WEDNESDAY
ad vagilias albas
—Why doesn’t it get dark? Have a look if you like, the new moon must
have risen somewhere. Everyone looks at what you are going to do
and you stare at the crowds looking at you.
The sights inscribe a tight circle
that can’t be broken.
If one is born the circle becomes larger
if one dies the circle will shrink
but this little, for this short period.
And the other four senses follow the same geometry.
If we’d loved the circle would break
we’d close our eyelids for a moment.
But we can’t love.
Your eyes were lovely, but you didn’t know where to look
and when you said we had to go because it was dark
you turned and looked into my eyes and a bat flew off
inscribing triangles…The gramophone started again.
Now our bats inscribe circles that shrink
as they fly from one man to another man
no one escapes
and life is rich since we have so many
and all of us alike
and life is rich since we created fin-tuned devices
when the senses fail.
Brothers, we shared the bread and the pain.
No one is hungry, or suffering anymore
and we all have the same height. Look at us!
We are looking at you. We are too! We are too! We are too!
Farther than this nothing exists. But the sea
I don’t know whether they have emptied it.
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Notches
Sickly, dusty little, street trees in the night, lit by
the slanting lights of the low, neighbourhood windows,
poor light patched on the elbows; everything is patched up:
the walls, ceilings, and tubs; the poem is also patched with
the rags of dead people’s shirts. A bicycle passed next
to the lamppost. Behind the glass door, the spiteful,
old woman appeared; she held an insect pump, there,
in the middle of the room, motionless, blind, with no target.
The arm can’t move not knowing its continuance.
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Pneuma
Nothing had remained in the room but the moist
of her sigh, a falling star, an orphan in the gleaming sky
a stolen kiss, spring morning, her shoulder-long hair
golden wavy breeze, shy beautiful glance just
escaping through the half-open eyelid, pond surface
where the loon took refuge, the osprey’s tail which
you saw or you didn’t, her fiery mound, bittersweet
surprise like her breath that stopped momentarily.
That night it rained so heavily no one could hear
our moans. And about our sins, what was their purpose?
I like those who don’t keep for themselves even a drop
of pneuma but struggle only to be pneuma of virtue.
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Manolis Aligizakis 