GIORGOS CHRISTODOULIDES SELECTED POEMS (1996-2021)
GIORGOS CHRISTODOULIDES
SELECTED POEMS (1996-2021)
Translated from the Greek by Despina Pirketti
Edited by Dr James Mackay
Armida Publications, Nicosia 2021
one hundred shards clinging firmly to each other to feign unity
Smithereens
In the moment
when the cup falls to the floor
and smashes into a hundred shards,
you realize the value of wholeness;
that what we call entire
is on the verge of smashing –
it is that which resists falling
and breaking into one hundred shards,
that which persistently withholds
the sum of its parts,
determined not to let on
that it is as brittle
as a cup
it is
exactly that:
one hundred shards clinging firmly
to each other
to feign unity.
Sources of inspiration
there’s something held in abeyance
that I really need to get off my chest
someone’s watching me as I write
a boor
I can hear him clipping his nails
scratching and yawning then rising
cracking eggs for an omelette
switching on the TV
relishing the day’s gloom
getting worked up over a derby match
puffing on his humungous cigar
sending smoke rings
towards a relentlessly crumbling
grey ceiling
“I could care less about poetry”
he tells me, ripping all etiquette apart
“I actually don’t give a rat’s ass about it”
he cracks up
He thinks he can piss me off
or prompt me to engage
in something more profitable
let’s drink a glass of wine, I tell him,
my treat
once again you have given me
my best poem
A cat keeps me company at night
When I smoke my last cigarette,
too bored to throw the empty packet in the bin,
he starts scratching at the screen door
and pinning me down with his eyes.
There are some eyes can eat you.
He wants his sausage.
After hours of patience, he knows he’s earned it
and I know he’s worth it.
Every night, it’s the same one-act play, over and over.
Me, the cat and Nobody watching us at this hour,
all of us knowing he’s going to get it.
He also knows I never liked cats.
And yet he comes here, crouches down till midnight,
attending my loneliness
(though I never asked for nor needed it)
for a long thin frankfurter,
such a trivial fee.
for
Others would have asked for more.
But he comes to me without so much as a meow.
He doesn’t expect much.
He chooses me over all sorts of animal lovers
with their stroking routines and their fancy food.
to peel a tangerine
cussing i was trying to peel
a highly resistant tangerine
succulent if hard
without having it drip down my fingers
i stopped when i thought of
the day when my hands would no longer
or when there would be no more hard tangerines
only genetically modified ones
soft and available
like some women in the run-down pleasure quarters
of regina street
la perla or san pedro sula
how will i long to be sprayed in tangerine juices then
i dipped my fingers into the tangerine
the juice erupted i sucked every drop
from my fingers, the stains on my clothes
i swallowed pulp and pits
the juice dried on me until late at night
do the same
beat time i told myself
as he looked on bedazzled
Violin-cases
Instruments are nothing but our need
to hear something other than our stupid voices.
Yet through the sound of the violin
you get to grasp the meaning of silence
and death.
Violinists should be dwarfs;
when they die, we’ll bury them in their violin-cases.
The coastguardsman on his return
When I discovered the existence of language,
I began learning beautiful words;
I learned quite a lot,
but they seemed inapplicable.
The people I found worthy
were much fewer than the beautiful words.
The redundant ones
I kept within poems
as a collector keeps pressed carnations
within cardboard boxes or the coastguardsman on his return at night
entombs a shard of glow from the lighthouse
inside of him
to light up in good time.
Secret People
If we’re writing poems
it’s because a solemn child in Thailand
is weaving the sweater of your bosom brand;
another child in Peru
is carrying rocks down the mountain to the mine’s gaping mouth.
If we’re writing poems
it’s because postpartum mothers with swollen nipples
are washing dishes in the seediest kitchens in the tourist area
and fathers relapse into slavery in America.
If we’re writing poems
it’s because their ancestors were buried for 60 years under a rigid plate
in the earth’s crust;
when they eventually rose through a forsaken open well,
blacker than their blackness,
it was as though they saw the sun for the first time.
If we’re writing poems
it’s because boats capsize and sink in the Mediterranean,
their passengers, still holding imaginary tickets, to the bottom of the sea,
even as fifteen-year old Myriam
is released this afternoon enraged from a Jewish prison,
aware of her willing combatant’s body.
All these people might have never read poetry,
never learned about Sachtouris, Walcott, Heaney, Juarroz,
the surrealists, postmodernism and slammers;
still, they have written our poems,
our peace of mind, under a roof,
our names online and in encyclopaedias,
our despicable fame.
They have fed our oversized ambition –
but were never able to nurture their own dreams and bellies.
Right now, I’m writing this poem
because I realize that if it weren’t for them
it would be me, my children,
it would be you –
only shorn of the refined contemplation.
Then, we would have to write
somebody else’s poems.
The adventure of poetry
I drill a hole into the lining of the day
and my years spill out
like change from an unravelled pocket.
I expand the soundscape of my space
by tossing furniture out the window;
My house empties itself with pleasing echoes.
The croaky sound of the broken violin cleanses,
till my neighbour ties its chords to a flying balloon
which trembles toward the stratosphere –
that unknown bliss of freedom!
(it expands and bursts halfway)
I tried to live in the clamour,
but it was too strong,
it kicked me out.
I withdraw myself
from the world
before time gives me the boot.
A large part of me
is made of others;
their remnants fray,
rubbing off on me
like the dry scales of an African cobra.
The beating of my heart
resounds
hollow, as if within a swollen corpse;
the clock is ticking
inside the secret niche of the parting wall.
It signifies something more inestimable
than death.
Trainee butterflies
elevate me up to the mountains of Troodos;
in the curves of the blooming almond trees,
human twigs welcome me.
Their leaves tuck me in.
They want to show me
that beauty is defeated
without love
and that’s why
the ending to a story like mine
might be ambiguous.
Small groups of storytellers
rekindle snuffed out tales;
they strive to lure them
out the shadow that
their flame wrought upon the floor.
Spring
implements an old plan
to strut around, winged
and stately.
Spring
is holding a sign
announcing expired merriness;
to scare me off,
she throws mossy stones at me,
dainty, like their silver-foiled simulacra,
and walks off with a swagger.
Stones bounce like frolicsome girls
and fall into the unknown holes of time.
I dash out behind them -
it’s a steep fall.
I crumble, but retain
an almond tree with bursting buds
on the talus of the rock.
I crumble but in the dictionary of the fall
I find the word “timely”
and grip it.
I’m holding on to it still.
José Saramago’s brown book
I’m reading a brown book.
The author is dead,
the translator is dead,
the main hero took his own life.
I’m still alive.
Sitting on the slope of an unsung moon,
I’m drinking a blond beer.
Who says death
is invincible?
As Stockholm slid away
To the poet Alexei Pourin
Stockholm was sliding past us
as the poet Alexei
who sold wrist watches and other trinkets
in St Petersburg
to make ends meet,
and who spoke no language
other than his own,
made an acknowledgement –
“To my precious friend,
my guardian-angel in this city” –
because I translated dull speeches for him
and bought him a glass of wine
to the health
of far gone Russia –
and a shiver ran down my spine,
a dread
that the courteous gesture
of a humble man
will be preserved in the future
as consolidated memory,
resistant to dissolution by the chemicals
of time and forgetfulness
or not.
Final judgment
I want to stop betraying poetry,
to finally add true meaning to words;
to carry the inner silence in all its magnificence
and submit it before two unprejudiced eyes;
to stand naked beside them, staring
with this innately silly gaze.
Then wait to heed
the lizard crawling over the ruins
the dove fluttering
an olive-branch in its beak.
Basic items
I took two pieces of paper:
One, the grocery list; the other, a poem.
I put them in the same pocket
of my magic trousers.
They became tangled up.
Rubbery words switched places.
The cheese melted so close to the sun,
the eggs crumbled, falling
from the bridge of the verses;
red wine was spilled in a thousand holes yet unopened.
I finally got to the supermarket.
