The Poetry of Bruce Lewis #1

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FLEUR-DE-LIS

I started to hail a taxi but something came over me, as if some lovely specter of autumn had suddenly approached out of nowhere, like a gypsy prostitute, putting her arm in mine, whispering seductively, picking my pocket, and I couldn't resist walking through the leaf-strewn streets of Budapest at 2 a.m. Alone wandering on the night of a holiday that Hungarians don't celebrate. They save their costumes and laughing at Death for Farsang. Tomorrow, tight-lipped, they will visit graveyards and weep. Maybe I will, too.

A final curtain call for the leaves. The wintering of the sycamore touches me deepest. The leaves are so big, broad, dry, brittle, human. Now they disintegrate with the first rains.

I had started out the evening in a little expat bar called the Mona Lisa. What a wonderful place, really. It had been six or eight months since I'd been in. Little had changed except the paint on the walls. It was now a more vibrant yet soft orange, almost peach with various abstract, artsy squiggles running along here and there at random—still, an improvement over the old nicotine- soaked dull green paint. Alot of the same old faces were there. Damon the Scotsman, tall, thin hair cut shorter now than the afro-like hippie frizz I'd remembered. He'd been a founding father of this place—one of the first barkeeps. Good man. I saw my friend Tamás Papp and we proceeded to get bombed on pints of beer. It had started out a good night.

Eventually, as the evening wore on, the short-sighted new management ran out of beer. I was happy to drink wine but my friend Stan had arrived and insisted we slake our thirsts elsewhere.

So back out into the Old Jewish Quarter night. How delicious, how awe- inspiring are the crumbling facades of Old Pest! I couldn't begin to describe them with any accurate architectural vocabulary. As I grow older, I realize such knowledge is out of any realistic sphere for me. I could get a dictionary and throw some terms around but would it be real? No, only the ache of the alley that curves out of sight, the dragon-skin cobblestones, the sapphire star just to the left of the spire—that's real. Yet, I'm fascinated by the tidbits of history that have come my way. Gibbon's baroque prose remains a favorite. There's a section on Attila-the-Hun. It stands illustrated before me as a section of this wall. All of Europe is depicted in it. A river lined with seagulls runs out to a camp where the warrior made his speech , then died. And recently I stumbled across – in an antikvárium across from the Opera—a copy of Joseph Lengyel's, „The Bridge Builders", which I  read in the Goethe Institute café over one afternoon. Interesting insights into the real István Széchenyi: madness, revolution. His eyebrows dark like a Turk's. Two hundred yards away from where I read his bridge still stands.

But tonight it's Halloween and the leaves are dead. Tomorrow the Dead are dead. But the Streets! Leaves blow across empty boulevards. On nights like this it seems like the whole city is asleep. Perhaps everyone's dead but me, or motionless like on a Twilight Zone episode. Actually everyone's probably in a smoke-filled bar or a cellar disco. No, a group of Hungarian kids are coming toward me, dressed in black. Is that white face makeup for Halloween or is it their natural pallor? They're beautiful with the European paleness of winter. One girl with astonishing blond hair passes me and I get a whiff of intoxicating perfume and turn for a moment to follow it, participating in their youth. But it's no use. I am already quite drunk so I stumble on homeward from square to square.

But before, when  I was drinking with my mates, I remember thinking that, as the alcohol buzz washed over me on the way to the pissoir, as I stood before the sweet fragrance of the urinal deciphering drunken hieroglyphics on the wall, it was sad that such an evening should have to end. My first few beers with Tamás, which somehow seemed long ago, were like the opening bars of a great song—potent, joyous. Then, meeting Stan and a friend of his I didnt know, getting settled in yet another bar—all that merely heightened the effect, the grandeur of this European night. But the conversation, after a time, began to dull a bit: the horror of today's political scene, our jobs, pursuits, women, marriage, tastes in music, books read, movies seen. Then the leave- taking, a twinge of sadness. A tipsy whirling around to walk away. Something drifting apart. Friendship has limitations, and like women or drugs or God, cannot save you from yourself. Perhaps I'll curl up on your sofa tonight, or inside your mother's womb? One mustn't be too demanding of friends. Each seperate little life. Down a seperate street or into a seperate cab. My temptation is to lose myself in another person, to live my life for them and make a deep emotional, even physical bond secure. But this is impossible. At least, that's what people say.

Then, alone with the street. Such delicious thoughts while escaping the cold autumn wind down a side street. Autumn rain brings winter in. The ornate doorway at 13 Dessewffy is a favorite spot for a meditative cigarette and mindless gaze toward the lights of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky. When I finally arrived at its leaf-blown expanse, I'm nostalgic with the thought of 1993, and fallen walls, and of how disoriented my earlier view of this city was. I thought that the Váci viaduct was a bridge over the Danube! For years this illusion persisted with the city's coquettish way of hiding itself from me. Which way is the river? It's whirling around in your brain. Taxis stood at the wheel spoke intersections and my dear friends ( I didnt know where the fuck I was half the time, reeling with imitation baroque as I was) put me into them and I'd be whisked away to my apartment in Buda to a street I couldn't pronounce, besottedly looking at the magnificent and directionally correct view of the Erzsébet Bridge through cozy cab window.

There comes a time when you feel the chill of a reality you hadn't anticipated and you are numbed into old age. Even at twenty six. Suddenly the stain of death is on everything, so why not me? The pattern looms large, like the fleur-de-lis shadows from the banister of my baroque staircase. Down in the crowded Metro every face a symbol of fragile mortality. Budapest is a vast fossil shell network of buildings built for a race of giants that no longer exists! And we have curled up into the void they left. Cut up into apartments. We have built on top of the ruins. But like a palimpsest, the ruins still show through. We are at play among them.

It is dawn--- the sky over east pest lifts me over the water.