Rick looked disconsolately through the second-storey classroom window at sheets of freezing rain, the weathered fence of the Pennsylvania Railroad coal yard and the blackened struts of the steel bridge that shuddered ever so slightly when a train passed over it, then back at Sister Assunta who was preaching, again, about The Immortal Soul as she paced back and forth in front of the blackboard behind her desk, slapping the pointer against her palm like a riding crop. “Pagans!” she was saying, “You were all born pagans and you must be taught to fear (her pointer hissed and snapped loudly against the desk blotter) the power of Almighty God.” Silence. Some of them lowered their heads to avoid her stare. But Rick was puzzled. That kind old man who lived forever in the sky was merciful and just. He was love itself. Why should anyone be afraid of him? He raised his hand. Forty-two pairs of eyes swung toward the front of the room, afraid for him, but excited by the drama that might be about to unfold. Sister Assunta merely glared and went on pacing, her voice hoarse with a nearly demonic fierceness. Rick took his arm carefully out of the air. “Daily, you neglect your immortal souls. They may already be lost to eternal damnation.” She stopped precisely behind her desk chair, her florid minutely wrinkled skin drawn into a tight smile. Rick tried to look inside himself. There wasn’t much light. After a while he became concerned. Where was his immortal soul, anyway, why couldn’t he find it? Then something round and flat like a communion wafer came into focus. It was tilted, like the head of a snare drum, and it was so clean it glowed. He began to understand. When you did bad stuff, soot fell on it out of the dark, then, if you confessed and said five Hail Marys,
five our fathers, and an act of contrition, an invisible power swept it clean again. And immediately, almost automatically, his pubescent mind reached for what he knew to be forbidden. The kids called her The Beauty Queen. Her dad owned the bar and grill at the corner of Monmouth and Fifth. She spent a lot of time with her followers in the extra lot next to her house her grandparents had made into a large garden surrounded by hedges, and dotted with trees. When she came out for a walk, all the guys stopped what they were doing and watched her tight pedal pushers, her graceful careless moves…
Expectation What are they waiting for in the morning, with the vertical, snow-white, square, big planes, fully lit again this spring? What does the child wait for by the window with his slaughtered doll? Or the old man leaning on his walking stick in front of the glass balcony door, above the noise, the city, the garbage collector, the banks, the flower shop? That unrepentant old man who enlarges, in the space, the hand of the woman who spreads her laundry on the opposite terrace, which enlarges the wet, red and white striped bed sheet so it covers two-thirds of the city, thus trying to forget that passkey of the burglar, not the passkey at all, the second key they presented to him in front of the other, one for each, there by his door that still smelled oil paint, and he didn’t consider complaining or to ask. In his pocket, he held tightly the bag with the nails, considering The pictures he had to hang in the big empty house.
Night The night is a door only the blind can see. Darkness makes the animals hear better, and he staggered not from being drunk. But from his futile effort to climb up to the tower we had once lost.
“Yes, Mother, but I’m only going away for a while; do not forget that.” Maria smiled and added, “Of course, my boy, you will return. But remember, you must write home frequently, so we can find out how your studies are going.” “You guys think as if I am going to forget completely where I come from. Don’t worry yourselves with that.” His father cut in, “Son, you are an adult, but I want you to be very careful in the foreign country you are headed; we, your mother and father, uncle and auntie, or friends, will not be there. There are a lot of dangers over there, and you might get into a lot of trouble. Have your eyes and ears open, be careful in a foreign place. You are responsible for yourself.” The old man’s voice became hoarse. Hermes looked at his dad with surprise in his eyes: tears flowed freely down the old man’s cheeks. Yet this time, George Dragakis didn’t even care to hide his feelings from the rest of the family. Hermes went to his father and gave him a big hug. “Do not worry. I know where I’m going, and I know what I’m there for. My only concern is to finish my schooling and return home to find you all. Do not worry. Nothing will distract me from my goal.” Hermes’s voice had so much certainty as it was heard that all those present felt positively about his voyage. “What about Magda, my boy?” his aunt asked. “Magdalene and I are going to be in touch, and I hope to see her when I come back. She told me she might even come and visit me in Vancouver next summer. I look forward to that, really. I like this girl a lot.” His mother and father heard these words and felt a bit relieved, although they’d prefer if he didn’t go away at all. George got up to go to the bathroom, and Hermes could hear the old man blowing his nose. Then Hermes went to the bar and poured a drink for himself. He asked if anybody would like to have one, but they all declined.