Shadows I bought at a bargain price
And a love affair, dusty from the shelf.
A special opener
for evocative cans of memories
with an expiry date.
The only misunderstanding hit the rabbit.
“Scared witless”, read the poem,
yet slaughtered I found it.
Impulse that flew in through the window
Saturdays back then
had a different colour.
They gave off youth.
The sun’s face more resolute.
At noon,
I added clay to my wings for firmness,
but they brought me tumbling down.
I broke my hands and legs in a daze.
I’ve been hangared for so long.
Today it’s Saturday again.
I’m looking out the third-floor window, smoking.
A cute girl,
accompanied by a ballerina’s melody,
gracefully brandishes a morsel
at the edge of her fingers,
puts it into her mouth
presumably to chew.
The small piece slides deep
down her throat.
The cute girl
turns her back to me.
It feels like she can see me.
I make to walk away, yet I stay.
A magical moment
I’m eating a cold salmon sandwich.
My wife is loving me.
My children will be calling soon
asking me to blow up the ball again
and make the goldfish speak
without gulping down a litre of water.
I’m donning a thought,
attaching wings to it –
it’s becoming a verse
and bursting into flames.
I’m skimming through my latest book.
There are a few good poems there
but I’m preferring other poems
that I find better.
I’m rereading Retamar’s “Blessed are the normal,”
Philip Larkin’s “Dublinesque,”
Tranströmer’s “Alegro,”
“Education for leisure” by Carol Ann Duffy,
“Vassilis Michaelides, the Sublime” by Costas Vasileiou,
“Oblivion” by Kalozois,
“The Child” by Sinopoulos.
I’m reading “The Nereid,”
the padlocks of doubt
are coaxed open,
the prescription for the exact
emotional intake of the day
is gone to the dogs.
Poems are reconciling me
with the law that even a complete fool knows –
that after me
everything will go on unstirred.
It is a magical moment,
the moment the white-clad Elpenor
douses his spectrum
with tears from thousands of previous
eyes –
the moment the tired beast asks his prey
for mercy.
This is an odd balance I have rebuffed a thousand times.
The balance ensures that
if I were to rub Aladdin’s lamp,
I would ask for nothing from the baffled genie.
The slightest addition
I’m afraid
would subtract everything.
In volumes
Just as the deceased
are placed reverently in coffins,
the coffins
in morgue chambers;
just as the pictures of the missing
are hung on police stations;
just as the skeletons
of prehistoric animals
are transferred to museums,
so too do poems
end up in volumes.
Charles Bukowski steals his book from me
And then one day
it came to be that
I had lost the Septuagenarian Stew.
I ransacked bookshelves and cupboards,
even frisked my friend the giant.
I dragged him through the window to pull out his humongous boots
and he was bare
and he was scared
and he was wounded
with broken bones,
falling as he did from the beanstalk every time.
I went to places I once frequented,
to cafeterias
to caves with flashing lights
to my tender statues
that grow alone in provincial squares.
I asked my coach
when I was young and hopeful.
(I found him in our imaginary pitch)
The grass was sown with
thickets, screaming seeds and stinkweeds.
I jumped into tree hollows
where once I had lost my faith,
squatted under low-rise structures,
asked things that come and go:
the dust
the melody
the hunger
war
stray sounds
smitten with silent sentences.
I embarked on the Larnaka-Madrid route once more:
prices plunge
when you return in quest of what you lost.
(because everyone but you knows you won’t find it)
I looked under the seat of the child that sobbed
during the flight.
I asked the turbulence,
the side winds and high-flying birds,
yet returned emptyhanded.
I ventured into his lairs,
the dark dens, the brothels,
into the house where he grew up
with the battering and the demons and the wild cards,
just to find that glass of wine.
It was empty.
On its lip a hefty fly jeered.
Until, despairing, panting and starving,
I realized that you’d probably
come here and got it yourself,
that you’d risen from the grave,
Charles Bukowski,
to steal your bloody book from me.
At noon, I added clay to my wings for firmness
Fuss and feathers
On hushed holidays,
recalcitrant angels disobey God’s commandment
to remain aloof from worldly affairs
and to wash their hands before the multitude –
even ignoring his baleful threats
to proclaim them fallen,
they go instead to visit hospitals, madhouses, orphanages
and charity foundations,
distributing flowers and incense
to the wounded and the deranged,
to poorly planned children. They wear necklaces with astral birds,
birds cut off from their cosmic nature,
fluttering in a frenzy
around small, slithery necks.
On days like these, unruly angels
keep our mystic people company;
they tell them stories about the understaffed branches,
the curbed enthusiasm and poor training
that plague the chorus of angels.
On some,
those who once dreamed of a thrill,
they attach plastic feathers,
stolen from the stockpile of spare heavenly parts.
They feather them up within whitewashed walls
and the feathered ones rejoice. Then –
and this might mean a moment that almost derailed time
but time ordered her back to her seat –
then
they escort them to flying cemeteries,
help to apply the corpses within atmospheric nooks,
fine-tune the wailing,
supervise the transition into mourning,
appease anything that could still be crying,
by quoting a line from the apocryphal guidance of their wrathful father
that says death
is a spoonful of dirt on the palate
a moment before it starts raining for ever.
Parisian Mirage
A parade in Paris.
Who would have thought?
We were heading for Notre-Dame.
There were red-gold uniforms of spearmen,
horses’ faeces in the streets,
love-couples kissing.
La Seine, a threadbare affirmation.
Tourists looking for the right place.
Souvenirs and curious queues of curious people.
The bells will soon toll
and according to schedule
Quasimodo will plunge into the void
in sheer adulation.
Senex Rex
Outside the house next to the school,
there sits an old man.
He comes out at noon,
when the sun is shining,
on his crutches.
He sinks into his shabby armchair
like a weary king;
takes in the sun,
the agitation of giggles,
feigns a smile, but seems bothered.
He looks like a man at the end
of his tether.
I am fixated on him.
There’s nothing more interesting in this neighbourhood.
On days whipped by cold, he withdraws,
retreats deep inside the house,
to the kitchen perhaps, with an oil stove
burning under the floor,
in the secret lair of his youth.
His wife closes the shutters tight
and double locks the doors.
Perhaps she thinks that death might
think twice,
and that with the next shaft of sunlight
the old man will rise again and reign in his court
from his aged armchair.
But death knows all the tropes.
It’s been a while since I last saw
the old man reigning in his courtyard.
Andreas Doe
We meet randomly once or twice a year.
Only yesterday he saw me at the supermarket picking tomatoes.
And again he asked how my eldest daughter was.
- A son, Andreas, now a student.
- Right, right.
Brief pause.
- Is he alright?
- He’s fine.
The same chat each and every time
over groceries gone bad:
at the door of the name-clipper;
at the repair shop for replaced limbs;
in the queues of dry jobless people;
the pavements of the shrunken;
the trenches of the city.
- Lean forward Andreas, no, don’t take a bow, just lean forward.
Strange how someone
can always remember the wrong thing twice.
I noticed a slight tremor in his hand,
though skilfully he tried to hide it by gripping the shopping cart.
I do my best to avoid him
but he persists on sharing his embarrassment.
It’s invincible.
One day he dropped his head.
We ran to catch it downhill.
When I paid the next publisher
to bring out my sixth book,
I mailed it to an unknown address,
certain he would receive it somehow.
Years later, we met again
in the public toilets,
paying for a pee.
- Say, how’s your daughter? I loved your poem about that guy.
I can’t believe that guy! Really now, who is he?”
Incarnations of the watermelon seller
He sells watermelons in front of the bus stop.
In his past life too he sold watermelons
though because in the 17th century there were no buses,
he sold them next to horse and donkey dung,
at the crossroads of the dirt tracks
that joined the pastures.
One time he brought a juicy watermelon.
to the court of the Regina,
didn’t win her favour.
He suspects that in his next life too
he’ll be selling watermelons.
Only he’d like to be
younger,
less hunched
and better attired.
Passing by in my flying car,
I’ll see him
and write the same poem.
