VOICES OF THE SEA
Drink your wine in the dark tavern by the sea,
now that the autumn rains have started,
drink it with sailors facing you and stooping fishermen,
men whom poverty and angry seas have punished.
Drink your wine so that your soul grows free
and if grim Fate arrives smile upon it
and if new sufferings befall you let them also drink
and when Hades comes, calmly offer Him a drink as well.
excerpt
“What are you doing in those clothes, Rachael? You look like a
hippie.” The words had only just left his mouth when he realized that
was exactly her intent.
Looking up at him, she giggled. “We were danshing. It wash … it
wash fun.” Her head fell back onto the sofa and she closed her eyes.
Ronald could not bring himself to move from where he stood staring
at her. He had rescued Rachael from many scrapes, or worse, but
this time he was at a total loss. What could he do with her? She was
drunk, that much was obvious. Ronald had seen the signs before but
never, God forbid, in his own family. He had the overwhelming urge
to sit down and cry. Taking a tight rein on his emotions, he leaned
over her, took her arm and tried to pull her to her feet.
“Don’t you dare go to sleep. I’ll make some strong coffee, then I’m
taking you home.” Let Morley and Tyne deal with her; this time she’s
gone too far.
“Let me sleep, please Ronnie,” she begged.
In her plea Ronald heard again the cries of a little girl – lost, cold
and near death in a frozen wasteland created by a prairie blizzard.
Hesitating for only a moment, he said, “Okay, you can sleep it off in
my bed. Come on, I’ll help you upstairs.”
“Oh no, you won’t, Ronald. She’ll sleep down here for what’s left
of the night.”
At the sound of Aunt Millie’s unusually stern voice, he swung around.
She was standing in the doorway of the downstairs hallway. Gray hair
formed a cloud around her pale face. One hand clutched a terrycloth robe
around her ample bosom; the other hand held out a long flannel nightgown
and a blanket in the direction of the startled girl on the sofa.
“Get out of those clothes and put this on. You’ll stay on the sofa
tonight, young lady. Ronnie needs his sleep. I’ll talk to you in the
morning when you’ve sobered up.” Millie Harper turned abruptly
towards her bedroom.
Sandals
Young boy with sandals
and a hole in his shirt elbow
ideal poem laughter
like glory of tattered books
on the table where coffee
steams above your cup
you grasp the sugar bowl
gaze through blue glass
the young boy chases
umbrella shadows on the grass
while others fight chimeras at the borders
or hunt for peace behind barricades
raising unfurled flags they sing marching
paeans and glory myths for the
fallen boy with sandals
The Apple Tree
Most of the times, I think for free
with no pencil. Gain and loss steam up
as, with severed arms, I harvest
the ripened fruit.
How can you tell the gender of a tree?
I remember a lazy apple tree
which imagined apples in its armpits
yet it resisted the spring flowers.
Brainless apple tree: its rustle but
sobs and hiccups
of the root pus. An internal sob
for all who reach their purpose
and are happy with the dowry.
If I now mention that apple tree
is because such imagination
of fruit was considered
an insult to nature like heresy
to the dogma of creation.
Desolate tree, unproductive.
They cut it down,
burned it
and its flames lick my last branches
as long as I’m talking to you.
Charioteer
You took the main road that dashes down
from the dark thighs of Delphi
like the arrow’s lissome quiver
symmetrical
to their questionable stature
you vibrated its unruffled gravel-road
with polemic sandals and the waterfall thunder
you held tight in your hands the reigns of the sea
and a reddish coppery gleam.
Arriving
you talked about the serenity of the god
who suckles the nipple of a star.
Adulthood
If I write my biography someday, I won’t forget to report my
hatred for dye houses; they are spiteful, and when they returned
the last children’s clothes, without wings, we got quite ill and
when we recovered, we felt awkward and strange, like the ones who
have disappeared for years, and when they return, they make excuses
that the garden was far away. Where had they gone? Unknown.
Only now, mother cries more often.
