…Emptied is the golden barrel the sun became a rag with a middle-aged woman’s neck whose cough never ends; she grieves for the end of summer with its gold on her shoulders and on her mound. Oh woman who lost your light hear, the blind man sings. It got dark, close the windows; make flutes from yesterday’s canes, and don’t open no matter how they knock; they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamens, pine needles, lilies from the sand, sea-anemones; oh woman who lost your mind listen, the water’s ghost goes by… ‘Athens. Events occur rapidly, the people have heard. The minister declared. There is no time left…’ ‘…take cyclamens…pine needles… lilies from the sand…pine needles… oh woman…’ “It is definitely stronger. The war…”
“I bet none of your sons’ll be fishermen,” Sweeney argued. “You can’t make a decent living at it any more. The whole industry’s gone mad.” He reached out and poured the formerly rejected half bottle of porter into a glass. “What did it cost to run a boat before the war? A hundred pounds a week maybe. Now it costs around three, four hundred. Even more for the big boats. You’re paying out more than you’re taking in.” “I’m not.” “Then you’re an exception, Joe; and I wish I knew how you did it.” Sweeney was staring at the pale, frothy head in his glass of porter. Then he looked up at Joe. “It must be galling for you to get tuppence or thruppence a pound for your fish at the quayside and watch the fishmongers in their shops rake in anything from sixpence to half a crown.” “And there’s damned little going for sixpence, I can tell you,” said Slattery. “In fact the housewives in the city are complaining because they can’t get enough fish, and the fishermen are complaining because they can’t get rid of it. I hear that whitings were so plentiful during Lent that fishermen couldn’t give them away. They had to send them to the manure yard. I think Michael was wise to sell out. Not that he’s a fisherman anyway.” “Speak of the Devil and he appears,” said Sweeney. “How are you, Michael? Come and join us.” Michael and Caitlin had just appeared at the dining-room door and looked in. “We’re going pretty soon,” said Joe Carney. “Don’t give us that impatient look.” “They’re not very hospitable, are they, Joe?” Sweeney teased with a leer. “Wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded with good friends, lots of food and plenty to drink on a miserable, wet night like this than stuck in here all alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to?” “I would to be sure, Sweeney,” Joe agreed. “Come on, you two, sit down, have another drink, enjoy the craic.” “I think we should take the hint and go,” said Seamus Slattery. “It’s getting to be very late. This isn’t one of Finn’s parties.” “You don’t have to leave on our account,” said Caitlin. “Oh, I think we do,” Slattery declared. “It’s been a long and memorable day for you two lovebirds.” “Well, your wife’s still gossiping in the kitchen,” said Sweeney. “Go and grab hold of her and tell her it’s time to go home. Come on, we’ll all go together.” Twenty minutes later the house was empty, and Michael and Caitlin sat…
III Our years were spent amid the bullets of friends, enemies, revolutions and wars bullets of official and unofficial forces killing bullets aimed at the back, neck, piles of dead people and others and others. You see them scattered amid the old metal pieces, silent bullets, cold, rusted you don’t realize that with such material we built our houses, that each wall, because of the bullets was our prison, our exile, our underground life. Yet sometimes we pushed the wall down, we defeated the enemy we were again victorious, then we found ourselves surrounded by other, bigger walls, while the populace always followed, and following they shed their blood.
