Neither This
With these comparisons, he always gets humiliated
by jumping from one subject to its opposite or staying
in the middle (more or less). He never forgives himself
in any position or movement, only from wherever he
returns he carries like a loot, and in such a secret pride,
a sole grain of rice onto which he incised many war
banners, heroes, dead, trees, flags, and that handsome,
skinny deserter who was naked in front of the rifle barrels
endlessly drummed on his empty water canister.
Finalities
Amid the fears and suspicions
with an unsettled mind and frightened eyes,
we melt away, and we plan how to act
to avoid a certain danger
that threatens us so gravely.
And yet we are mistaken, the danger is not in our way.
The messages were false
(we neither heard them nor fully understood them).
Another catastrophe that we never imagined,
sudden, torrential, falls on us,
and unprepared, there is not enough time, it takes us away.
Not Assembled Poems
Following
the existent paths of being
humans rise
into the myth of life to the end
in a new endless voyage
many bodies, souls, and dreams
buried in deep days and nights
the newborn baby cries
doesn’t know its origin
when the time comes to die
it doesn’t know where to
it breathes the melancholy
of the betrayed kiss
a wandering stage show
and the night-sailor up high on the sails
lights up the enigmas of the galaxy
behind him,
not assembled poems the mortal eternities
in the deep-voiced void of love
Madronna’s Summer
Let my kingship
unfold the dream
of tree trunks
negating the crown
Two bodies interlocked
bright reddish trunks
firm in resolution
to uphold the tree-pneuma
benevolent auspice
unison in the hug of the breeze
sliding amid dark leaves
and rustling serenity over
rocky promontory gazing
the water down where
blue and shadows become
one like two madronnas
challenging the painter’s mind
Excerpt
But for the most part, it was a year or so here and there with postings
to what sounds like exotic locations, such as New Guinea,
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Cape Town, Chile, South Korea, and Lisbon.
A long time ago, Joel had figured out that he wasn’t getting the top
assignments any longer, but at this point, he was just thankful to
have a job, any job as an engineer and he knew that he was desperately
hanging onto this posting.
Early on at Empire, he figured out that Mr. Lee wasn’t a fan of
his hard-drinking nightlife and was less than excited about tolerating
it. Mr. Lee had explained to Joel on his first day at the new
office that he had asked the home office to consider sending
another engineer to help with this project. It wasn’t that Mr. Lee
didn’t know Joel’s abilities yet; it was that Mr. Lee already knew
of Joel. In the maritime engineering community, word gets
around fairly quickly, and the word on Joel was that he was a
has-been, or maybe more accurately, a never-been. Recruited to
the firm right out of university at the age of twenty-two, Joel was
marked for great things. There was no doubt that Joel had an
incredible wealth of potential, but that potential seemed to dry
up a long time ago.
So here he was, six months into a project to shore up the foundation
of an old terminal, and after a twenty-five year career with
the same firm, Joel could sense that the end was near. Already
the project was way behind and significantly over budget. And
Joel knew that although they couldn’t pin everything on him,
many of the problems were a direct result of him screwing up.
Being as he was, from consuming vast quantities of alcohol daily
Joel just couldn’t keep up anymore. At best he was
half the engineer that he used to be and even back then he was
only putting in half the effort. If his calculations were right, Joel
figured that he was probably functioning at something close to a
quarter of an engineer. This project really needed a fully functioning,
experienced senior engineer. He knew it. But he wasn’t
about to change. Or even if he wanted to, and some mornings he
certainly felt like he wanted to, but he just didn’t even know how…
Northern Halo
Before your enigmatic manner
I adjust the red chiton and
the crown of thorns on your hair
I raise your fortitude straight to the sky
this April and I salute
ecce homo
A Slice of Moon With Watermelon Fragrance
It always appears early, when it’s the new moon.
Stars hadn’t yet appeared and the moon, just a little slice!
One could discern the rest of its body around, as if in fog, as if a body hidden behind a curtain, you see it mostly in your imagination, yet you know it is there, a real, alive moon that you will be able to touch in a few days.
And you’re happy to wait, to long for it and imagine it.
There was a moist anticipation in the air and the breeze, consistent as it was, from the south and pierced your bones and the old wounds in a sweet kind of way.
My dry lips till had the taste of the watermelon we ate at lunch time and now, evening already, my glance was glued high up in the sky.
And that moon, a watermelon slice, I ate earlier in the day and had thrown the leftover into the garbage bin.
A small, tiny, lighted and persistent moon telling me that summer was just beginning and the watermelon will last for a long time.
