Disfigurements The modest, the simple, the right to bread, the bed that was made of planks, a humble window without a feather a few books next to it. A lightness blown straight from the afternoon sky. Here, only here, the minimal, the basics of the internal view, the alarm clock, the saw, the shelf, with the green bottles, and the naked arm on the chest. We, of course, had our secret dead men and other distances, long, short, with shops lit, between 7 and 10 o’clock, by old oil lamps, where the naïve daughter, half dressed, for the first time discerns, in the old mirror, her right leg enlarged up to the opposite hill and the cart with the long crests that passed and missed her.
Today you won’t awake one who’s in deep sleep today you won’t only bring a new dawn to the world but you’ll accomplish something amazing: all the immortals who have died, those I buried myself the immortals who have died you’ll bring to life with your music of resurrection. For this you have brought me to the cemetery, here to wait and for this all things around here are joyous and bloomed and rejoicing, which I’ve never seen before around the graves nor have I seen cypresses so flexible like now, like bodies that wish to embrace and kiss like newlyweds. And the graves are but tables waiting to be set with flavourful foods for crowned revellers who’ll come and feast until the new rosy dawn comes.
Past Looking back I wonder why everything I left without any effort to change them remained as beautiful as nature had crafted them. Who was I, after all who once wished to shift the balance of the universe by changing the depth of the beautiful cove of a woman’s body and the length of a man’s penis without the Grand Master’s plan?
In Alexandria (31 B.C.) From his small town, close to the suburbs and still full of dust from the trip the travelling salesman arrives. And “Frankincense” and “Gum!” “The Finest Olive Oil!” “Fragrance for your Hair!” He cries out on the streets. But the big noise of people, and the music and the parades won’t let him be heard. The crowd pushes him, pulls him along, hits him. And when finally, totally dazed, he asks, what madness is this? Someone throws at him the gigantic lie of the palace, that Anthony triumphs in Greece.
Between her horns it held a heavy piece of the sky like a crown. A little later it lowered her head and drank some water from the creek licking, with her bloodied tongue, the other cool tongue of her watery idol, as if licking her internal maternally, serenely, irreversibly, widely her internal wound from the outside, as if licking the silent, great, round wound of the world — perhaps it even quenched its thirst — perhaps our blood is the only thing that quenches our thirst — who knows. Soon after she raised her head over the water, not touching anything, untouched too and serene like a saint, and only a small lake made of the blood of her lips remained between her feet that were rooted in the river, a small red lake, in the shape of a map that slowly enlarged and vanished, melted as if its painless, freed blood traveled far away to an invisible vein of the cosmos; and for that reason she was calm, as if she had learned that our blood doesn’t vanish, that nothing vanishes, nothing, in this great nothing, the inconsolable, cruel, incomparable, so sweet, so consolable, so nothing.
Centaur Morning and the horses neigh tied onto the froth of impenitent sea rustle of naked leaves punished leaves forty times lashed by the winds climbs on the shoulder-blade of Sunday and on the Pelion waters. Here the blood of serpents poisons the ripen languor of serenity like rust the veins of marble and time gathers the wings of ash to debate with the blond gables now that in the sleep of the olive tree the spider forms its wrinkly netting. In the fields the lustful sprouts quiver and bathe in the fountain of convulsion.
We sat in the tent of a comrade talking till late in the night. Proof of love… ignorance of Eros… the third, unsaid thought rippled through the conversation carrying the night on its shoulders like a wounded soldier.
Butcher’s knife He sharpens his knife before he tries it on the hind of the goat hanging from the hook, grey-haired neighborhood butcher who has slaughtered many animals during his career which has sold to meat craving citizens. He was a very important member of the society, Stephen, in his white blood stained apron, a butcher with his washed out blue eyes, you could say the national flag’s white and blue colors, now that his back is constantly aching, hunched man who can’t sharpen his knives as easily as he used to do, sometimes contemplates, would they need a butcher up there in the Heavens, do they still eat meat in Paradise? Other than the days of Lent when both the alive and the dead abstain from eating flesh
…no doubt hoping that the audience might have been larger. Denied by religious difference the pleasure of verbally crucifying Liam in front of his congregation in church, the Reverend MacNevin had decided to get compensating satisfaction by birching him in the barber’s shop. Unfortunately for the Reverend MacNevin only the barber was present. The other chairs were empty. Jackie Harrison’s assistant came in from Carraghlin only on Friday evening and Saturday. ‘I would have preferred not to inform you of this highly distasteful matter, Mr Dooley,’ the minister went on disingenuously, ‘but the act was witnessed inadvertently by two teenaged boys, one of whom happens to be my son. They went to collect waste paper at your house and it so transpired that they caught sight of the adulterers through your kitchen window. Fornicating on the floor. On the floor, I repeat. In their lustful passion they could not even wait to go to bed. I have extracted a promise from my son that there shall be no spreading of this unseemly scandal on his part, and he has endeavoured to extract a similar promise from his companion. But I fear the damage may already have been done. You can, of course, imagine the effect that such a sordid narrative must have on the imagination of adolescents. And what kind of an example does it present to them? The schoolmaster’s wife and an officer of the Royal Navy. By the greatest of good fortune, your wife is no longer a teacher at your school. You showed commendable prudence, Mr Dooley, in removing her from that position of responsibility. But I shudder to think what she might have been instrumental in instilling in the minds of her charges while she was so employed. That is why I have made it my painful duty to draw your wife’s gross indecency to your notice. It cannot be allowed to happen again. Furthermore, as a moral lesson to the young people of this village, it cannot be permitted to go unpunished. The very least you can do, Mr Dooley, is to forbid your wife ever to be seen in public with Joseph Carney again. What further steps you take to ensure that your wife does not repeat such immorality is, of course, up to you. I should think, however, that in view of the house from which she comes, such immorality and gross misconduct are indelible aspects of her character. Good day to you, Mr Dooley. And to you, Mr Harrison.’ With that the Reverend Lucas MacNevin, touching his hat to the two men, abruptly left the barber’s. Jackie Harrison turned to finish the cutting of Liam’s hair. ‘None of this will go any further than these four walls, Liam,’ he promised. But Liam did not hear what the barber said and would not have believed him if he had.
Tears When we met you promised to make the sadness in my eyes disappear, the sadness you said you had noticed. Yet you didn’t say, you meant to do this when they were full of tears. Have a great time, my love, wherever you may be.
Manolis Aligizakis 