4 Therefore I sit and contemplate: what man has that is truly his since my life assumes its importance when I narrate it to someone like daylight that is important to the blind who, at least, need to be seen thus I sleep in peace knowing that someone else risks on my behalf, the one they know, only that each morning, just not to betray myself, I have to gather the broken pieces of the nightmare and Uncle Elias, very old, powdered with talc, since he lived humbly, returned each Christmas and spent his evenings making birds, not real ones, just to make sure they wouldn’t lift up the house again; in fact, one night I retried, and I swore with such empathy that the few cloths I had placed in the room almost dried up, yet just that, and the bed, Judas the Iscariot, betrays me to them every morning I therefore preferred to walk aimlessly, a true delight to my kind of people, and then I truly found myself close to my life, like the very sick who love the next fellow and who stand absentmindedly under the trees or wear old pyjamas or die fast like honeymoons and Mr. Such and Such was very joyous when he made money though that didn’t stop him from slapping me two or three times a day so that my poor mother’s milk went bad and we had to exhume her so other seasons wouldn’t be in danger; Besides, how can I learn new tricks at my age? In fact I’d like to stop here for a moment as it happens in old transcribed glorious documents or like the drunkard who stands in front of the icons for a while before he goes to spend the funeral money on drinks and then the expulsions from parish to parish, short affairs with the handrails, mysterious way of wearing the same hat all the time and this woman at the end of the road, so forgotten that her steps are heard from inside all the fairy tales; then there is always a sorrow for ourselves in all our illusions like our true residence that lasts as long as a song.
(If this poem touched you, you may find more about this beautiful book of translations in the following links)
At first, the face of love for me was the humiliated, broken, rejected barefoot beggar. Later a quiet rebellion nested itself in my heart; by then I had grown irritated by helpless love that endured everything, by the sour stench of passivity, by the endless swallowing of humiliation. Instead of the hermits’ Christ who resigned himself to everything, I chose the rebellious Christ. When I arrived home on the day of the awards ceremony, I found my mother crying. My father was delivering one of his endless monologues in a pitch far higher than natural, intoxicated with himself, circling endlessly around his own words. “Where were you?” my mother asked. Silently I handed her the certificate. “What’s this?” my father tossed out indifferently. “Be first in your studies!” Then he threw it aside. That same day, when I was supposed to leave for the reward excursion, my father attacked me with the long wooden ruler for some reason — today I no longer remember why, perhaps there was no reason at all. He beat me until the ruler shattered into pieces. I had only one aim: to keep the blows from reaching my face. I endured it without a sound. I looked at him with cold hatred and with a cruel kind of pity, watching the shameful, helpless rage pouring out of him. That only enraged him further. He could not bear that I never humbled myself before him, never begged forgiveness the way my siblings did. I could not ask forgiveness for something I did not feel was a sin. It was around then that the desire to escape awakened within me. I stepped outside my body, and from then on observed the entire inner and outer chaos from a distance, the world struggling with its external and internal laws, and within it my own self, stripped of meaning. Instinctively I kept away from artificial intoxication — alcohol, drugs, anything of the sort — not out of virtue but out of self-defense: I was terrified of losing sight of myself even for a moment. Later I tried to direct both myself and my surroundings through carefully planned or improvised scenarios. At first it was a game;
The houses I had they took from me. It happened that the times were unpropitious: war, destruction, exile sometimes the hunter meets the migratory birds sometimes he doesn’t. Hunting was good in my time, lots of people felt the shot the others roam around or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale, nor the skylark nor about the little wagtail inscribing numbers with its tail in the light; I don’t know many things about houses I know they have their own race, nothing more. New at first, like babies playing in the orchards with the tassels of the sun, they embroider the colored window shutters and the shining doors over the day; when the architect finishes they change, they shrink or smile or even become resentful with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who would return if they could or those who vanished now that the world has turned into an immense hotel. I don’t know many things about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop even when sometimes, near the sea, in empty rooms with an iron bed with nothing of my own looking at the evening spider, I contemplate that someone is getting ready to come that they dress him up in white and black cloths with plenty of colorful jewels and around him venerable ladies with gray hair and dark lace shawls talk softly that he gets ready to come and say goodbye to me; or a woman with quivering eyelashes and slim waist returning from southern ports, Smyrna, Rhodes, Syracuse, Alexandria, from cities closed like warm window shutters with perfume made of gold fruits and herbs that she climbs the stairs without seeing those who slept under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow easily resentful, when you empty them.