Excerpt
At the Margins of Existence: Love, Exile and Mortality in Marginal
This seasonal structure is fundamental. Autumn and winter repeatedly signify ageing, loneliness and approaching death; spring signals erotic renewal, resurrection and possibility. This poet’s universe therefore remains tragic without becoming nihilistic. The later sequence “Longing,” consisting of fourteen numbered poems, concentrates these concerns into a more intimate and meditative form. Its recurring invitation “Come, sit next to me” changes the relationship between the poet and the addressee. The voice becomes conversational, almost testamentary. The speaker wishes to remember love, political dreams, failures, friends, unnamed victims, forgotten workers, soldiers and the people whose history exists outside its official narrative. Here the connection with The Incidentals becomes explicit. One poem recalls the revolution that was never begun and the world that was never changed, then sings for those “incidentals” who never raised banners or became heroes. Another goes further and demands that these anonymous people finally be made heroic, because they lived so that others could receive glory.
This is perhaps one of the most important developments in Aligizakis’s recent poetry. The marginal and the incidental become related categories. Both designate those excluded from the centre of historical narration. Poetry becomes an act of restitution: it gives them the page they were denied. Stylistically, Marginal moves between short lyrical poems and expansive free-verse meditations. Aligizakis often relies on accumulation rather than conventional narrative development. Image follows image through associative logic: flower, flesh, sunbeam, mythological figure, household object, political allusion, death, memory. Punctuation is frequently minimized, creating long currents of thought in which perception seems to precede grammatical organization. At its strongest, this technique creates remarkable fluidity. The poems appear to move as memory itself moves—suddenly, irrationally, sensually. A flower may open onto childhood; a body onto mythology; a window onto mortality; an abandoned house onto the mystery of origin.
“Pilgrimage” is among the volume’s finest examples. The speaker returns to the family home, not simply as a visitor but as someone searching for the place where his existence began. Four walls, rocks, wind, the location of the childhood crib and the orientation of the door become coordinates of personal mythology. The house is a finite space placed inside infinity. Biography becomes metaphysics. This exploration continues in “Wisdom of the Nude,” where the abandoned family home becomes associated with an abandoned body, and absence itself becomes a form of knowledge. Such poems reveal Aligizakis at his most compelling: personal memory is neither memoir nor nostalgia but material for ontological inquiry. The volume is not without excess. Aligizakis frequently returns to the same constellation of images—flowers, irises, Eros, death, light, statues, female beauty, loneliness, ancient Greek mythology—and some poems state philosophically what their imagery has already conveyed more effectively. Erotic rhetoric can likewise become so insistent that individual images lose some of their uniqueness. Yet repetition in Marginal also functions almost musically. These motifs return like themes in a long composition, altered slightly by age, memory and context. And repetition is appropriate to a book about ageing.
The older consciousness does not simply advance. It circles. It revisits. It asks again. It remembers differently. The final movement of Longing therefore offers an appropriate culmination. The lovers sit together at dawn and look toward the first rays of light. Their love becomes “blessing,” “endurance,” and “eternity,” and the concluding vision imagines them giving birth metaphorically to a new generation of immortals. This is not naïve immortality. Aligizakis knows too much about death for that. The immortality envisioned by Marginal is the human refusal to let death possess the whole meaning of life.
We die, but we have loved. We disappear, but someone remembers our voice. The homeland changes, but the landscape survives in language. The house becomes empty, but the first cry of the child remains somewhere between its walls. The lover vanishes, but her shadow continues to occupy the arms of memory. The immigrant may remain marginal, yet the very margin from which he speaks allows him to see what those standing comfortably at the centre often cannot. And perhaps this is the central achievement of Marginal. Manolis Aligizakis transforms marginality from a condition of deprivation into a privileged poetic perspective. From the edge, the structures of the centre become visible. From exile, homeland can be questioned. From old age, youth can be understood differently. From loneliness, love acquires its full weight. From the proximity of death, the body becomes luminous. Marginal is therefore a book of boundaries, but also of their transgression. Its poetry continually inhabits the narrow strip between the temporary and the eternal. And in that uncertain territory, among flowers, bodies, memories, myths, empty rooms and returning light, the poet finds what poetry has always sought: not an escape from mortality, but a language capable of standing before it.
HARVEST OF THE GRAPES
excerpt
The grapevine blooms and spreads its vines
over the bulrushes and cypress branches
in riverbeds and in crevasses full of rocks
it spreads its fragrance with every stirring
of the air, as on the hillsides, mountains and the plains
great swarms of bees rouse from their hives
to drink the vine’s ethereal smells
and forage on its pistils full of nectar
and spread the news in buzzing eulogies.
Girls of the village start their day, following
nature’s wisdom to their orchards and their groves,
on mountains and plains, with baskets, joyful
and with songs. The gathering and harvesting begin,
and the countryside awakens to their sweat
and girlish scents and every grapevine row
as if arising from the earth brings forth new chthonian fairies…
Three Poems About Sorrow
I
The spider and my life
but an erotic summary
sorrow of the leaf
small organism of nothing.
In each of my corners
a trapped lion
a desperate ant
an extreme shadow of light
and I’m even grayer
than yesterday.
I sweeten time
with a childish Heaven
till the day
one day
that I’ll find courage
in death.
Manolis Aligizakis 