The kiosk
Down the street
a kiosk closed.
It just shut down one day.
One morning it simply didn’t open
like a tired man departs
quietly and premeditatedly
for a one-way journey.
The kiosk owners vanished, friendly and decent fellows,
we have never seen them again,
we maybe never will.
Now, every time I pass by,
I glance at the remains of things abandoned
inside the deserted store.
I look at the shape
of what has ceased to be
and I’m surprised to find
it doesn’t look at all like something absent.
Life,
when it goes away,
leaves something behind.
That thing lingers on, gathers
like fluff on the body of time –
and for a while it keeps death from expanding
to where there used to be
life.
April
The forgotten children
are kicking a ball
in the school yard.
It is precisely 3:30.
The sun at this time of the year is compassionate
yet its rays shift northwards,
day after day,
one after the other.
The blond girl,
a delicate key-holder
on tip toes, opens the gate,
then runs outside
to fetch something trivial.
The door is left ajar –
a child notices and hastens
out of bounds
to become a cloud;
another child does the same,
becomes lightning;
the other children morph into droplets and gusts of wind;
the children multiply,
the children evaporate.
This is more or less how,
on that sun-drenched day,
an uncanny storm
broke without warning
over the school yard.
Broken bikes
Their father mended broken bicycles
in the neighbourhood.
Now and then, passers-by brought him theirs.
His two children ran around barefoot
and ragged,
their eyes gleaming with adventure
and its closure,
all day they ran.
Swamped with work,
he almost never took his eyes off them,
but at a sharp point in time,
when the improbable scythed a path through the afterlight,
upon that blind spot
when the neck fails to come full circle,
they slipped away,
mounted two saddles
with punctured tyres,
rickety chains,
broken brakes,
and rode the crest of the dream
On the steep downhill streaked with colours,
where most of
the barefoot children flounder,
they didn’t make it.
In vain he looked for them,
their sunless father.
In silence he looked for them,
only he looked for them.
These, and other incidents,
occur in lightless places.
The dog and the man
There was a man
who had a dog.
He called him Rogue.
He found him dumped in a field,
hind legs severed.
Now, every afternoon,
he dresses the dog in two wheels
and walks him around the block.
Rogue is mad with joy:
his hind legs
are no more.
The man with the doves
Down the street, the dove whisperer
opens the cages every so often to free his charges.
The birds briefly skim the house in circles
until, on his nod, they go back to their proper place.
He’s a hulk of a man,
looks straight to the sky,
but he vanished months ago.
His car no longer parked outside the house.
Strong evidence he broke up with his wife,
took the doves and left,
took the cages with him.
Never again will I witness that surreal spectacle.
The man left behind him windings of contrails,
dried bird droppings on the fence
and soft, sporadic feathers that keep falling
from the timeframe of that space,
wherein the doves
used to fly, mesmerized, for a few moments,
those very doves
that land right here
on this poem.
A woman breastfeeds her baby
It’s perhaps the most beautiful piece of luggage
you can take with you
when you’re left with nothing else
than tokens of remembrance.
A woman in the Piazza del Popolo
lowering her top
just enough
to breastfeed her newborn,
and the newborn clutching at her breast in ecstasy
as you blush with embarrassment
and feign indifference
when she suddenly casts her gaze upon you,
unaware of the beauty of her act,
surprised at your surprise
like any summum bonum
falling short of self-awareness.
Christmas Choir
The lady on the right
wears long carved earrings.
She collects the last scrapings of freshness in one place,
while a buttress of a smile supports her crumbling gaze.
Her face fades
across a cautious translation of time,
her mouth speaks
an unknown language.
The only man in the choir -
tall and broad-shouldered,
must have worked as a guard at some port -
stares at the choirmaster like a small child,
struggling to keep up with her.
Music lends him a willow stick,
but the absence of any itch for joy
dunks him into a hazy swamp.
The lady on the left wears her hair in a bun.
Once blond, still all dolled-up in soft blusher.
Never caught unkempt.
Before she became a mother and a grandmother,
she was a ripple –
broke good many hearts in her prime.
In unison, this lovely choir
performs “Merry Christmas”
like a funeral march.
The song is over and the audience of rats
(mostly community honorees,
prospective municipal counsellors,
PTA members,
church trustees,
relatives, refined ghosts of friends
that attended the event in suit and tie,
just like anyone paying a visit of tender subtlety) --
they must all applaud,
and they do, with cramped enthusiasm.
I am sitting on the twenty-fifth row,
away from every grotesquerie,
but the future bites hard.
The future takes a big chunk out of me.
Forest in the courtyard
He insists on the same plants, always.
He waters them, fertilizes,
caresses,
never prunes them.
It would be like cutting off their arms, he confesses.
“We’ll grow into a forest”,
they tease him,
and he laughs.
“Oh, I have a fairy tale
to put you inside.
You will never grow old,”
he tells them.
The palm tree
As luck would have it, years ago
I found a palm tree thrown away
within my father’s orchard,
barely the size of a child’s open hand.
“No use in planting it,” he said,
“It’s clearly a waste of time.”
And yet I bowed and picked it up.
Now, if you amble through my garden
you see a mighty palm tree
casting its branches over the fence
and singing all the while.
So when they ask me of my kids I say:
“I have five and one almost died.”
Odd jobs
for Theodoros
My son
works with metals
comes home with cuts and abrasions.
He works as a waiter
for tips
withered by gazes.
My son runs errands
the sun inside him dies.
My son harvests olive trees,
his hands black with bitterness.
He’s a good boy, my son,
handsome
everybody loves him.
Sometimes he is summoned
to other jobs.
Sometimes
he is summoned
from the skies
to act the angel,
to haul the wounded.
Small child deep into the future
for Cybèle
you used to hold me tight
in your arms
lest I sank into the sea
lest I stumbled down the stairs
(and plunged into the canines’ stares)
lest I overtired
as I staggered with blind eyes into the fall of night
only from the blast of time
that dragged me
and threw me deep into the future
where I am yet to grow up
did you not protect me
and now
that I need your arms more than ever
to hold onto awhile and catch my breath
now that you should ingest my puffing
and breathe me in
you had to become
the barren twig
of a perennial tree
in an age-ridden garden
my god, when did you wither so?
I gather all the years
in a day I call yesterday
and trace the line that tenderly caressed
my forehead
each time the pear appeared
in a plate on the table
meticulously chopped as always
for fear that it might swerve in my throat
and bring on
yet another choking-induced fit
Nocturnal misadventures
for Cybèle
Before you fall asleep
you have to toss and turn for hours.
The notion of the void is unknown to you.
I always catch you in mid-air,
just before you land,
and place you softly
upon green bedsheets.
I can hear thundering waves underneath.
You’re staring at the ceiling,
I’m peering at the deep sea.
The clang of their words
for Orestes
I remember my first time in school
how I wept in secret
when my mother withdrew her hand
and an ironclad palm
patted me on the back.
Looking back I know
I wasn’t afraid of the teachers
nor the examiners,
my unfamiliar peers,
army officers later on,
professors in college.
It was the frigid cycle of their knowledge I dreaded.
Their words,
harsh, intransigent, loveless,
like empty walnuts cracking,
while my mother’s words
were kneaded in affection.
And now,
as I sense the same fear in my son,
I give him words each morning,
words of love,
to take with him
to have and to hold
when the clang of foreign words
closes in on him.
Fracture
for Ares
the child leans on my shoulder
my shoulder is rough
bones wrapped in muscles
and tendons
the child
longs for his mother’s shoulder
a blossoming cushion
three layers of honey
a tap dripping rose petals -
no, a spillage of rose petals! -
and fervour
my shoulder gives way
breaks into shards
under the weight of the child’s
desire
Errata
I repeat the same errors
in the way I classify things
in my rapports with people
in the way I don’t look at women
in the perception of the best that could be
in what should be left to die down alone
in the prevention of unpleasant events
before you become entangled in their swirl
and spin away
with my children, sometimes invading their world
like an efficient dream-buster
Only later do I grasp these errors
sometimes too late
usually with no gain
since the only thing this knowledge has ever afforded me
is that by now in time I suspect
my current errors
and in the future I predict
that only too late
will I become aware of them
Le jour de ma sagesse
When I was raising my children
I was supposed to know all the answers:
Why is the sky so high?
