Founded Love
Th
e two of us
roots of the oak
wings of the eagle
until the next time
we shall meet
inexplicably joined
at the base and in the sky
calligraphic grace of chronos
encompasses the meaning
of the oneness that fills
the net of life
over the substratum
and inside it
glory to the dangerous voyage
as is called by all
who don’t dare fall in love
excerpt
He stopped abruptly as a male voice from amongst a group of
men near the door hailed him. Looking decidedly relieved, he excused
himself to Sarah and hurried away.
She stood in the middle of the room, unaware of the people moving
around her. The day was not going at all as she expected. She
wished she hadn’t come. Perhaps Ben had been smart, after all, to
stay at home. Whatever he had done to alienate the people of Nimkus
had obviously cut deeply. But she could not understand why
they should take it out on her.
She became aware of people staring at her so she walked away,
and eventually made her way outside to the fair grounds. No one,
except a little oriental-looking man, spoke to her. Struggling to
manoeuvre a table through the door into the agricultural hall, he
flashed Sarah a huge smile. “How do, missy.”
Sarah vaguely remembered the sign on a shack at the end of the
main street, declaring the presence of Pong’s Laundry. She felt the
urge to run after the man whom she knew must be Pong, and offer
to help him with the table. After all, apart from Will, no one else
had shown any friendliness towards her this morning.
With nothing better to do she decided to go back to the livestock
area and watch Dave show his animals. Picking her way through
the people gathered on the fairgrounds, she noticed a group at the
grandstand near the ball diamond. She walked over to have a look.
Young men, some in their late teens and others a little older, had
already begun a game of baseball. They wore no uniforms, and the
few baseball caps amongst them did not display any team logo so
Sarah could not tell which districts they represented.
A man leaning on the end of a bleacher seat smiled and moved
aside to let her get a better look. Sarah, interpreting his move as
a friendly gesture, dared to speak to him. “Can you tell me what
teams are playing?”
“Colson and Ryerson districts,” he said, turning to look at her.
“You not from round here then?”
“Yes, I live in the Colson district, but I haven’t been there long.
I doubt if I’d know anyone on the team. Are they the ones at bat
now?”
“No, the ones in the field. They have a pretty fair team…
Mirror by the Entrance
The wealthy house had in its entryway
a huge, quite old mirror,
bought at least eighty years ago.
A very handsome young man, a tailor’s employee,
(on Sundays an amateur athlete)
stood there holding a parcel. He gave it
to a member of the household, who went inside
to get a receipt. The tailor’s employee
was left alone and waited.
He went close to the mirror and had a look
at himself, and he adjusted his tie. Five minutes later,
they brought him the receipt. He took it and left.
But the old mirror that had seen and seen,
during its long years of life,
thousands of things and faces,
the old mirror rejoiced now,
and felt proud that it had received
that gorgeous beauty for a few minutes.
The events that followed his revolutionary ardour and all the changes that took place, most importantly the decay of human values and the spread of consumerism, didn’t stop him from overcoming his personal trials and becoming the expression of his era. Thus, he opened a passage toward the future light using his past experiences, the lost vision and his infinite nostalgia, and he reached his apex in his latest books where he enclosed all he had planned to reveal in verse:
And perhaps this is the unsaid: as if someone close to your cries,
one you’ll never see, nor will he ever meet you.
But at night, when you both come back together, you
Open the door to the old room.
I was so afraid that when they took something
From me, I felt grateful
They at least left me with their memory.
Livaditis’ poetry is alive, as is the memory of him. It is poetry open to the populace, addressed to those who walk toward new eras, to those who at least can grasp his warning:
Ah, life! A stranger’s hat we put on hastily
in the panic of the bombing.
~ Spiros Katsimis
excerpt
…thinking of going hunting tomorrow. Is there anything around here
we may find?”
“You are going hunting without a permit?” George asked.
“That is right; we’ll arrange it. Do you have the guns?” Demetre
insisted.
“Yes, you can have mine, and my son has his, which his mother
has kept hidden for a long time.”
Hermes was surprised.
“You know your mother; she wouldn’t let me touch her son’s
stuff.”
Despina, by now, had already set the table with her best linen.
She served the food in her best dishes. They all ate with a good appetite
and drank to Hermes’ success. After a few glasses of wine, his
father began to speak more freely, and they had a very pleasant
evening.
excerpt
They were marvelling at the line of diminutive Inuksuit that curved along
the water’s edge toward a far-off boulder that seemed to reach almost fifty
feet into the sky. The Inuksuit told a story, Ken said, and after a lunch of
fresh fried fish he led them toward the boulder. As they walked the boulder
diminished in size until they stood beside it and found it was about
three feet tall, pink, perfectly smooth, and resting on top of an immense
gray rock that had been partially heaved out of the tundra.
