POEM BY CHLOE KOUTSOUBELIS

TO MY ONLY READER

I’ll wait for you
in a station not yet built
in that center of loneliness
where condors swirl around the trains
where bald babies wail loudly.
You’ll come
with a train no longer in service
without brakes nor engineer
a train that rolls among the stars.
When you disembark you won’t hug me
you won’t tell me I love you
you’ll only raise your hand
and you’ll rearrange tenderly the collar
of my worn out overcoat.

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Sirocco 7 Levanter

                               For D.I. Antoniou

Things that changed our face

deeper than thought and more so

ours like the blood and more so

sunken in the sweltering heat of noon

behind the masts.

Amid chains and commands

no one remembers.

The other days, the other nights

bodies, pain and lust

the bitterness of human nakedness

 in pieces lower than the pepper trees along dusty streets

and all these charms and all these symbols

on the last branch

in the shadow of the big ship

the memory, a shade.

The hands that touched us don’t belong to us, only

deeper, when the roses darken

a rhythm under the mountain’s shadow, crickets,

moistens our silence in the nighty

earning for a pelagic sleep

slipping toward the pelagic sleep.

Under the shadow of the big ship

when the winch whistled

I left tenderness to the money-changers.                                       Pelion, 19 August 1935

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