Delphi Even this solemn remnant of the ancient temple standing like an anchorite in meditation on the slope of the tired hill even this they will defile remember it — I said half-breed men with wide shoulder-blades and hierodules with exquisite cheekbones swaying their provocative buttocks for the amusement of the winds and for the salinity of the smooth sea even this they will defile remember it—I said aimlessly before the innocent statues they will desecrate and life a whore they will call and with stamina and unyielding persistence they will bury the primeval beauty and after they exhume the ancestral hatred and guilt, they will imprison pneuma to be guarded by Herculean arms and theirs the wealth of the valley and my kin’s reward blood-shed in streets and neighborhoods where you and I once roamed and played making plans for exploits and deeds and you said — it would have been better if we stayed obedient to the holy and venerable half-truths brought to our lands by easterners at least they promised a gleaming Paradise
Transmutation What escapes through the windows to the night outside to an unclear dimension, that is ours, is carefully hidden in our pockets, along with the keys, in many drawers along with the correspondence, pictures, and newspaper cut-offs and stars that are the same as the chairs in a hall that visitors’ empties after the funeral. The chairs, mixed up as they are, remain in their lonely tidiness indifferent about a line, about a priority. And then you can sit on any of them, comfortably, in a friendly and no preconceived distance from this dead man or the other, and while you take a cigarette and you light the match, suddenly, you see your gesture aimed at you. You stop. You change your movement, offering the light to them, so they can light their cigarette first. For a moment, their shoes gleam in a new black colour, and the
…on the missing list, and despite the owner’s reassurances, Ken had a bad feeling. It so happened that he was visiting a home down the way on Nile Creek business and there, proudly displayed on the walls, were his missing paintings. He asked how long the family had them and was told they’d been purchased several months previously. They were curious as to why he was enquiring, and Ken explained the gallery had never paid him. They felt terrible. You can imagine what that does to a gallery’s reputation. When I asked the owner what was going on, he claimed the potential buyer hadn’t made up his mind yet. How stupid is that? At the same time he was telling people that I was the best thing ever to happen to his gallery. My paintings were generating 60% of his business, but even at that he was prepared to cheat me. Well, he did tell me he was a pathological liar—I guess he didn’t lie about that.
…I laughed at the faces of the simple-minded who bowed their heads to the future justification in the afterlife and I said, they deserve a better reward if they can only open their eyes, and if they raise their heads to look at the virginal dawn and glance at the lissome girl freed from the bonds of littleness the smart ones were teaching them I laughed at the faces of the simple-minded and I realized that I came to this world early, and with only one concern: the laughter of the child and the stirring of the flower petals I laughed at my daring destiny before the moment I appeared on earth to get drunk on the endlessness of the sky and to admire the miracles of my mind that came to stir the calm waters of the lake my mind was giving birth to immortal immortality.
Beauty He sprinkled beauty over ugliness took a guitar walked along the river singing He lost his voice stolen from him by the crazy woman who severed her head in the red waters and the poor man has no voice to sing anymore and in the river, the serene head flows with closed eyelids Singing
Belisarius as the holy empire groaned under the suffering when the nation bent under the attacks of the barbarians and the whole state kneeled under the endless enemy strikes they always seek him to save the country from the suffering they hoped for the saving and salvation of the land from him and then? afterwards they didn’t know him thus during the last years of the `30s period among the vague plans of philosophers who were raging, despite their poor tools for a possibly better predominance and the immature, salivating, beggars and thieves of glory the young Belisarius started along with Andreas Embiricos to create and to live
“There won’t be any children, Mrs. White. It’s summer holidays,” Lona said with a smirk. Paul rolled his eyes skyward. Jennifer felt a little sheepish. Lona was probably correct. However, it was irritating the way she always ensured that everyone knew she was correct. It was time to change the subject. “How did you happen to study Russian, David?” she said, leaning back in the grass, ignoring Lona and fixing on the young man. He had an intelligent, open face with sparkling white teeth but even at the age of 25, his hairline was just starting its slide toward the back of his head. She knew that his family was of English descent, not unlike her own history on her father’s side. “My father’s in the Air Force,” said David, “and I guess we’ve lived on a dozen different bases as I grew up—Germany, Italy and NORAD in Colorado. I picked up a little of every language but never Russian.” “So why Russian?” Lona asked. “Well, six years ago I got chosen along with a lot of other army and air force brats to go on a teen cultural exchange to the U.S.S.R. I had no knowledge of the country before that. We were just supposed to be shining examples of North American kids. It was sure different than this tour. It had been organized by Sputnik—that’s the youth tour group—and we had cocky Komsomol leaders not much older than us in charge.” “So you have more than a nodding acquaintance with Lenin?” “And Marx. And Brezhnev. The Komsomol is seriously political, and this was before the signing of the SALT treaty so east-west tensions were high. Believe it or not, it’s more relaxed now.” “But how did you learn the language?” Paul asked. “Oh, we had a crash course before the trip. Then we stayed in a dormitory for four months and ate with the Eastern European kids, so we learned a lot that way. We didn’t visit the churches back then because they tried to pretend that they didn’t exist. Instead, we had to study in the dorm a lot and debate the class struggle or dialectical materialism with our team leader. Most of us didn’t have a clue!” “My god, I’m not sure I could define them now,” laughed Jennifer. “But I bet we’ll know by the end of this trip.” “Well, that was what sparked my interest in Russian. Learning by talking is the best way. That’s why I didn’t pack my Ozhegov.”
