No. 1

Bored to Death Just Being

Brother Know Thyself

Lavabo

There You Go Again

Dog Is My Co-Pilot

Effort Syndrome

Red Crocodile

For My Wife on Mother’s Day

Winterhurst

Papa’s Schmaltz

Christmas 1995

Lunch at My Uncle’s

Boxer Shorts: A Sestina

Instead of a Lover

Powerwalk on the Boardwalk

Psychotropes

S(ons) and M(others)

Riddles and Death Rattles

Hmm, the Doctor Said

Cubist and Impressionist

La Paloma

Isabelle

Bake Off With Death

The Precise Date of Her Death

Witchcraft

Palms Nursing Home

Not a Whole Lot

Surrounded by Family

Stars

Once Upon a Time

Croaking Siren

On the Ventilator

Ghost Town

Litany of Fear

Icon Man

Vegetable Love

Birds and Bees of Paradise

My Browning Duchess

Edema

Ithaca

My Secret Sharer

One Must Die

Come

Songbound

On My 55th Birthday

Passing by the Freeway

Heart of Stone

The Pietà

The Owl

The Art of Taxidermy

The Tower at Lake Wales

About the Poet

for Dianne Marlene

Acknowledgments

These poems appeared in the following publications to which grateful acknowledgment is made: Sixty Years of American Poetry (The Academy of American Poets, Bruno Navasky, ed. 1996), Nimrod, College English, California Quarterly, Spirit, Blue Unicorn, The Carrel, The Cornfield Review, Palmetto Press, The South Florida Poetry Review, National Poetry Anthology, Dark Tower, Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, The Apalachee Quarterly, Polyphony, Playboy (Hungary), Sands, Vox, Isle of Flowers, The Café Review. The Conch and For Mother’s Day appeared in Forum: Ten Poets of the Western Reserve (Mentor E.V.S. 1978); Ode to an Owl appeared in National Poetry Anthology; Ezra by the Pound first appeared as For Ezra Pound in Dark Tower before appearing in Ezra Pound in Memoriam; Mother’s Visit No. 29 first appeared in the Palmetto Review, and later in slightly altered form in Budapest to Bellevue (Palmetto Press, 1990). After One Martini, and Münch’s Scream formerly titled I Lost My Muse appeared in Dark Tower, 1973. Facial Tick No. 1 first appeared in New Voices in American Poetry, 1974; Seeds and Sleep-over appeared as Anyarozs and Altató in the Hungarian literary gazette Élet és Irodalom; Words appeared as Szavak, Wheedling Into Being as Bálványteremtő ima, and Stars appeared in altered form as Elment anyád in the Hungarian periodical Tiszatáj; Go appeared as Várj csak in Szivárvány; Vegetable Love, S(ons) and M(others), and My Browning Duchess, appeared as Agamemnon in the Hungarian periodical Árgus.

Witch’s Island (1728- )

for the Roma of Hungary

The sun that thawed

Winter all day,

By twilight lay

In one exhausted breath

In the Hungarian town of Szeged

Where tonsured monks

Long dead swarm again

Out of the dark caves

Of the Inquisition.

Except this time they come

As tattooed skinheads,

Tongue-sure and wicked

And armed with sticks.

Like locusts

They invade

Witch’s Island

For Ecstasy and the Rave,

And once again

Darkness is made.

It is said that in 1728

Six men and six women

Danced around an orange fire

All naked, inciting all

To raise the dead

And singe their bare souls

For the great Baal.

Their moans were measured.

It is said that one dark girl

Was dragged forward

To answer for the unspeakable.

She was small and willowy

Her inky skin unholy

Like her heretical idol

In the Bhagavad-Gita,

Thus spake

The tongue-sure rabble.

The light in her Gypsy eyes

Fenced with saffron tongues

As they burnt off her skin.

And she wailed before she died,

Before the hush of holy sacrifice.

And her sinful thighs

Created for the danse macabre

Withered into ashes.

Outside the white circle

There is still no light,

And the locusts reenact

Their murderous chorus

In this awful darkness.

Bird Bath

"There are countries where birds

Quench their thirst in cemeteries."

—Sándor Kányádi

Why is water

So important here

Where there is no time?

Is it to seep through

The root knowing

The tree has a heart

To drive it?

Why do we try