Why did it lose hope today?
Why can’t we cross the checkpoint?
Why can we cross the checkpoint but we don’t?
If they are the enemy,
why don’t we wipe them out and be done with them?
Are you sure the living outnumber the dead?
On the day I told them I had no more answers to give
and that those I had given already were probably false,
they looked at me in the same way
I had once looked at a sage.
When she crests the mounds, I spurt downhill
Singing
My body carries
the dust of the road you crossed.
My feet bear
the burden of your fatigue.
Long before you were,
my door stood waiting for you.
That unknown carpenter who crafted it. Singing.
Myth 2
He closed his eyes and whistled a tune
urged by an impulse born
in the bosom of utter silence.
It was spring.
The surrounding forest smelled of fresh greenery –
a reserve, a refuge.
Wherever he reached with his hands,
he touched life other than his own.
Then she descended from the moon,
followed the traces of his long whistling.
Laying down, she slept upon his lips.
When you let go of your arms for a bit
I wanted to meet you,
rushed to see you
but I was slow like a Galápagos tortoise.
I commissioned my hands
to bring me your touch.
(my arms are faster than the rest of my body)
They caught up with you, caressed you,
captured your scent,
clasped it firmly within the palms of their hands.
They returned to me overjoyed --
but in their place they found a new pair of arms.
Now new arms have sprouted on my shoulders
that know nothing of you,
have never skimmed your skin.
Rope ladder
she sleeps across the bed
drained
I’m not even sure she’s breathing
next to her
my son
cuddled up in night’s foliage
the moon’s secret rope ladder
will unroll
and again I’ll scale it on my own
she’ll wake up
notice the aimless lingering of the rope
fold it neatly
and tuck it away in the drawer
just like so many other things
the sky unleashes
now and then without much ado
Sea of Happiness
Lately,
more often than before, you escape,
crossing the line of no return.
You become a pale dot
against the horizon - no,
in the wide sea
of happiness.
Drenched, you return,
distant and uncanny.
I make to wipe you
with an infinitude dry and unfailing
that I set free
by transposing a mountain.
Less and less of you I find each time.
Your joy, already misty,
is now the colour of water;
and your touch
is the incorporeal
that caresses me
when I feel nothing.
Persistently I inquire:
I have a sun of my own
hidden in an unmarked sea;
now that the rime is melting
shall I light it up?
It yearns to expose drought..
You do not speak?
Then why do you insist on returning?
Have you ever seen the living revisit the dead?
Why do you insist on returning?
Each time
stranger than before you approach;
each time
like someone else you keep drawing away.
Through the purple tattoos
Mothers with purple tattoos on their calves
come and go by the pitch,
picking grapes
and picking up their children.
They look merrily forlorn.
Their tattoos
are seals to certify
they didn’t always belong.
When love bargained with freedom
someone had a clever idea
to be engraved with a stylus.
Tattoos are a challenge:
“Look here, there was a time when I only wanted to be;
Now I have what I never thought I’d seek.
But sometimes I’m not sure about what exactly I want”.
(they say the owl was a baker’s daughter)
Through the hollow bone of dusk, I see
the rotten marrow of the world flowing like a quiet river,
drying up as it slides toward the future’s empty ossuaries;
and I’m positive that years ago,
by the edge of an ocean,
these mothers
made love behind the tamarisks
in an endless August
nailed firmly to its days,
until the nails erupted
and leaves soaked the hours,
and then these same days
peered across the breadth of the water
for anything that seemed endless,
and scorned redemption
because it didn’t understand,
like a myopic insect wallowing in mud:
if it could trust a human being,
it would confide its awe
for this year’s flurry of flora
that will eventually feed on its manure.
Now I’m getting a tattoo that says
“Never Ends” –
it’s my first,
and I smile discreetly
with coyness
and feeble caution.
Wants to become
lately
our bodies
are crushed
between a staying distance
you at one edge of the moon
I at the other
we look like survivors
of a global disaster
randomly collapsed side by side
you sleep within briars
I lie under the cypress trees
we are separated
by a forest thick
with storms
erupting over my head
even as lovely weather
settles upon your brow
(who are you smiling at)
(who is touching you in your slumber)
but mostly
in geographical terms
I measure
our divergence
you, a lake
that wants to deepen
myself an ambitious heap
that wants to grow
thicker and taller
become if only a mount
Oblivion
Deep, it is very deep
that which stays unfilled
by your absence.
I make to cover it
with an improvised bandage
of oblivion,
yet it insists on asking for you and you alone,
obliging the incorporeal
to yearn for matter
and weep.
How can what is not there
be aware of what it misses?
What oblivious man prescribes
a draught of blank memory
for the things bound to expire
beyond and outside
of anything our days
were meant to withstand?
A crafty stranger
is ensuring precisely
that the dearth of them
weighs heavily
as though they were ever there.
A crossing
For ten years we’ve walked the same woods.
When she comes, I go.
When she crests the mounds,
I spurt downhill.
When I pick twigs and wild roots
to raise my weak fists just in case,
she sends ripples through the nests of the hares,
the lairs of all the orphaned animals.
The geese suddenly get into their stride
lauding their comeback
after heavy rains this year,
the lake overflowed
water spilled into the same track
we’ve crossed time and again.
She hikes the lane of blossoms in love,
as I trudge along exaggerated edges
next to a Venus flytrap flaunting its snapping lobes.
Now it’s as if we’re gliding over flooded time
in an orbit that makes me challenge crossings.
See, I can only depart from the dominion of wishes
to the terrain where trekkers alive and undead
use steel cables to bring down the gates
and go missing over and over.
Flamenco
Madrid, 25.07.2017
The body that swings in front of you
first measured up
to love;
by love it was conquered
and learned to bend without shame.
The body that writhes in front of you
affords the world
a story of lived love.
When Rosa dangles,
digging her heels into the floorboard in the beat,
and André slides his fingers over the chords,
the inflammation of silence recedes.
You say:
“Thankfully, there are still things
that have not been named yet;
thankfully there are still
things that are mysterious
and people peerless in defeated love”.
When Rosa and André
twist their wrists,
the world of the named things
takes a step back.
Prompted by hail
I remember a shower of hail
one afternoon
when I called you at work to say
I’d never seen anything like that before.
Is the clothesline inside? you asked.
Yes, the clothesline is inside,
but for a moment I thought we were outside in the yard
dancing in close embrace.
The book
If love is a book,
only woman can read it.
Man roams between crossroads
wrought by words.
Sometimes ahead,
other times behind,
he errs,
lost somewhere undefined by words,
where words would like to limn enduring landscapes
and establish permanency of love.
But words can’t breathe.
They expire
once uttered
or forsaken
and in the end
man,
roam though he does,
will return to the woman
and together they will leaf through the pages
one by one –
painfully
but now hopelessly,
they will close the book
and put it back
to be read
by their successors.
I used to be a river
Our song, you whispered.
Do you remember it?
I can’t remember a thing.
It’s been so long,
I have puddled.
I was born to a waterfall
that rushes without memory relentlessly,
that rushes so much water relentlessly.
Severed from his source,
he has taken in the entire length of its demise
and the length of his want.
You ask for depth,
but I’ll soon be reduced to a shallow brook,
then thin
into a long imprint.
I can only ripple
my impending dehydration.
Exodus
here
in this place
the heat dry as dust
people leave
their parched bodies
and wend their way through the mainland
all following the same lines
to become one with the sea
as they became one with a woman
who had wanted them silently for years
before they explored her depths
If we’d a desert, I would write about an alarm clock ringing in the flatness
We’re missing so many things down here
If we’d a desert,
I would write about an alarm clock
ringing in the flatness.