II Greatness protects us both with the sky’s little lambs and bears you, an adventure of the cloud and I always here. If we touch each other I’ll be the redemption of sickness If I touch you the beginning of the end. And I remained with the nocturne divided shape of the olive tree with the darkness and the struggle I remained close to the moss on whatever pulls you down all the time. I was left with half words and I returned. The old man will endure the night nothing perfect has ever occurred on time.
…We’ve left our concern with the bird oarsmen and the tiredness of bread and wine with the expanse of the northwestern wind and time the master craftsman. We raised the elegy of rain high up to the top of the cypresses lancing the silent viscera of the night. Our days and deeds are shields and banners that intimidate Hades horse rider of the opposite cross-road. With your finger you’ll write of our love and faraway voice in the futile easiness of the sea and like a child you’ll sleep on the eyelids of roses when you alone, incomparable will shine on the bear-creaks and the mountain tops of memory.
Epode V The young poet evokes the divine mother with her nine daughters to come forth and gift today’s troglodyte with patience and steadfastness, to grace him with Terpsichore’s refined movements with Erato’s unblemished lust, Urania’s wisdom of the Heavens, Euterpe’s lyric poetry. Oh, great mother of art, grant this man the ability to express the whole with the trembling steps of the beginner transcend him from his ego, purge him from his deeply imposed fears, grace him with the light of Logos, gift of your nine daughters, and let its freshness embrace him like a sweet breeze in the cloudless purple dusk. Let his stanzas speak of love and his songs talk of laughter, let his azure dreams dance in the expanse of the firmament and let his freedom turn to a beacon for the other faces in the mirror.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has spent a career writing about people the world files under "miscellaneous" — and vequinox has been keeping up.
Mara: That's the thread running through this episode: Greek poetry and its modern resonances, love and faith tested in quiet rooms, conflict and exile, and a critical look at what it means to write about ordinary lives with extraordinary attention.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry itself — ancient voices, contemporary weight.
Greek Voices, Modern Weight
Mara: The question here is what Greek poetry actually does when it moves through the modern world — whether it stays monument or becomes something you can touch.
Pip: George Seferis, translated and presented here, sets the coordinates early. The poem positions us collectively: "We are all like the Dead Sea, many fathoms lower than the surface of the Aegean."
Mara: That image does real work. The Dead Sea passage isn't elegy for a place — it's a diagnosis of emotional deadness, where "heart and thought congeal in salt." Seferis is naming a condition, not a geography.
Pip: Yannis Ritsos in Romiosini measures anguish against a wild mallow's knot and courage in the eyes of a shoeless child holding a flag — that's not metaphor reaching for effect, it's metaphor doing the only honest work available. Titos Patrikios in Selected Poems and Antony Fostieris in Selected Poems carry the same weight: fathers known too late, moons that swell and shatter. Constantine Cavafy's satrapy asks what you trade when you stop reaching for the laurels.
Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos and Wheat Ears round out the range — from cosmopolitan irony to daffodils insisting on blooming through leaden, death-filled days. And Ugga lands the quietest claim of all: "for the light to change, we must feel the loss of darkness in transactions." Entropy and Triptych both circle that same idea — transformation costs something, and the cost is felt in the body, in the chapel, in the shared candle.
Pip: From the weight of history to the weight of a single room — the next territory is love and what it asks of people.