The sandy stretch beneath the Mureş River embankment served as the beach. In summer we went there every day on foot, enjoying the water, the sunlight, watching the girls and women as though the order of the world might remain unchanged forever. Back then the watermill still functioned for a while, the one that had once belonged to my maternal grandparents. And the Rákóczi-Kornis castle had not yet collapsed into ruin — it operated as an agricultural school. At school we committed every prank imaginable. Teachers were still permitted to use corporal punishment. We received hard slaps. Șerban’s method was the cruelest: he grabbed the hair beside one’s ear and lifted until the tuft remained in his hand. Others struck our palms with rulers. If we jerked our hand away, we had to stretch it out again until the blow landed properly. Our hands throbbed for days afterward. That was why the favorite punishment was being thrown out of class. Then at least we could find something to occupy ourselves with. It was a mixed-language school, with Romanian and Hungarian classes. Back then the balance was still more or less even. Later the proportions shifted; the Hungarian secondary school disappeared, and even in the elementary school fewer and fewer Hungarian pupils remained. At that time there were no dramatic ethnic tensions. It amounted to little more than the strongest Hungarian boy, Józsi Türke — who later became my brother-in-law — testing his strength against Grecu, the Romanians’ muscular champion. The children circled around them, each camp proclaiming its own warrior the victor. Church holidays meant something slightly different to us children than to the devout believers. At Christmas we went caroling. For weeks beforehand we practiced Christmas songs, sometimes at our house, sometimes at my friend István’s. Amid the many false, whining voices filling the streets, our singing was beautiful, and those who welcomed our carols praised us for it.
The Lost 1% Finally you turned me into yourself, my love! Or perhaps I’ve been this way all along unable to answer the same way when they tell me “I love you”. Unable to say, “me too…”, or “I also love you.” The phrase almost reaches my lips but is not stated. To observe other men with that sad and full of agony glance, the one I noticed in your eyes for a long time, and not being able to answer. Now I can understand what you felt. I feel the same way. Now, I know what it means for the other person to expect something from your lips and you unable to utter a word. And it is not that you don’t love the person, it’s not that you don’t care for them. The opposite, you care and you hurt more so. But that 1 % that is missing, that you miss and without it the word isn’t said. That 1 % you know you won’t ever find. That, as if you came faulty out of the factory and you miss something, what you’ll never acquire and as a result you’ll never be able to give it to anyone. And you’ll remain like Sisyphus to go up and down the mountain with the weight of love on your back, forever searching to unload it and to offer it somewhere. 70 But there will never be anyone to lighten up your load no one will ever walk along with you up the mountain and no one will ever give you a hand just to stop you from slipping down the slope. Because simply you can’t grasp onto anybody’s hand you can’t grasp onto anything.
– I guess we better get going, I said. We don’t wanna miss our rendezvous. Burt didn’t budge. Finally he said, Ain’t gonna be no rendezvous. He loosened the flaps of his pack and spilled its contents. River rock. I dumped mine — the same. – What’s going on, Burt? – Ain’t no satellite receiver, little brother. Those two buggered off long ago. And look, he said, fingering the napkin map and peering over the edge into the ravine. They were hoping we’d have ourselves a little accident. – But this cable! And the TV store! Burt chuckled. The van was leased, he said. The TV store was rented by the month. I still wasn’t convinced. – I was checking on my stash one night when I overheard the two of them talking. It was all Swanson’s idea. He’s done this before. Bud’s his stooge. – And? – I told the cops everything. Those two are probably in cuffs by now. Burt removed a nylon bag from his pack. – Open it, he said. It was stuffed with paper money, and plenty of it. – Explain, Burt . . . – While Bud was trying to find mine, I was looking for his. A couple of times we almost bumped into each other. With a little help from a friend, I found his first. All the share money, his cut of the TV sales. My brother separated the money into three piles and pointed to the tallest. The bills were stacked like a column of Chinese characters. – I figure we’d turn this in, he said. It belongs to Aunt Peggy and the others. But this one—he stuffed the second pile into the pack— is ours. After all, folks have their TVs. – And the third? – That’s for cousin Mark. A reward. He’s the one found a couple of Bud’s chewed-up toothpicks down by the river and suggested we start digging.
