George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and arrived in England as a refugee in 1956. This poem is from his collection REEL, published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2004.
ROUGH GUIDE.
Your image destroys itself, remakes itself, and is never weary. Octavio Paz, The Prisoner.
Impossible to look directly into another’s eyes. Impossible to look into your own. You read the dense book of being like a document you flick through.
Eyes, even an inch apart, are blurs, clouds, like the concept of yesterday which has an entity you sometimes stray into beyond the limits of his and hers,
The unknown: the roughest of the rough guides, and all it says is: you’re here, you’d better make the best of it. You entered by mistake and so you’ll leave. It’s what the route map hides
and languages obscure, the magnetic pull of all you ever see of the beautiful.
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But I have seen the beautiful. I know its contours and the rough guide it provides is blissfully specific: the hand that rides the ridge of the collarbone or moves along the brow,
the perfect form of momentary light in this line or another. It’s what Blake saw at the top of the stair, the terrible earthquake at the root of the flesh we think of as delight.
It’s what you see when you shut your eyes and see, the angel with the whip or a flaming sword that burns your eyes down to the spinal cord, the shit, blood, semen smell of mortality
you get used to because it follows you everywhere and is both beautiful and true.
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