If we’d rivers and bridges and
polar temperatures,
people pausing to gaze at the water’s flow or frost,
I’d probably drop a line about that too.
If we had warplanes, I would keep silent.
Then again, we have no railroads either, but I’ve talked
about a train that whistles its way towards me.
Nonsense.
We probably lack great desires,
otherwise they wouldn’t be so few,
those poems that yearn for love while burning bright.
Diligently erasing traces
We will soon say goodbye to yet another summer,
swing the last grains of sand
off our smooth bodies.
One grain will be lost, deep
in the labyrinth of the ear:
it might even be buried with us.
We’ll save a slice of shining sun
in an airtight poem
to be read by the blind and to glare like a crisp torch in the night.
(now the nights are many)
We’ll hide a suspicion of freshness under the tongue.
Over time it will spill across the palate
and a future kiss will taste like the sea.
We’ll make an unexpected love disappear
– as the magician swiftly
makes the startled rabbit disappear –
by labelling it “never-happened.”
Then nobody will be able to steal anything from us
since we’ll have nothing other to do
than take stock
of how another summer
grazed against us.
Two dames in old Nicosia
On Sundays,
underneath the call of the muezzin,
like a free-standing canopy,
old dames exit memorial services,
holding bowls with kollyva.
These they distribute –
not only among those nearby
but also among streetwalkers
that look more hungry
than interested in the ceremonials.
Two dames like these,
when the motley crowd scatters
across serpentine sidestreets,
walk toward me.
“No, no, next Sunday I won’t be here,
I’ll be away,”
one of them basks,
as though this is the most important thing
that’s happened to her of late.
“They invited me.
They invited me so many times
and I finally said yes.”
She utters words slowly,
interposing an enticing pause, triumphant.
These plans she declaims
within spitting distance
of the face
of her beloved friend.
Two girls at the gas station
They work from seven to six,
entitled to a half-hour break at noon.
At night they rub their bodies with a curry comb,
then pick up the scraper
– seriously –
they pick up the scraper
and won’t put it down
until they bleed.
They want to get rid of the smell of gas
and lubricants.
They want to shed
what happens between seven and six.
Indeed, they succeed for a few hours
But, along with the flakes of dirt,
their skin is slowly scoured away;
taken by time, taken by the gas station owner,
taken by anxious customers.
They put their skins up for sale.
Deranged tanners loom.
It’s a meticulous trade,
this transaction,
meant to afford them a different skin,
cheaper if cleaner.
The trimmer of human pelts
fits them for a bargain.
Day breaks.
They take the bus
with their new skin,
stretch it, fine-tune the details,
the folds, the hem, the linings, the silver linings;
(fantasies of Hawaii)
they make it
in time before the final stop
and arrive at the gas station
just like you arrive at work
with a narrow smile,
a new pen,
a crunchy chocolate candy
or a new mobile app.
Stories you comprehend much later
Each noon, in the block of flats’ parking lot,
a policeman chased after us ablaze
in his shorts,
him and the orchard owner.
The first cursed us for playing ball
and ruining his siesta.
He’d grab a wooden stick and rush down
to beat the crap out of us.
The second would howl gibberish,
a brute
with a hard-won certainty he would catch us
in the act of stealing fruit from his trees.
But we were fuller of fire than them
and faster.
It took me years
to suspect
that it was our laughter they hated
more than us
that power and possession
have no love for children.
Salvador dodged a bullet
When Salvador fell off the tree,
we thought he’d dodged a bullet.
Back then, we didn’t know the meaning of death;
we had hardly come out of the egg.
We suspected he was in trouble
when his eyes welled up
and he lay still, exactly where he had landed.
Then memory fails. It lets bygones be bygones
as though to bid: “It’s water under the bridge now,
just focus on the latest.”
We moved and I never saw Salvador again.
But he must have been spared from that fall.
He must have survived it,
because later I found out
he has pulverized by a shell in the war.
The drawer
His bones kept in a drawer
of the anthropology lab
are waiting to be identified.
This was a man who wanted to go places
but didn’t make it. An ill-fated man.
For forty years he was missing.
For five he was presumed dead.
Four years in the lab.
Tucked neatly in a drawer, similar
to that drawer where one time, as a child,
he had hidden a sticky lollipop
to lick later.
Kurdish man at a street protest in my country
He came from afar,
trudged through a desert
that unfurled to keep up with him.
The Turkish smuggler
put him on the boat that took people across the waves –
these shores, or somewhere else.
He didn’t dare ask for a refund
when his wife and son perished at sea.
He carried on, riding a muffled scream.
The phone rings and a voice tells him “in a bit”.
The phone rings in a candle-lit room,
pictures of Öcalan
and a poster, his son’s, of Adetokunbo dunking.
On the plate,
over the half-eaten içli köfte,
wrapped in yoghurt sauce, ever so white,
a cockroach is wriggling
moments after scaling the wall without a care in the world,
ready to walk on air.
The man goes out in his Kurdish scarf,
his breeze rubs off on you,
and joins the others in the square.
He shouts
“Freedom in Afrin!”
“Freedom in Rojava!”
“Freedom in Kyrenia!”
as you cower behind him.
Future return of a missing man
No, that’s not the man
who vanished years ago.
A small boy
roams my memory over and over,
falling without fail
through the cracks
of solid loss.
With his short pants,
unripe skin and
homespun gaze,
he went to war
and, beyond war,
to a missing time and place.
That’s the one I want back,
not this unknown man
etched with a coarse beard
from a distant, dark-swept prison.
Rainbow
Snow in Moscow,
unlikely sunlight in Athens.
Sporadic rain in Prague,
sandstorms in Cairo.
In Nicosia, unusually high temperatures
with a mutedly starlit night.
In Baghdad, the weather is still stormy,
with gales, and an uproar of thunderclaps.
At night, blazing and forlorn faces.
By applying clever mutilation, you can heal the illusion of a limb.
The rainbow has been disarmed.
All curves have been removed, its bend mended,
lest it be mistaken for a WMD.
Matutinal image
The morning exposes on the day’s canvas
an image of frozen immigrants.
Standing at the bus stop,
waiting for an imaginary bus.
They need it to take them beyond fixed routes.
They need it to take them to an ancestral land,
away from employers with soiled nails,
plump ladies ordering them about,
old men melting away alone.
They need it to take them
far away from the crumbling shed
next to the menacing river
the weeds circling the broken door,
the oxidized hinges that squeak,
so as to stop being afraid at night.
They want
to return in time to see their mother,
to smell their homeland once more.
My children will soon go out into the street.
My children will go out into the street to play.
Only they will see the immigrants
boarding the bus.
The shilling
I was barely seven
and that shrivelled old woman
kept her palm open.
I gave her my pocket money – one shilling,
and ran away frightened.
The old woman died as I grew up.
In the ground, time
has cleansed her bones.
Had she not been buried,
you’d see they’re of the same colour
as this year’s August moon.
But what I’m trying to say
is that the shilling I gave her
has since been returned to me
time and again,
gleaming
more than all the other coins
along its journey.
Famagusta 1973
They took me by the hand and led me to the pier.
I can’t remember who they were,
but they loved me.
The morning fog grew denser
as we waited for the ship.
Anticipation
and fatigue
docked first.
My parents
like waxworks
disembarked
and closely embraced my five years
that were there.
Then they held
my five anaemic years
that cowered to the side.
It cost my parents two gestures
to fully embrace the one person
that I was.
My years came together
just like the half-full part of a glass
comes toge ther –
I lumber on to where there used to be a lake
The Undone
How much rain failed to fall
from the qualms of the clouds?
The sky was heavy,
in labour.
It wanted to pelt down
but something stopped it.
An invisible wall, hesitation.
The more you climb it,
the more it rises.
Breaking against it,
tall waves
of love enclosed
in the unsaid,
.dry lives from flooding,
lives that totter
across the frontier
between land and sea.
What happens to all the things
that were not done? you asked.