“This is a fishing Inukshuk,” he told them. “It tells you that this is a
good place to go fishing. How does it say that? If the fishing is good, the
Inuit take a stone out of the water and put it on top of another stone
with little Inuksuit leading the way. A passerby who had never been in
this land would know immediately that he could catch fish here. Other
configurations of stone describe what kind of fish are here. Essentially,
this is a language.”
He explained that the permafrost lurks just under the surface of the
tundra, and below that lay thousands of feet of ice. The ground above the
permafrost where the ice melted consisted almost entirely of rich humus
built up over eons by the tiny plants that grew and died there. An eightinch
tree takes hundreds of years to grow to that height in the Arctic’s
short season. The fibres of the humus stretched out along the surface and
down to the permafrost, siphoning the water from the ice and sending it
into the atmosphere. As the wind travelled across the surface of the land
in buffeting gusts, it created rudimentary magnifying lenses of the millions
of tiny water bubbles streaming into the air. The farther away you
were from an object the more lenses you were looking through and the
larger the distant object appeared.
That night after supper he walked down to the dock with a fly-fishing
rod. Arctic grayling congregated in the shallows here and after a few causal
casts, he landed a fine three-pound fish. As he unhooked it and slipped
it back into the water he noticed Karen sitting on an overturned bucket
at the far end of the dock.
“I’d like to try that,” she said.
He handed her the rod and described the process but even after all
these years he still had no idea how to explain that it was a line with no
weight and it needed to fly guided by minimal strength and energy, and
perfect timing.
She cast a couple of times and smiled. “I like this,” she said and while
the fly lay on the water, a large grayling took the bait. Ken disengaged it,
gave the rod back to her and left her to sort out the tangles and continue
casting. He sat on the overturned bucket at the far end of the dock and
watched.
Futile
Internal voiceless tears of grief
have dried up on my pale cheeks
and unwillingly I’ve searched
for the meaning of my demise
and I stood and asked
all my beautiful adornments
is this supposedly love?
And is this same with life?
And I stood and asked why
in my youth filled with fragrance
I heard the voice, the tedious
voice that was leading my way
and I stood there long enough
for my question-laughter to freeze
until the deep darkness slowly
reflected in my eyes.
No voice reaches here anymore
from all the powerful things I had
the wise people looked at me
and left saying a ghost that I was.
Straight
No excuses, he said, no regrets. Next, in the baths
you could hear the skinny old woman washing
after she placed her three rings on the moist glass shelf
and her dentures on the cover of the bowl. Outside,
the sun was buzzing between the trees. Three birds
cawed higher up where they were flying, so we
wouldn’t notice the three men drown in the well,
those same men whose swollen bellies we pressed
with our two fingers.
Flies
Flies take charge of the wound
decay creeps into his nostrils
sorceress curses and in the corner
the blood-filled bucket
avenging bull wondered
what was accomplished with a death
the matador’s chest gored by right horn
deep aspirating gash where
breeze collapsed
his eloquent movements
fogged his poetic eyes
while the brassy band cheered victory:
of the bull
the matador
or the poet’s
composing this eulogy?
excerpt
THIS IS DEEP MEMORY. Childhood. The South Beach summer house on Staten Island. Late light fades from the sky, the window, the upstairs bedroom where Rick lies under a cool sheet, watching the stars come out, listening to silence.
Slowly, as his mind opens, the heavy stillness after rain dissolves into small sounds. A breeze sweeps through the willow and sighs off over the glassy skritch of crickets, tree frogs like a troop of wet grace notes, the faint hiss of traffic on wet pavement from Hyland Boulevard, and beyond that, far away, but close, too, like the pulse of a double bass, the sea builds to a rush and subsides, again, and again, with a soft crash that makes him think of God and time without end.
Then, below the open window, it begins. Tentative chords from his father’s guitar. Three clear notes. A fourth. A fifth. A melody takes shape, picked up by his uncle Vincenzo’s mandolin. It’s lazy at first, until his mother’s clear soprano joins the strings. A male voice comes under it, then another, and a song rises to full strength, steered off and back by the wind. He smiles to himself. It’s what he was waiting for. He rides that comfort into dreams.
Rick sits at the oval table in the kitchen with his colouring book. He is trying to keep the slippery crayon tips inside the lines. At the other end, his father and his uncle Vincenzo are playing a game called briscola. They study their cards then slap them down hard enough to make them bounce off the coarse grain of the wood. Sometimes they shout at each other, but he knows it’s for fun and their raised voices pass over him without breaking his concentration.
As he works, he can hear his grandfather, Arsenio, talking back to the radio in the front room where his wife, Theresa, argues good-naturedly
Manolis Aligizakis 