All Cities are the Same at Dawn “All the cities are the same at dawn; they’re all alike” you told me once and I didn’t believe you. When day break arrives to their beds they all sigh the same way. And the night lovers whisper things or embrace each other before they get up and at the first light walk away with heavy footsteps. They wear clothes half undone some inn their underarm when they kiss a soft silent kiss not to awaken the one sleeping next door. And the door closes behind them most carefully, silently. The car is turned on, a sound that seems very loud in the quietness of the night and even the gas petal seems to be half asleep and heavy from being asleep or exhausted from making love all night. And the home they return to is always empty and cold. Only the blackbirds chirp in the garden. Half of the sky is lit and the day commences when you enter the shower to let the water run over it and take away the breaths and sweat of the night. All cities are the same you told me once and I didn’t believe you. Because I saw you leaving and I still wanted you in my bed, to take you in my arms, to breathe your breath one more time and to go back to my dreams. And you kissed me softly and closed the door behind you. How long has since gone? I don’t remember. How many times I closed the door behind me after I kissed someone softly on the cheek and whispered good night? How many empty streets have I driven to reach home? You were so right! All the cities of the world are alike at dawn…they all sigh, they toss and turn in bed, some empty and others full of the all night long lovemaking. Each day break one door closes slowly and one other opens and welcomes the loneliness of the traveller. Only blackbirds chirp in the garden always the same way like the day break. People change. Some leave others come. What difference does it make in which city you are?
Dennis was a top student, the school rep at the Science Fair. Afternoons he skinned cats. – Whatcha watching? – Show about bugs, replied young Ronnie. Fucking stupid. Dennis whispered, Got any smoke? Mrs. Stinson appeared, a towel around her head. Beads of hair colouring sluiced across her forehead. – Burt still not going to Aunt Peggy’s? she asked. The only way the Stinsons could have known about Burt’s recalcitrance was if someone had told them. Someone like Mom. Times like that I’d get these pictures in my head. I could see Al Stinson disguising his voice and mumbling threats into a telephone, the three conspirators having a good laugh afterwards. My brother knew about my visions. He figured I had psychic powers. Aunt Peggy was waiting for us at the bus station. With her was Bud, the latest boyfriend, and Mark, our cousin. Bud walked bull-legged and sucked on a toothpick. Mark was an awkward 12-year-old with eyes the colour of blue marbles. Aunt Peggy said he wore his cub uniform everywhere. – Are you a Sixer yet? asked Burt. Before developing other interests, my brother had been a pack leader himself. – I need one more badge, Mark said. Knots. The five of us squeezed into the cab of Bud’s pickup. Mark and his dripping Popsicle sat on my lap. Bud said, Don’t blink, fellas, you’ll miss the highlights. The town of Coppermine was divided by the Similkameen River, a marauding deluge of glacier-cold aqua roaring through a steep gorge. Mountains loomed on all sides, leaving the few thousand residents in shade for all but a couple of hours a day. The mountains also blocked TV reception. A bridge joined the wealthier west side of town with the poorer east. The narrow wooden span was a popular meeting spot for teens. A resentful congregation dissolved at our crossing. – That road there, said Aunt Peggy, indicating a gap in the trees, leads to the Cherry Creek Indian Reserve. They say all this land belongs to them.
Pip: If you've ever wondered what it looks like when one publisher holds together Greek modernism, Irish wakes, cruise ship romances, and Kabbalistic horror in the same week — well, here we are.
Mara: This episode covers work curated by vequinox across three territories: poems of desire and grief, prose wrestling with spiritual and moral conflict, and fiction that moves through travel, loss, and homecoming.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Desire, grief, and the alchemy of souls
Mara: The poems gathered here keep returning to the same question: what do we carry inside us, and what does it cost to carry it?