I suppose they are stowed in dams of dreams,
then channelled
into a thirsty future
with tributaries expanding, vanishing
beyond any drawn map,
drop by drop, watering
the undone.
The caretaker
I have for some time now ceased
to stir up vain questions such as
where does the ultimate drop of life sink
or how do complex nervous systems disconnect
their endings
or who is responsible
for the genetic grief of the universe.
But, mainly at night,
when giants whitewashed with ferocity
scare the clouds
that move in panic
to reveal the gaping depths of the firmament,
I catch myself wondering
who is keeping us asleep in the antechambers
before we are born but also after --
who is preserving our senselessness
with tender caresses
in thick darkness
until we are charged
with that ever so light touch
and like vapours of love we take courage
and find flesh that can travel well
bones that can withstand the shift --
and who keeps on tending to us with diligence
down to the fringes of softness
when, as we awake to terrible spasms,
we are revived
to less existence
than before?
I met the man who remembered everything
because he lived in a country without erasers
and he was miserable.
I met the man who couldn’t recall his own name
because where he lived Alzheimer’s grew everywhere
in fields and plots,
and he was unsung by either joy or sorrow
I met the man who had conquered all his enemies;
he was forsaken because his country was a lonely place,
enshrouded in the solitude of merciless cruelty.
I met the man who had been defeated in all battles –
by other men, by ants and flies,
by creatures who didn’t know how to fight –
because he went to war sad
and came back sadder.
I met the man who had been loved by the beautiful women
and he was unsatisfied because he wasn’t yearned for by
the lovely roses: not just them but
their gardens, groves, irrigation systems and decorative gravel.
I met a motley collection of men;
four-legged ones with pincer hands
three-eyed
two-headed
with nine lives
and none of them was happy.
So, I decided to give in the wisdom of their unhappiness;
I decided that
happiness evades us in all sorts of ways
by faithfully following the best escape manuals,
sometimes devising even more effective ones herself,
even as wisdom is bored with all this
and sits, hands resting on her chins, observing
your escape and your return;
she stays there,
runs ashore inside you and
does chores,
feels your wholes,
fills your holes –
those it cannot fill,
she seals tight.
Daybreak in dewy meadows
It’s three in the morning.
The carob tree, the olive tree and the eucalyptus
stand tall yet alone in dewy meadows.
Had they been humans, they would have frozen to death,
would have run away.
Apparently, living things withstand the chill
because they’re rid of a soul.
Silently they fall in love with the birds,
their sounds
their stillness –
brandish their branches
only when they have something to say.
I’m thinking I should spend one night in dewy meadows
to measure my strength;
if I survive,
I’ll hug the trunk of the eucalyptus
and tell him
I feel you.
I’m still here.
I’ve made it
and now I almost love you.
Let’s talk about hopes
In the face of the untold,
you are hoping for something to happen
and to quell misfortune.
Every Holy Week, as always,
you are glued to the TV,
waiting for Judas to hesitate,
Pilate to dare,
the crowd to finally see the truth:
Peter, if all else fails,
not to deny Him.
Holy Thirst Day
I kneel down by the shore of the lake
after a great war
and soothing waves wet my feet.
The waves of the lake are poised to love,
they have nothing to prove,
only few people drowned in them –
blind divers tow them up in earnest
toward beds in the sky.
I kneel down by the shore of the lake
and now I am sure
that fresh water had always been right:
some robust person has glossed over everything
with discreet frigidity
and crystal tears, exact like stalactites:
the carpenter hacking at the heart of the tree,
the fisherman caressing the fish
before plucking out its eyes,
the resonance that gives me back shrieks
sharper than those I had given her,
God’s huge hands
– one dying eggs red for Easter,
the other meticulously typing the intensity of the cry
when the nail is plunged into
his son’s ankle,
splintering –
The Lake
It hasn’t rained for two centuries
and the earth is begging for water.
I lumber on
to where there used to be a lake
like someone lumbers on
to where there used to be love.
The earth is cracked in squares.
The few fish that haven’t rotted
have grown legs,
have become reptiles.
Lake, I mutter to her –
I will never be able to disregard
what you were
in the moment
when bewildered trees,
before bowing down and falling with a shrill,
raised their trembling hands to the sky
and gutted its hollow sacs.
The case of the word sempre in lake Tampo
A cedar tree is crying on the shores of frozen lake Tampo,
looking forlornly at the lake and crying,
its branches dripping sobs.
Ripples emerge through the cracks of the lake.
The lake gives them back as volatile panting wails,
all the more to upset the cedar tree.
The lake weeps, ice screeches.
A cedar tree is crying on the shores of frozen lake Tampo
because it was once a man who lost his gender, his name;
because the lake was the woman he loved,
but the time had come for people to transform,
forfeiting their gender first,
to become trees, to become lakes --
the most hardened would become mountaintops,
those with the most suffocating melodies
would melt in the oceans,
and the thickest-skinned would become piles and mine walls,
and no one would ever meet anyone again,
and no one would ever be able to hurt anyone,
nor would they be able, during periods of great affliction,
to console each other
on the loss of gender, the leaking of form.
Just like now,
the cedar tree crying,
the lake yearning,
both helpless to come closer,
what with the adamant word sempre
between them.
After the hurricane
When the hurricane struck,
we thought some boorish man had invaded
our home.
It demolished the door,
shattered the vases,
threw down the paintings –
grandfather’s portrait was torn on the cheek.
(it bled)
It ripped off the roofs,
scattered the cars like dry leaves.
It swept everything away and petered out.
But we were saved.
As though by a miracle, we were saved.
Mother thrust us
into her womb.
We opened it like a hatch
and were delivered back to the world.
The worst now over.
From that day I’ve been thinking
that from the fury of the hurricane
I have rescued something priceless
which I no longer know
how to preserve.
mozambique is the wealthiest country in the world
you hear that mozambique is the wealthiest country in the world
you travel there any way you can
by sea
by land
underground like a mole
once there
you are welcomed by two wolfhounds
thrown into a reception centre
you eat mud
choke on it yet survive
shit in a hole
with a miscellaneous collection of others
who also heard that mozambique
is the wealthiest country in the world
you are labelled as imprisoned
labelled as an unidentified moving object
cooped up in there four years
one day you break out
the local police gives the press your mugshot
reporters confirm you are dangerous
their neighbour believes them and double-locks the door
police cars flare up, work double shifts
chieftains put a price on your head
gangs are looking everywhere for you
the peaceful mozambiquan kiosk operator
checks his sbr in his secret drawer
and believes
that you are now a dangerous man
you believe it too
Inactive Human Material
(Bigger with an N)
for George
Floyd
I'm tired of walking,
tired of driving,
explaining,
either talking or not,
observing;
I instructed the Bedouins
to sow my seeds in Sub-Saharan Africa
and I sprouted bigger;
I asked Aborigines
to plant me in the tundras of Australia
and I sprang up eager;
I pleaded with little Muna Zayed from Yemen
to thrust me deep into the fine-grained soil
of her camp
and I grew meagre
yielding meagre fruit.
I want to go to a place forlorn
like that spot behind the ear;
a place forsaken
by both humans and dispersion
like the cavernous mouth of a hungry man.
I'm looking for a highland to bring back to me each morning
the hereditary blindness of my race,
a small expanse of land where nothing will know me
and I’ll have no memory of who I am
neither alive nor dead,
being only still,
inactive,
indifferent,
impervious to tears and rain,
watertight and impenetrable.
I want to be
the passer by caravans in Paris la ville lumière
pretending to see a normal dwelling,
the curious man crossing through the tents
of freezing people under the massive bridges of New York,
the man on a mission
to do important things,
the onlooker of the white cop,
the cop spawned of the Ku Klux Klan,
pressing on a black man's throat.
I want to be like you
Maria, Helen, Persephone, Myrto, Artemis,
who walked right by me,
carrying the load of my memories,
who grazed against me as you went on
the other day on St Justinian street
containing me,
your marrow filled to the brim with me,
acting as though you didn't remember me.
