Sculptures in Hungary

For Miklos Borsos

A Hun turned sculptor spoke

Of the styles of Etruria. Under a basin-cropped

Black cap of hair, his drooping thick moustache

Was style of the First World War, style of Attila.

His toad-hipped plenteous nude

Pannonia bears

The name of a Roman province, but the art

His barber practised was

For art's sake also: more than a Magyar manhood

Spoke from the hairfringed lip wide in its welcome.

The closed still forms wear from his classic chisel

A smile like an enigmatic property,

But his hid nothing: human, it deserved

Better than I could rise to when he spoke

Of the unfinished as a form of art,

Fragments entire. Not womanhood but, through

Each woman's nub of breast and belly, stone

Spoke from a polished torso in the corner.

Pannonia! her bastion heaped the west

Outside the plateglass of a warm hotel

Against the luminous evening over Buda,

Still in bright cold gradations, grey and rose.

The frogged hussar

Curvetted there on terraces

And men alive in Germany have watched

Where plateglass glares from Pest

The Russian gunflash. When De Gaulle

Advanced upon Algeria

In armoured cars, the colonists

Howled, choking through the teargas, "Budapest!"

He spoke in smiles. His hands braced up the air

Poising ideal objects. The matrix

Adheres a little, Istrian nor Carraran

Not of locale nor race but meaning, "broken".