Kraskolkyn pulls delicately at the creases of an expensive grey mohair suit,
but his tie is loose, his smart shirt is open, the hairy fruit of his paunch sports a
chunky gold chain. He’s adorned with gold—wristwatch, rings, tieclip, fountain
pen. Fancy leather luggage bulges on the back seat. Pauline would have
been appalled at this display of conspicuous affluence. That dongle on the
chain has a phallic shape. This is not a correct person.
“Never mind, it don’t matter . . . I get everyone out of the shit, know what I
mean? I put ’em in deep. Oh yeah! But I get ’em out again . . .” The laughter
bellows on and on. Lucas can’t find the correct verbal register for dealing with
this big Kraskolkyn.
His fellow-traveller is delving into a pocket and pulling out cigars. Lucas is
queasy about smoking, he’s only tried timid experiments with Wicked
Trevor’s hash behind the gym at Westway, but now he feels obliged to take
part in another kind of machismo, its camaraderie, matches, blue smoke,
coughs, expectorations.
Kraskolkyn slaps him on the back. “Crazy damn kids. Always on the run.
Give bastards the runaround . . . Just have a nice cigar . . . then you be OK.
Enjoy the sights.”
Lucas isn’t OK. All he can hear is this bullying laughter.
“You gonna love those sights, I tell you. Better than any nutty house, you
know? I put loadsa money inna sights, believe me kid, crazy peoples gonna love
it all over the Seaside.”
Mr. K chuckles, chews purposefully on his cigar, as if waiting for a confession;
and Lucas realises that he should have the willpower to keep silent. The
slopes are becoming thickly wooded. He doesn’t know this edge of the Moor,
nor can he relate it to the location of distant Oakhill—or the coastal resorts.
His rescuer (abductor?) is asking him if he wants to learn any good jokes.
Lucas moves his head ambiguously. Too late, a fruity narration is already underway:
a Ukrainian, a Serb, an Englishman and a Croat went to the toilet. In
the toilet, see, there was this big telly—
The car lurches over potholes, compounding his difficulties in following
Mr. K’s polyglot diction, so he can only nod weakly at the gaseous explosions
of mirth. His head starts to throb with the noise and tedious obscurity of it all.
They’ve just roared past the darkened ruins of a station. He thinks the
crooked signboard said Abbots Oakham—for Oakhill Hospital. There, there’s
no way back, not now, it’s too late, best to close down that area, keep his eyes
open.
The Enemy
He not only fought against loneliness and isolation, but against his whole identity, been in constant rupture and orgiastic sectoral emotions that couldn’t settle in his pneumatic completeness, but always took him to the immense void, lurking behind every set concept, that rendered him unable to position one against the other or choose one so he could annul the other; his vision was multifaceted and plethoric opposite the metallic and unbendable silence which destroyed every effort for relaxation and acceptance of the regular, the common-sensical with his pride unable to settle down, as he was not only against the world but against his viscera that demanded the impossible of him
Focusing
Again, and always the selection and the contest
are hard. We stood on the stone terrace for a while
listening to the vertical silence of the trees occasionally
interrupted by the minimal exclamation of a finch.
The faraway mountains are lighter blue than the
unreachable. What can you look at? He asked, what can
you avoid, what can you remember? We hid the holed
undershirt with the small monogram between two pillows.
The hole was passed onto the body and the wall, while
the three blind men held their violins underarm, raising
their heads slowly to look straight at you.
And they said to one another:
Who’s the one with the violin
who isn’t pleasing our hearts
and inflames the surprise and
anger in our viscera? Who’s
conniving with his unwise
hand awakening this violin
which talks of what we watch
it doesn’t see and what we hold
it doesn’t keep and in all
festivities and joys the anguish
stands before us like the traitor
of our kin and killer of our joy?
No other bow has ever played
such ugly, novice and imperfect
music on any gypsy violin
like the music of this foolish one.
And only the young children
oh the beloved children
filled my serene loneliness
turning it into my main fun
since my violin always
surprised and attracted them
and they run around me
with their big and bright eyes
into which they always
had hidden a tiny secret and
they made of all their surprise
and awe a great silence and joy
from my violin, the cursed
violin as if my own race,
from the far future time.
Manolis Aligizakis 