Pip: "Entropy" sets the stakes plainly. The poem reads: "motionless, we, the descendants of ignorance, move the voices, the names, the history of waves aren't coming from the outside they are the love of a heart that faces the miracle the alchemy of souls that turns the earth around as the anchor of hopelessness floats between the inexistence and infinity."
Mara: So the upshot is that movement and stillness coexist — we are paralyzed and yet carried forward by something internal, not external. The poem locates history and love inside the body, not in the world.
Pip: "Orange" distills that into two lines that hit harder for their brevity — wilted carnations, two empty bowls, two empty glasses, and then: "life full of desires. Thirst, so much thirst and not a single fountain." "HEAR ME OUT" answers with hunger of a different register, erotic and urgent, mapping a lover's body like uncharted territory.
Mara: "Wheat Ears" pushes back against the pessimism — pundits declare nothing can be done, and the poem's answer is to stand in the plaza holding hands. "Red in Black" frames love as structural, roots and wings at once. "Titos Patrikios" goes darker: a soul that gets used to being whipped and begins to ask for it.
Pip: The Cavafy piece — "Constantine Cavafy" — is the quietest and maybe the most devastating: a mirror that rejoices at having held a beautiful face for five minutes.
Mara: "Kariotakis-Polydouri" gives grief a voice that has gone voiceless: "No voice reaches here anymore from all the powerful things I had." The Ritsos volumes carry that forward — "The Victor" shows a man raised on shoulders in the sunshine while silently crying, and "After the Fire" asks whether surviving a battle is the same as winning it.
Pip: And "Introspection" closes the arc with a Nietzschean prophet who sees the new race of humanity before his eyes, even with his eyes closed — which is either visionary or a very convenient excuse for not looking.
Mara: From the interior life of the poem, we move to something more embattled — faith, institution, and the places where they fail each other.
When belief meets power and the wild
Pip: The posts here put spiritual authority under pressure — from mystical horror to the quiet collapse of a priest who cannot speak the love he is supposed to embody.
Mara: "The Qliphoth" opens in full disorientation. Lucas is strapped to something between a chair and a launch pad, voices layering over each other: "His inner ear is roaring with an echoplex of distant detuned voices, drowning in mutual overlap — Westway music room / dub reverb / his father roaring at the nurses / mother bawling out dumb classrooms in her sleep."
Pip: What that passage is doing is collapsing private trauma and collective noise into one body — the skull becomes, as the text puts it, a flickering moviedrome. Transcendence and violation arrive in the same image.
Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" works the same tension from the opposite direction — not visionary excess but institutional silence. A Brother tells a priest directly: "I do not want your judgments and I do not need your approval. I want your trust and your love." The priest cannot answer. He walks into the forest for three days.
Pip: Three days in the wilderness to avoid a conversation about feelings. The Church has always had a gift for dramatic avoidance.
Mara: "Ugga" compresses the institutional question to its most extreme form — a figure called the Great Homo Digitalis consolidates all scientific discovery and convinces every religion to submit to one universal church, positioning himself as the Antichrist. It's a single dense paragraph, but it reframes everything around it.
Pip: And then "Ken Kirkby" steps entirely outside institution — into the Arctic tundra, where Inuksuit are described as a language of stone, and an eight-inch tree takes hundreds of years to grow.
Mara: The sacred there is horizontal and practical: a stone on a stone means the fishing is good here. No hierarchy, no doctrine — just accumulated knowledge readable by anyone who knows how to look.
Pip: From stones in the tundra to people in motion — arrivals, departures, and the ground between.
Journeys, thresholds, and the weight of return
Pip: The fiction here is preoccupied with thresholds — the moment before entering a room, the moment after a death, the crossing that changes what home means.
Mara: "The Unquiet Land" opens at a graveside. Clifford Hamilton steps forward to eulogize Finn MacLir: "I have the duty and the honour of saying a few words about the man lying in death before us." The grave already holds Finn's wife, Roisin, dead since 1892. Finn's name will be added later. The scene is precise about that gap.
Pip: A quiet, solemn wake for a man renowned for his parties — the gap between the life lived and the life being mourned is doing a lot of work in a single sentence.