Love, Faith, And What They Ask
Mara: The posts here sit with intimacy in its most pressured forms — a wedding interrupted by illness, a love that cannot quite complete itself, desire that circles back to anxiety.
Pip: The Unquiet Land anchors the segment. A priest steadies a congregation while a man named Padraig recovers in the sacristy, and when he's asked if Mass was said for him, he says: "I did, Padraig. And the wedding? It went very well. Ah, that's good." Then he lowers his eyes and says he never could have done it.
Mara: What that exchange captures is faith as practical care — the priest stepping in, the doctor promising to apologize to the family, Padraig asking not about himself but about the couple. Dignity held together by people covering for each other.
Pip: Hear Me Out turns the register entirely. It's a meditation on that missing one percent — the fraction that stops the words "I love you" from completing themselves. "You'll remain like Sisyphus to go up and down the mountain with the weight of love on your back, forever searching to unload it." That's not self-pity; it's a structural description of a particular kind of loneliness.
Mara: Water in the Wilderness moves through a different kind of relief — someone waking, someone running for her coat, a child on her first bus ride being told to watch for deer. Small mercies assembling into something that holds. Cloe and Alexandra brings a fairy-tale sharpness: a hunter shoots an arrow at a princess because he feared she would pierce his heart first — obedience and self-protection dressed as accident.
Pip: And then The Qliphoth arrives, which is a different temperature entirely — raw physical intimacy followed immediately by the anxiety that trails it, the replay of warnings she tries to suppress. Control claimed and then quietly questioned.
Mara: Redemption sits underneath all of these — two characters debating whether inherited belief can ever be honestly evaluated, whether tradition is a gift or a constraint. The same question the other posts are living out in different registers.
Pip: From what we inherit to what we survive — conflict and exile are next.
Conflict, Exile, And What Remains
Mara: This segment asks what displacement actually looks like from inside — not as history but as the specific texture of a life interrupted.
Pip: The Circle opens it with a phone call from Los Angeles to Baghdad. Hakim learns his uncle has two tumors — liver, pancreas — and the novel renders the weight of that news through a detail: he walks to the balcony and looks at the clouds covering Los Angeles, "in the same way that they cover his heart."
Mara: Distance is the condition. Straits and Turns gives us Mike, humiliated by a small workplace error, walking home with his head down — and then laughing at himself with his family. Marginal's caricature figure arrives "hiding the packaged freedom silently in his pockets," and the speaker finds redemption not in confronting him but in bending to smell a jasmine flower on a dusty sidewalk.
Pip: Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy and Rendition press further into rootlessness — the gypsy standing "like a fresh branch of a not pruned, ageless, fruitless tree," alone on a black mule, trying to discover who he is. Rendition puts innocent blood and irony on the same menu board.
Mara: Which brings us to the question of what poetry does with all of this — and one critic has a precise answer.
Writing The Incidental Into Permanence
Mara: The Incidentals gets a full critical reading here, and the central claim is ethical as much as literary.
Pip: The reviewer, Balázs F. Attila, puts it plainly: "The moment the poet writes about Gladys, Mathew, Stefan, Benjamin, Galanos, or the nameless postman, he abolishes their insignificance."
Mara: The upshot is that poetry here functions as counter-archive. The postman who carries everyone else's news while waiting for a letter that never comes — that figure is rescued from anonymity by the act of being named in a poem. The net, the rope, the shoe: objects that become the whole shape of a life.
Pip: The review also notes that Hades and Thanatos move through gas stations and Canadian immigration offices — mythology as living language, not museum display. That's the formal argument for why the Greek poetry segment and this one belong in the same episode.
Mara: And the question the review leaves open is the one that makes it stick: how long is the rope on which we ourselves live?
Pip: Dead Seas, jasmine flowers on dusty sidewalks, a postman waiting for a letter — the scale keeps shifting but the question stays the same.
