Logogriph
Longing descends
like a spirited mortal
at low tide
ascends a languorous
watery apex
at high pulse
chthonic impulse of
movement pushes
the earth’s bottom
to the surface
lethargic ache full
of ideas tsunami
to gulp a mortal or two
and their belongings
resurrection
renewal
rebirth of tidal love
Behind the Scenes
words that nobody utters: he is an orphan
like any coloured vapour he dissipates
into the tilted sky or lose himself in the world
letter on a rattling goods train:
smooth graze in man’s history
lost vestige: is it truth or ample
extension of imagination?
crumbled face among worn-out decorations
stranger: itching, with the litheness of death
he searches for his own life
and if he doesn’t find it
as an orphan with parents alive
he dresses himself with somebody else’s
eternal is only the place in which we cannot hide
everything that can be lived: is death
did the clock needle stop? or is the world spinning with it?
FAR AWAY
I would like to tell you a memory…
But it seems nearly erased…and as though nothing remains—
because it lies far away in my youthful years.
Skin like it was made of jasmine…
That day in August—was it August?—the night…
I barely remember the eyes; they were, I think, blue…
Ah yes, blue; a sapphire blue.
Solitude
Away from fishing grounds
skipper-less floating hope
in morning orange juice
windless calm of small
bay lights up with a red scarf
still dreaming of adventure
in high seas through
Desolation Sound to upper
coastal treasured pastures
another destitute day
arriving with paeans for
past glory, none talk about
today’s missed expedition
as if there is another on its way
HEDONISM
A fleshless string of beads made of songs
I haven’t given you today
with the spells and games of a charmer
I’ll cloy you, my love
naked and like a vine I’ll climb
to taste your body that devours me
with my fingers, I’ll conflagrate
the tender hairs of your mound
enrapturing wine and milk that soothes
to sleep I’ll bring to moisten you with
all my body drop by drop
and on your white sculptured legs
two vases that drive me crazy
my honey like a maniac, at last, I’ll ejaculate
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
I am still wondering what the slow-endeavouring patience means
And how, unwillingly, I came to grasp it,
and then dominate it, in all its power,
after having exhausted all the peaceful forms of revolt,
not because I should always have yielded without a word,
or that its fury and fire did not test my heart
that was always giving too many branches in its effort to understand,
but only my reconciled crying succeeds in having roots
into the hell inside my daily life,
into the hell outside me, from everywhere outside me,
it is only I, with my long patience,
involuntarily acquired, by the will of fate,
that fate that put the Library of Alexandria on fire
and made it in such a way that only the statue of Ptolemy II remained,
alone in the infernal traffic of the street,
drowned behind walls that are too high,
with huge letters from all the alphabets of the world.
Daily
When he gets up in the morning, and with a headache,
he doesn’t delay at all; he rushes, half dressed, to open
the window, to smell the cleaned dust of last night,
the aroma of the rotten grass, the rotten fruit behind
the fence wall. The street is still quiet. The flower sellers
pass with carnations or roses in their baskets. “Fake
convictions” he says, “it doesn’t matter” he adds. And
suddenly, the shadow of the city vanishes behind
the chimneys. All around, in the air, diaphanous, almost
triumphant, the buzz is heard from the keys of the stores,
the nails and hooks of the cheap daily business and
exchanges.
Manolis Aligizakis 