Earthquake
Blunt people,
some formerly sharp-tongued,
emerge through the ruins
and walk over corpses
to descend
the skyscraper’s only staircase.
Their steps light
like a butterfly who found it in her heart to skitter.
The towers collapse without a clang, one after the other,
the streets crack
just as an unchecked swirl of time mangles the skin.
Interior plants that seemed carefree
shake off their branches, trying to shed
a plume of dust from a barrage of crushes.
A piano slides over the slanting floor of the rooftop restaurant,
its keys rattle the last piece of the perspiring pianist
like the sonata of near exhaustion.
The piano falls into the void and splinters
within an impeccable chord of demise.
Through the smoke,
the first riders of bedlam
exit the building;
the sea has come surging into the city to welcome them.
The city is only sea;
the sea is
everywhere.
Invisible bridges
Do we die because we can’t breathe
or do we stop breathing because we’re dying?
You should pay a machine to lift you up,
rent a sound pair of wings to investigate.
It remains to be proven whether those who moved mountains
and piled them one on the other
to proceed from the snowcap
to the kerb of the firmament
actually made it.
That’s the exact import of force you need to live,
as much as to deny life.
There are long bridges that join
cities, shores, even states.
Join distant relatives,
the unknown brother,
the lost mother who vanished
one Monday morning.
There are invisible bridges
that join
me to what I used to be,
you to your future.
Nobody has seen them,
nobody has actually crossed them all the way
but they’re there alright.
Like the Provençal who reads
my verses in French,
peruses the front cover
and wonders about me.
It is always night;
as I make to climb the bridge,
he pores over me
before I dive back into the darkness.
Without us, death would not be
We’ve been killing each other since the dawn of time
(and before) –
we were killing each other before we were born
so that we might be born.
We were killing each other in order to eat,
over plots of land,
over love, without ever learning how to love.
We’re killing each other for more,
killing each other to stave off scarcity –
over influence,
over disputed land,
over plenty of prey and countless fruits of the earth,
over the unmeasurable rays of the sun,
over a broken water pipe.
We’re killing each other because
we’re better at killing each other
than at giving life.
More blood has flowed outside our bodies
than inside them.
All that unnamed grief
more suffocating than the biggest flood,
the ascended wailing
bulkier than seventeen Himalayas;
and all the salvaged music was
a funeral procession,
the hymn of the Cherubim.
We are the genus of repeated death,
killing each other because we are delivered by darkness.
Without us,
death would not be.
Japanese tale
There is a safe way
to annihilate a family
or an entire generation.
A most ancient way,
as yet unattached to official records.
Rumours grow dim over time,
bribed servants hush the facts
and from time to time
a poet devises some truth
that looks like a lie.
This is a way: genuine poverty –
consumptive days,
a barrage of dead ends
without eye-witnesses
because all the participants are dead
across different centuries,
other places,
and alien homes.
It happens when a child falls gravely ill,
the doctor won’t come because he won’t get paid,
there’s no medicine
and the starveling child slips away.
A feverish week later,
the child merges with the stoic shadows,
the father asks for permission and kills himself,
the mother drinks poison,
and a light snowfall
reminds us that sometimes
a kind of indifferent innocence
sets in over the world.
The survivors
Those who come to
have disfigured faces,
and severed limbs.
Their previous gaze is gone.
They sink into a frothy daze
and their words morph into nestless birds.
They take sparks for sunrays,
wounds as a crafting error,
and the victims
as angels asleep.
They take in the entire scene of the accident
without horror –
like the survivors
of a quiet day
– of several quiet days.
The perennial starvation of humanity
we are the healthy ones
waiting for the grave illness
we are the infected ones
waiting for grim death
while an odd fatigue assaults us
perhaps because we have lived for too many centuries
perhaps because we have survived beyond normal
perhaps because we have exhausted ourselves with life
perhaps because we have killed many innocent lambs
and agile squirrels in delight
we are the formerly happy ones
because no caress has ever locked us
into an eternal shiver
the fingers of time morphed into the women
we had loved
perforating us in mid-air
though we never felt their desolation
we decided that our harsh skin was at fault
and took it off like fleece
fed it to the lizards
that throw off their scales, time and again
they dubbed it pleasure
and put it on
but they never thanked us
they only began making out
dressed in our skin
we are the countless ones waiting for the lucky number
of sustainable bliss
the unsuspected ones punched in the face
by corporeal suspicions
we are those that never die as a whole, never entirely out of the blue
because we have devised a death that is slow like smouldering mercury
leaking out of cracked tubes and riverlike veins
through yet another safe prediction
that the future is the bolthole
of the present
Futuristic
these are arid times
not quite as enriched
with a roseate glow
and it’s only getting worse
because the way I see it
in the future
a kiss will be
an X-ray of two skulls
that once
neared each other
front to front
I let out a shriek when I realized that no man can ever really know he is dead
The road between heaven and earth
As I travel on the Koilani-Amiantos road
suddenly I come across
Mister Costas
my grandfather
riding his donkey
at five o’clock of a dawning day.
Where are you headed grandpa? I ask.
The mine is closed;
your need to work expired.
His footsteps,
of many years I assume,
oddly sink into the tarmac.
I follow him with deep yearning,
pierced by sharp nostalgia
and a craving to chat,
now that I have chanced to meet him.
But he only glances at me,
ignores my plea,
and keeps on.
It’s me, grandpa, your grandson.
Your furrowed hands
once held me tight
on this side of the world.
The whole of me used to fit into your palms.
On holidays
you took me to the movies.
Stealthily I would hop inside the film
then come back
moments before you awoke,
a man exhausted by the harshness of your days.
Forgive me,
not a single film do I remember now.
You took the temperature that rose within me
on foot to the doctor for remedies –
wind-stricken
rain-drenched –
you never learned to ride the bike;
over rocks your life unfurled.
I saw through you a long time ago.
You knew nothing beyond love.
How did you haul it? From where?
You beheld vibrating strings,
never heard their sound.
Patience is a big waste dump,
it bears the rubbish of the whole world.
Aren’t you glad to see me, grandpa?
I ask.
He carries on, unperturbed.
How is it possible
that you should be among the living?
We rushed to bury you.
It was May.
How could we ferry you
across gardens in full bloom?
He pauses for a moment
murmurs something I don’t hear
(like sorrow without the shape of its words)
and goes on, bent.
I run behind him
longing to hug him
though I know he avoids it.
Hugging is not for men,
he used to signal.
I lag behind.
He treads softly,
beyond fast or slow,
trained since long in the chambers of silence.
I lose sight of him, he becomes a furtive shadow
as I linger somewhere
like a ghost.
I look around me
colours fade away
the landscape behind the Troodos range
dark blue, leaden,
a feast of ashes
merging the sum of hopelessness
into a discoloured aberration.
I let out a shriek
when I realize
that no man can ever really know
he is dead.
The grave
The person you killed has slithered inside you,
curled up, scared like a stray nightingale
on the awning of your back porch.
He chooses a fenced view
and holds his peace.
You are afraid of his lingering silence,
his mute “J’accuse…!”
piercing through your cells like a howling.
Within you lives the slain man,
motionless as though dead.
He doesn’t ask why;
only fills you up with grass and moss,
and anoints you with scented myrrh.
Prayers ring in your ears.
You become his grave.
Silence
When you keep quiet
the silence stirs up dust around you;
it grinds you after sucking you in
chunk by chunk.
Nobody wants to see
a fragile mouth
among so many remarks refusing
or failing
to record the rushing tanker
that unloads consonants and vowels
in our face
when, by the thousands, the deceased,
with indissoluble mouths
proceed reverently to the silence,
owning it thoroughly --
the same silence that will always favour them.
Because
When you need to talk to someone
as doubt has sprouted in your gut,
or to find a sage
that knows
how the past pours into the future,
and can so clearly read your thoughts
(like an old friend)
(as lucidly as his own thoughts)
when you need someone to talk to,
then you must feel like a castaway
yearning for light in the night,
or even for a splinter of driftwood to grasp
some more
over the turbulent sea or the turbulent mind,
over the tyranny of hopes.