Mara: "Small Change" moves to a younger threshold. Rico returns home to an empty house, finds a note, and sits alone in the dark rather than crossing the street to the party. When his aunt Marianna finds him, he holds up papers — something he's worked on — and "suddenly he feels very small, and scared and shy." The stakes are intimate but the weight is real.
Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" puts a piano player named Buddy on a cruise ship, where falling for a passenger is called Man Overboard — so named, the text notes, because a despondent waiter once jumped after being rebuffed. Buddy writes on a coaster: "Her eyes look inside my head and see everything," and underlines the last word.
Mara: "Jazz with Ella" ends a journey rather than beginning one — Jennifer returns from a trip through Russia and Montreal, and when she finally passes through the arrivals gate she almost doesn't recognize her estranged husband waiting with flowers. "Despite herself, a full, warm feeling dispelled the black cloud, if only for a moment."
Pip: "Fury of the Wind" places Sarah at a rural fair in Nimkush, where no one speaks to her except a man named Pong struggling with a table, and a stranger at the bleachers. She is new to the district and it shows.
Mara: "Redemption" finds its threshold over a dinner table — Hermes, his father, and a quiet negotiation about guns and permits that turns into a pleasant evening. "Straits and Turns" gives us Mike, a Greek immigrant in Canada, writing in Hellenic on paper torn from a hand-wipe roll, on an old manual typewriter a friend gave him for free.
Pip: He writes: "Both of us were born close to different seas, mine was the blue Mediterranean and yours the grey Pacific Ocean, yet we bleed the same red blood." A novel about arriving, written on whatever's at hand.
Mara: "Wellspring of Love" closes the set at speed — Tyne is pulled over doing fifteen over the limit, rushing to a hospitalized aunt, and the officer lets her go with a look of compassion she almost misses.
Pip: Small mercies at the edge of crisis. That's most of what travel turns out to be.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the question of what we carry across thresholds — grief, desire, faith, language, the memory of a face in a mirror.
Pip: And whether the anchor of hopelessness floats or sinks. More of that, next time.
sixteen-year-old breasts, long legs, the outline of her female parts where the wet cloth of the suit pulled tight, and I felt a surprising warmth flow down from my racing heart to fill the netted sling in my swim trunks with muscular intensity. I could barely breathe. My head seemed to float above my shoulders, and as I stared like a hypnotized animal, she caught my look and smiled. I never saw her again until that fall. It was almost supper time; the street was deserted and it had begun to get cold. She came right up to me and I felt my chest tighten till I was breathless and a little giddy. I couldn’t read the look on her face. It was amused, but not quite sure of what she was going to do, as if she were crossing a line, or testing something, and there was a challenge too, and I remembered that smile from the summer and I saw it now as something else, something that made me feel a flicker of anxiety along with the excitement and the wonder of this unexpected proximity. She didn’t say hello, or what’s your name, or I know you, she just blurted it out, “Wanna wrestle?” and she was a little breathless too. It was something my friends and I did all the time, but I’d never even imagined wrestling with a girl, much less an older girl who was already a woman, and I didn’t know what to think about that, and before I could think anything, she stepped up and put her right arm around my neck, trying to pull me into a headlock. I slipped out, spun around, grabbed her forearm and wrist and attempted to force her arm behind her back, but she was taller and heavier than I was and she used her weight to push me off balance. She grabbed me from behind, but I squirmed around until we were face to face inside her bear hug, and I could feel her warmth, smell the light fragrance of her deodorant and a deeper, muskier scent that astonished and aroused me so quickly that I could feel my stiffness fit between her legs, and her face looked shocked and she tried to twist away and we fell, and my ankle caught on the curb and she landed on top of me, both of us breathing hard, and I heard a dull crack, and a stab of pain like an electric current that shot up my left leg, and I went pale and started to faint, and she looked scared, rolled off of me, took off at a full run down the street. I lay there catching my breath and wondering what to do next. When I tried to get back on my feet, the pain shot up from my ankle again and I felt a moment of panic. How long would I have to lie here before I could walk? Should I yell for someone to help me?
