Archer of the Unfeasible
I’m very late
my past is an ancient enigma
one thousand-year-old man
in eternal youth
who has sailed
since eons
shattering the events
into silence
horizon
the myth of time
in the history of lost
opportunities
I’m very late
hung between my meaning
and the flashes of fate
I lie where the season brought me
spender of the unfeasible
confessor of the opposite shore instincts
without what I wanted
a soul to love
where the light narrates
the tree reminiscent
in the chaos
Tonight, we decided to write a letter for you, mother.
Perhaps we may hear the rain
dripping on your worn-out clogs.
Perhaps we may see your smile
hanging from your chin over our thirst.
They feed us rotten potatoes: don’t worry.
They curse us and hit us: please love us.
Perhaps we may never return—but you still light
the lamp, mother; others will return.
Now you gather the white cloths of exile from
the clothesline.
You stitch the patch of your concern on our socks.
You know, mother, we never used the gloves
you knitted for us
we gave them to a comrade who was taken away
to be court-martialled;
we also gave him a can of food and a piece of
our palm.
He tied the edge of his sack with a string
he tossed the sack on his shoulder
and we saw him climb the hill
with his thin legs scissoring the opposite
sky into pieces.
Each morning, they take a count of us.
Each evening, we count the leftover plates
the leftover grief in our eyes
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Echo
She opened her window
motionless powerful feminine
exhilarating gesture
that shook me
and memory rekindled
paradisiacal kisses
I dreamed of capturing
the echo of a raindrop
falling through fog
into the plaza fountain
greetings, oh life,
here I am too:
splash!
Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin poetry Awards
IV
There was a vacant seat in the open-air theatre where
we had gathered;
the city was in danger, we had no time, we had to decide
quickly
“Who are we waiting for?” one asked the other, showing
the vacant seat;
the day passed noisily, with angry exchanges, voting
and every so often “who are we waiting for?” they asked,
until, suddenly, a leaf fell off a tree
and after it made a circle in the air, over the human noise,
it came and landed on the vacant seat.
Perhaps it meant something more important.
excerpt
Bruce Davidson assessed the spectacle and said, “You’re an agent’s
dream. Usually we have to concoct all this crap and get the artist to go
along with it. But here – man, it’s hard to keep up with you. It’s never going
to be boring.”
“No,” Ken said. “It’s never going to be boring.”
When the fuss died down he had the boulder removed and put the ten
thousand dollars back into his bank account. Summer turned to early fall
and Nick’s symphony for Isumataq neared completion. The rock CD had
been recorded. But they still had no site for the unveiling and the more
they discussed it the more they came back to the idea of Parliament as the
venue. But how do we get our foot in the door there? Bruce asked. Ken
scheduled a breakfast meeting with the Honourable John Fraser, Speaker
of the House and they met a few days later. Over bacon and eggs, Ken laid
out his ideas for the unveiling of Isumataq.
“I know it’s not done,” he said. “People don’t take over the Houses of
Parliament for exhibitions or art openings.”
“Well,” John said. “Let me think about it. I think it’s a wonderful idea.
We’ll have to get approval from all the parties, because you have to have
everyone on board when you do something like this. If you’re going to
do something that hasn’t been done before you don’t want to just shove
it down somebody’s throat. You want to get everybody on side, so the
story has to be told very well. I know your story and it’s wonderful. You’re
the one who should come and tell it, but then there are the logistics of
getting all those people together. And then, depending on the particular
day, they may be angry with each other – it gets so complicated. Let’s just
work away at it.”
The winter of 1990 settled in, and Ken received a call for help from
Keith. As president of the Arctic Tourist Association, he was scheduled to
make a presentation in a downtown Toronto convention centre to Tom
Hawking, the Federal Minister of Arctic Affairs. The snag was that as he
was driving his caterpillar over the ice to his island airstrip, the machine
had crashed through and he had to get it out before it leaked diesel fuel
into the river. Would Ken make the speech in his place, and would he
present the Minister with one of his paintings?
The comedian Dave Thomas emceed the event. Ken was the last to
speak and he talked about the importance of tourism to the Arctic and
how important it was to allow those who lived there to make the decisions
about the infrastructure – let them build it in their own way. Let
Nunavut be their land and a land of their ideas.
Hawking requested a private talk and they met for a drink the next
day. He asked to hear his story – the long version – all the details of his
travels through the Arctic and the road that had led to the creation of
Isumataq.
The Souls of Old Men
The souls of old men
sit in their withered bodies.
How sad those souls are
and how fed up with the miserable life they lead.