You must be completely lost,
invisible to those who never gave anything away
and never showed pity;
to those whose life was an infectious disease
from start to finish.
You must be visible to the hunted,
scared of your own self
and the world.
This is a good time
to turn to someone
because nobody has ever given
the despondent anything more than a nod of pity,
nobody has ever rolled up barbed wire for the secluded –
because nobody wants to rescue themselves,
(they might want to, but they can’t)
because someone else must be ready to rescue you.
A human being
must be willing to jump into the fire for you,
to track you down
over the muddy road.
And you must believe in that like mad
because if you don’t believe,
if you don’t reclaim your faith in people,
then there’s no point in what we call living.
The agelasts
To chat with my dentist -
between rinsing my mouth
of the remains of beams, buttress walls,
and the injectable anaesthetics she sticks into my gums -
is always interesting;
I asked her how the have-nots fix their teeth
when the cost of a standard dental repair
equals their monthly salary or more.
“They don’t”, she said.
By the thousands, folks are walking about without teeth,
entire flocks are walking about without teeth.
Men, women and their children
- who grow up to inherit their poverty –
all chew without teeth,
smile closely or avoid it
(even though they’ re not always exactly sad)
only to hide the absence of teeth.
The most fortunate among them,
those who have lost their back teeth,
are in a more favourable position.
They can smile more,
even laugh their heart out
and so there are still smiles, even bouts of laughter
within the hordes of the toothless.
No one has died from a lack of teeth
though how many died
because they couldn’t smile?
This is a fundamental question.
Precarious counting
The telegram reads:
A bomb attack claims the lives
of roughly eighty in Iraq.
Obviously, some were left uncounted,
obviously for some they weren’t sure.
Roughly dead?
Roughly alive?
The number seemed good enough.
At school, pupils learn how to count.
One plus one equals two.
Two plus two equals four.
At school, pupils don’t learn
that so and so makes roughly so.
They are not taught
the precarious relativity
of the mathematics of war.
The debt
A debt will always be pending
to those who didn’t make it,
those who weren’t strong enough,
not as adaptive
as most people
that make it.
A debt will always be pending
to those who didn’t cross over
to the next day,
the next week,
because a mountain
loomed before them
and they didn’t have it in them to crest it;
to those who hadn’t drawn up
a decent escape plan,
to those who hadn’t perceived
the window behind the wall,
the pale light that could have shown them
a way.
A debt will always be pending
because you didn’t become the window for them.
You didn’t become the light.
Naval battles
There will always be
ships sailing away
and ships docking
in Marathon and Salamis.
Therefore
some Cynaegirus
will always turn up
with his enormous hands
grasping the Persian warship,
keeping it still –
and, when his hands are cut off,
hanging on by the teeth –
and, when the nape of his neck is smashed
(to let go already),
sinking his teeth into
the hardwood of the stern,
and the teeth will stay sunk,
until first the wood rots away
and then the teeth.
The miracle of life
If you really think about it
we are sustained by a pulse –
along with a thousand crawling details –
enmeshed, entangled with each other,
without so much as an explanation.
This is where
suicides have the upper hand:
they live for as long as they want;
the rest
for as long as they could.
The dead and the things
He dies.
The funeral notice says:
“Our beloved is buried today”.
His personal items
hearken to the wailing of the women,
enduring their temporality.
The motion of death
brings out the immobility of things.
Toothbrush, socks, shoes,
shirts, a watch, a few notes
meant to be revised.
A week later they pile them up.
They burn them (villains!) or throw them in the garbage.
There’s usually something left behind.
The widow finds it
years later.
She cries over it
and puts it somewhere safe.
On days when I looked for my mother
I looked hard in the crowd
I was either brimming or lacking,
parched or immersed,
yet I couldn’t find her.
I went to the land of the shadows
and to the land of the living;
I got down on my knees and begged
the large statues that had skilfully solidified their secrets,
until a pale albatross, tied tightly
around my neck,
whispered to me softly –
“You’re too late in looking for your mother;
she perished before you were born -- then again,
where were you when she asked for her son?”
- and that it was because I hadn’t really yearned for her,
like one yearning for water running
with neither source nor reflection,
just running across the desert incessantly –
that my mother had perished.
My mother –
only through a touch of love,
an improvised miracle,
a sprinkle of rose flower,
will she perceive her offspring
and maybe return.
Katabasis
Down there
there is a whole other world;
the pimp with the black shades, the airs and graces,
the transvestite who wanted to be an artist,
the hunched errand boy,
mister Back Scratching,
the noiseless upper-tier mediator,
the barman with the deeply grooved face,
the bow-tied fox that serves watered-down liquor,
the Russian girl that bled on the snow over the asphalt,
the gentleman with the big Porsche and the big belly,
the old man that wants to top up his engine,
the broken bottle,
the puzzling butterfly.
If it weren’t for the gentleman with the big Porsche,
would the transvestite become an artist?
Would the hunched boy
turn to a shard of light at joyful dusk?
If it weren’t for them and so many others
- visible, invisible, deranged, tampered ones –
if it weren’t for us,
the holy holders of peace,
what would happen?
What would happen if things
turned out different?
House fire
I was driving
across the street,
saw my house on fire
and gasped.
I got home,
left the car in the garage
and took a better look:
there was neither fire
nor smoke.
Could I have possibly imagined the fire?
Was it a mirage?
Was it my panic?
I went up the stairs
to lie down and rest
from labours and illusions.
I woke up years later
and realized that
if I was still alive,
if I could still drive,
I would probably get there too late
to put out the fire.
Or am I –
What am I to make of these fires that I perceive
though they do not burn?
In some darkness of hell
I’m sitting naked on the bench of hell
and it’s night
but the darkness can’t touch me.
I’m sitting illuminated by the torches of the fallen angels
on the bench of hell
because now I can play with the demons
and push them up against the wall
until everything is shrouded in darkness.
I am naked
but also decorated
like a sepulchre in procession –
on the cusp of grit
for a few minutes.
Fear
I’m not afraid of death.
It’s the burning sun I’m afraid of.
I’m so afraid of August’s ghastly heat –
that rather than lying on a beach, being kissed by the sea
I will be buried deep in the earth
in this scorching heat.
Lazarus
On the day after his resurrection,
when Christ had cried out
Lazarus, come forth
and he’d risen from the grave, stepped out of the cave
speechless at first
until his senses had reawakened
until he’d recalled once more how live the living,
he vaguely registered through his daze
the voice of Martha scolding
“But Lord, there is a bad odor, for he has been dead four days”
and he was mortified.
How could he walk among the living oozing with earth?
It was then he began weighing the pros and cons.
If Christ had done the right thing
if he had rightly pulled him back to the light,
that is to say, if he justly walked again,
if it was fair that he should walk again
or if Christ had erred of too much love.
And it stayed with him, this thought,
until he was dead once more,
without ever having lent his lips again to laughter.
The big leaves of the unknown trees
Some trees have leaves that are bigger than humans.
I don’t know their name,
nor am I lenient with myself for this ignorance.
These terrible leaves:
only a God could have drawn them.
I go near them to look closer.
On my last day,
if I get to choose,
upon these leaves I want to lie,
entrusting the last of my breaths
to their swaying.
Resurrection
Again we went to a funeral
and it was lovely.
The mournful mourning,
the gravely grieving,
the slightly forlorn,
the sombrely sunglassed,
the duly attending,
the priest with the sensual lingerie,
the padded mayor,
the well-rounded commissioner,
the honourable MP
with his bank account,
black birds,
bats – those beguiling pets –
and the deceased neatly tucked in place,
supine, eyelids sewn shut,
dressed in his Sunday best,
serene, until that moment when
the perfume of an unknown woman
suddenly flooded the church,
a woman oozing soul and flesh,
a woman without reins.
She was alive by mistake among the dead.
The deceased made to rise,
but no one would open the coffin;
none of the bereaved
opened the coffin for the deceased.
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