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WRITING
When we start writing what is it we want?
To penetrate into this world’s fruit stone?
Or break it?
Sublimate it into imagination
For an imperishable
Universe of words to rise? Or an ebb tide
To leave behind it cobbles of feelings?
Fears and dreams? (The wake of dreams, I mean.
And the others, for the burdensome morrow.) Starting
To write what we always write without stopping
With a string
Of rhythms and scenes. Feeling
That in fact we want nothing ― that
Writing is a nothing universe. And that
This endless writing
Is our destiny.
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I’M WRITING
I write
I wrote
I’ve written.
Fine up to here.
But the future is lacking.
Unidiomatic the imperative.
And the indicative is optative
Euphemism.
An irregular verb, really.
Intricate.
Who can learn it?
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I WANT TO WRITE A POEM
To float on the oncoming waters
To save what was wasted in oblivion
The frail
The bright black
So intricate and simple
So unintelligible
That here it seems still whereas it ascended
To the mind’s heavenly pockets,
Stone
And feather
A blind poem
Without alphabet
Marrow intoxicated in the bones
Saying without saying and flowing angrily
Unsubdued, watering
With sense without sense and rhythm
What noiselessly
Toppled in the darkness.
Sometime
I want to write a poem titled:
“I want to write a poem.”
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MEDITATIONS
“And were you to live three thousand years
Or even thirty million years
Bear in mind
That no one loses a life
Other than the one he lives. Hence,
Long or short, there’s no difference.
Since the present is equal for everyone
Thus equal will be what they’ll lose:
The momentary.
There’s no way they’ll loose either a past
Or a future. Besides
How could they lose anything
If they don’t have it?
Bear in mind that everything is alike and revolving
There’s not much difference
If you see them around you for a hundred, two hundred years
Or till the end of time.
They are always the same. Man
Be he aged
Or young will pass away.
For him the loss is exactly the same.
I repeat: no one stands
To lose something he doesn’t have.
Right now the only thing everyone has is the present.
This was given him, this he’ll be deprived of.”
I wonder whether this account
Resembles a poem in any way.
There’s not a drop of lyricism. No way.
Even I who wrote it
Eighteen centuries ago
― a fragment of meditation
Or a stoic precept
To myself, let’s say―
It never occurred to me
That one day it could
Be emotive as a poem.
Besides, of conviction,
Only slightly does emotion move me.
Nor does poetry befit
A man of action.
Let alone a mighty
Emperor.
Marcus Aurelius
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CYNEGEIRUS
Not even a minute has gone by.
As I was holding the ship fixed
With both hands ―
Lancet? Sword? Thunderbolt?
Cut my left arm right off. It didn’t hurt
As one would think. There was
Only a warn squirt from the shoulder’s cape
And suddenly
Beside it a hand in the water. A strange hand.
Like a strange part of me. Distant.
With what it had held, had caressed an entire life
Writhing like a dying
Fish. Now in an airy
Dancing manner if heads
For the deep.
God, what a hurt heartlessness!
Here you bury yourself in pieces,
And tearless
You embroider metaphors like poets?
Like poets
Who with paper for a shroud
Bury
In each word a remote self.
A strange one.
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THE FLAME OF TOUCH
I’m thinking of Midas, of course. As you are.
The covetous gold that his every touch
Supplied. Then I said:
How come the miracle turned topsy-turvy
And whatever our slightest caress receives
Is burned up
In invisible lightning?
I have no answer.
Regardless that around I see the smoke
Unwinding
Like fictional rhetoric
About worldly matters.
Flagrant stuff for burning
Or fire
That with golden glints
Sides with the Medes announcing
The occult.
Cremate the living.
And though wrong etymology
The uplift
It nonetheless tells the truth.
In this ceremony
Remain sober:
Your skin
An unguarded shelter
To the flame’ s
Tremulous
Touch.
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FIVE PAINTERS
Were you an ignoramus, you’d presume
They were white-collar workers. A dull lot
Sitting in a restaurant corner ruminating on
Recent platitudes. Nothing
About their talk or movements
Betrays the touch of Art.
Nothing
Except for, well, a smile
Or the blank look
Of the oldest one.
This evening, three hours ago, he finished
His most brilliant painting. He knows
That it’ll probably be the zenith of his oeuvre
Now that time is pressing him from all around.
He doesn’t breathe a word. He just listens. Ponders
On the exhibition opening
The comments of his fellow-painters the public’s
Hearty but ingenuous praise.
The critical crown. And later on
Dissertations monographs albums
But further ahead
A prestigious museum wall. He thinks
― Satisfied with the future he’s leaving behind ―
That maybe some day some people will surmise
With what unbridled excitement he celebrated
That evening the triumph
Of the final brushstroke.
With what eloquent ebullience he set forth
Intentions and achievements
To friends
Who listened awestruck.
Artistic intentions and achievements. Not colourless
Gossip and tiresome platitudes ―
As ignoramuses
Sensually
Like to ruminate on.
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THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD
The dead speak
A strange language
Full of gnashing vowels
And elegiac sobs.
As if waking up panicky
From the future
And running
Up
The C
Scale
On the keys
Of their
Insatiable
Teeth.
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SILK NOOSE
inner harmony
The world
Writhes in the sun’s
Noose.
The strangled day
Sticks out its tongue.
A new light
Whitewashes olden things
And everything is buried
Deep in the air’s
Soil.
(Really, how sweet
Is the verse’s rhythm
― It also makes the noose
Silken;
So is it just the measure
And the number
That determine
The universe’s
Order?)
The night
Opens its starry womb
Thousands of fears
Call it mother;
Men and beasts
Birds and fish,
Sunk deep
In the air’s
Waters.
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CONCLUSIONS
all and always all
The sky: a mirror
Destiny: mute
Passion: insatiable
Time: dead
Mother: one and only
The river: deep
The mirror: cold
Nature: mute
Tears: a river
The sky: dead
Destiny: one and only
Passion: deep
Time: cold
Nature: a mother
Tears: insatiable
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And the dead turning on their other side
Pulling up to their nose
An ethereal blanket.
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The soul’s raw material will be the body.
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In this Hades
Of the upper world.
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What a lavish mint
Is nature.
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To become unborn again.
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The only paradise
Is this:
The lost one.
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Behind the face, a mask.
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Each word in a poem, a keeper of keys.
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Look how words hang on paper
Like feeble leaves rusted on trees.
An army of memories pass before my eyes
And in divisions they march to the centre.
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Poetry (one version):
The abridgment
Of the shining world to an alphabet.
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Poems
Printed ones
And paltry ones.
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Hypocrisy: the grandma of virtue.
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From mouth to mouth, love
Slides like herpes.
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* Ποιήματα από το βιβλίο στην ελληνική γλώσσα μπορείτε να διαβάσετε από το Αρχείο του ΠΟΙΕΙΝ ΕΔΩ