How they shiver at the thought of losing it,
and how they love it, those confused and
conflicting souls that sit, tragically,
in their devastated skins.
VI
Behold. Please, stay on this hymn,
the young poet cries out now. With
the skylark of his vision and logos
standing unfettered by the tempest,
as a lightning bolt, the poet records
the marks of the wild wind
on the falcon’s feathers, the young poet
enters as the coolest breeze
in the heart of July’s noon hour
ruffling the petals of the jasmine
and caressing the virgin’s pubic hair
like a soothing kiss on the forehead
of dawn the young poet enters
with his dream before the counting of
heartbeats, with feelings of red roses
he takes notice of the neighbour’s littleness
which defines these leaden days.
Behold. Please, stay on this hymn,
the young poet cries out now, freshly
cut from the womb of a mother
with the tribute of his chalice
as from the arc of the bluest sky
the young poet enters bearing gifts.
THE DEAD HOUSE
Who has kept all these for us, then, with such
exactness and such applications, washed, pleasant,
cleaned up and tidied, scratched by wounds and
death? And the red river all around the house
nothing, crystal clear water from the day before
yesterday rain, warmish rain reflecting the reddish
sundown until late in the evening, to the hour when
that diaphaneity is spread, immense, glassy, and
you see the indestructible, the invisible in that
immenseness, indestructible and invisible as
you are too surrounded by the whispers of
the furniture and the stars. Mother sits in her
engraved chair and embroiders her endless handiwork
under the light of the oil lamp with the shivering flame
as a light current is coming through the two windows
and father has been away hunting since morning and
the melancholy sound of the hunter’s horn reaches
his ears along with the friendly barking
of the impatient dogs…
excerpt
He still won’t talk about Nick, he won’t talk about Tanya, his own dear
mini-model girl, his lost dream. He is fatter; and insists on wearing a regulation
striped shirt and one of Her Majesty’s grey jackets. Pauline chides him for
showing off.
“They’re good, these porridge-jackets. Cult collectables, as soon as I get
back in the business. ” But he won’t say what business, or discuss concluded
business, except in general terms. He smiles wrily at the thin brown curtains,
the broken Dansette record player, a chaos of books and one small picture, a
last retrieved treasure, on the damp wall —an ancient engraving of a bearded
man holding a complex structure, like triangulations of spherical retorts, radiating
light. She asks him about it —an old alchemist, a cabbalist or whatever?
She has to say something. He forces a hollow laugh and taps the dusty glass.
“I’m told it’s by Paulus Ricius, Augsburg 1516. Beautiful, isn’t it? God
knows what it means. All my alchemists turned to fool’s gold. At one point, I
had a guy with a PhD. brewing pure acid for me, I had two guys specialising in
THC oil, and they all turned rotten on me, turned Queen’s Evidence. You
wouldn’t believe I had a gold Ford Thunderbird, and whole wardrobes of
money . . . I could have given you enough bread to ransom Lucas three times
over.”
But in Larry’s professional opinion, Lucas hasn’t been kidnapped. The boy
might be on a little caper, perhaps, he’s at an age when the nerves are good. But
he’ll be back, give him a chance. Larry believes that Lucas is more stable than
Nick.
“It’s your civilising influence,” he says softly, with a slow smile that transforms
his rough-cast mock-up of a face. She wonders if he’s remembering
their distant dark-age act of hurried unbuttoning, A tiny moment swirling into
non-being. She’s let go. But has he? “That’s the trouble with inside—no
women. Just piles of demented men.”
She hopes he’s going to say more about Nick and Lucas but he’s back to a
re-run of prison life. It was a monastery with real mediaeval penances. This
vicar was a nonce who spanked young choirboys, so they made him run
around barking on all fours with a burning blue paper up his arse. Branded on
the bum, as old Geoffrey Chaucer puts it.
“Larry, I really need your help . . .” She goes into explicatory overload, the
whole construct sounding more and more implausible as her words fill the
dingy room and the clock ticks.
…and from the narrow
shores of Bosporus
green cities made of sprouts
and fountains rose;
blossoms looked like fairies
flowing, descending
in cisterns: jewels, rain full
of red precious stones.
And the sun reflected onto
the Bithynian mountains
to the Vlaherne and
Magnavre palaces
which unobstructedly rose
and gleamed up high
and from the Golden Gates
to the Heptapyrgion
up to the end of stranded
emerald islands
legions of palaces
and armies of monasteries
as if the spells of witches
were cast upon them and
they spread over the domes
and mansions and you shone
oh my soul over all the motionless
crosses and the cypresses.
Manolis Aligizakis 