Visit of a Thought I’ve been trying to sleep for the last three hours. August heat sweat of the mind and thoughts, all around, like mosquitos, poke it. What has happened to me? They rarely come during the day now I surely feel happy or to be exact: I forbid such visits. As soon as by chance a thought comes to my mind it soon invites the other, for just a little while, a short visit, you know all this, when voila: caravans of inter-related images charge inside of me seeking a permanent habitation. I don’t want them. Then sealing the borders safely, I end it. Because I’m not American, nor can my lands feed so many migrants.
Nora never let Joe know that they had been espied that night. She continued to write her long letters every week, letters in which she tried to hide her sadness and her melancholy and her bitter disappointment. Three months after Joe’s departure she was pregnant again, and that added to her bitterness. But she hid her gall from Joe. She did not want him to think she was accusing him of failing her. Joe wrote sad, serious letters with only an occasional light or amusing remark. But they were letters full of tenderness and love, like those he used to write before he learned of Nora’s marriage. It was almost as if the marriage had never happened, as if Joe and Nora were the lovers they had been before, with their own marriage to look forward to when the war was over. Nora realised that this was a fantasy to which Joe clung to help him through the bloody butcher days of war, the black, tense nights of watch and wait and pray. She gave him what he needed. She wrote what he wanted to read. She almost came to believe in it herself. Nor was it difficult. That they were both as deeply in love as ever was true and needed no deception. That they could ever enjoy that love outside of their passionate letters was where they lived in a soothing fantasy. As time passed Joe’s letters became more morbid. He was losing his friends one by one but kept referring to a very old companion who was with him still, who never left his side. This old companion was never named, and it was some time before Nora realised who the companion was. In one of his letters Joe wrote: He’s been with me since that day your father pulled me out of the harbour. He fought over me with Dr Starkey when I had pneumonia and he lost that time. He wants me to go with him somewhere, but I just turn to him and say, “I’m sorry, friend; but I have this girl back in Ireland and I’m going to her first. We have a lot to do, this girl and I. I hope you can wait a bit longer.” He’s waiting, my darling, but he’s becoming impatient. How long can this war last?’ Joe was excited about a posting to a Buckley-class frigate, the HMS Bullen. On 6 December 1944, the Bullen was torpedoed by U-Boat U-775, in the frigid waters of Pentland Firth, northwest of Scotland. The Bullen broke in two and sank in two hours. Of the one hundred and sixty-eight crew members on board, seventy-one went down with the ship. One of those lost was Chief Petty Officer Joseph Ignatius Carney. His turn had come. And this time there was no Michael Carrick to pull him out of the icy water. A few weeks later Nora gave birth to a daughter whom she christened Josephine Siobhan.
Swan We lost ourselves in unconsecrated churches since the days of Leonardo. On the wall we hanged the beautiful woman of the loiterer icon of an ancient youth. In lakes wedged between the beard of rocks we saw our strange features afraid of the thunderous flapping of eagle wings. What we recounted wasn’t ours. Coppers of the holy oak in the trenches of red hills that shatter the lance of winter. Morning dance that hid in the viscera of the oak and in the frowning of the motionless stone. Our struggle our grief buried in the unstruck chord of a lyre that will brake on your touch.
Hermes felt so overwhelmed by the euphoria of the company that his pride rose again. The blood of the immortals that ran through his veins was the Same blood that ran in the veins of these people, with their hairy chests and their large hands that could crush rocks and turn them to dust. The party wound down slowly as the early dawn hours approached. Hermes’ group boarded the same bus that brought them there and returned to their village. Days went by, and he still couldn’t have enough of admiring this and that, observing ways of the locals, enjoying everything that came along. Then, one evening, while Hermes was out on a long walk, his uncle called from Athens, leaving him a message that the exam results had been posted and the graduation ceremony was scheduled for a few days later, and the time had come for Hermes to leave his village. The next morning, he went to the city and reserved a ticket for the boat ride to Piraeus.
Manolis Aligizakis 