Mara: Whether the rope is long enough, and whether we've noticed we're on one.
“I’m not sure who’s fucked who,” says Larry sleepily, cupping her bottom with firm hands. “And I’m losing track of the exact number of times. But it’s been fair exchange. Above and below.” Pauline is astride him now, first stretching back, then leaning forward, letting his eyes linger on her breasts, let him kiss and lick and tease her hard nipples as they brush his face. She reaches down, right down there,to sheathe his prick, his penis, his cock, his rod, his willy, all such silly names, yet an exciting catalogue to recite under her breath when he’s already so hard again, a natural material phenomenon like a stone or a tree or a jolt of lightning right up the rippling crevice of her; but she’s in control now, poised for take-off, almost at the point of no return, as long as the ride’s easy, gently does it, the triangle of her sex is perfectly balanced on him, so he disappears in his dark murmurs and while she’s astride this cunning old Adam, she’ll give him his golden apples all right, just a quick/slow/quick/slow squeeze around and about the hairy zone, he just can’t stop going into her, but they keep going . . . She can see his tanned chest below her, his scarred arms, tiny curved crescents like cigarette burns on the shoulder. His belly is noticeably curved also, thickened by the prison stodge, but what the hell, he is a great stone giant lying on his back, heavy weathered curved lips, pitted slabs of cheek, a hell of a heavy stand on him, standing steady for centuries, for her steady pleasuring, her repeated steady roll. She will never relent. She is sitting on top of the world. In control. She is at the apex of earthly power. She is reclaiming this male organ, (all hers, hot and engorged), she has just discovered it and this time she won’t let go without a delicious fight. He’s going to, going to—he’s moaning, bucking wildly, stroking the cheeks of her arse together. She lets everything go. Much later, as she swallows his harsh black coffee, and listens to distant domestic bellowings in the bedsits upstairs, she isn’t sure about anything, despite the languour in her aching body. Already there are anxieties—were they too perfunctory with the condoms? and a replay of Graham’s counsel keeps surfacing, however much she tries to force it down—suppose those marks on his arms were tracks from injecting, inside men, shared needles, all that nightmare stuff . .
“You shouldn’t have bothered, Moe. I could get a bite at the hospital, you know.” “It’s no bother. And you need something home cooked after that hospital food you’ve been surviving on. The meals aren’t any better than they were when we were students.” It was only after Tyne had eaten that Moe, sitting at the table with her, said lightly, “Aunt Millie called a little while ago. No, it’s all right. And I didn’t tell you earlier because I knew you’d go rushing off without breakfast if I did.” Tyne sat forward, her heart in her throat, ready to bolt from her chair. “What is it? Why did Auntie call?” Moe smiled. “Morley is awake and asking for you.” Tyne let her breath out on a deep sigh, sat back and covered her face with her hands. “Thank you, God, thank you,” she whispered, then shot out of her chair and ran to get her coat. Moe was right behind her, car keys in hand. Rachael didn’t think she would like riding in a bus. Not a bus this big, anyway. As the huge vehicle, with the long skinny greyhound painted on its side, drew to a stop in the bay behind the Emblem bus depot, she shuddered and moved closer to Mrs. Milligan. A man in a sort of uniform was standing beside the open door, taking tickets from people, punching holes in them, then handing them back. When it came their turn in line, he did the same with the tickets Mrs. Milligan handed him. The man looked down at Rachael. “Hello there, little lady. Where are you going today?” Rachael thought he must already know that, but he was trying to be nice to her so she said quietly, “We’re going to Calgary.” “It’s her first bus ride,” Mrs. Milligan informed him. “Is it? Well, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Be sure to sit beside a window so you can see everything. And look for the herd of deer on the right hand side; they’re usually grazing in the field there.” He held out his hand to the person behind them as Mrs. Milligan guided Rachael up the steps, and led the way along the aisle to seats half way back.
Manolis Aligizakis 