From the Beginning Again
The leg sank deep
in the thick, muddy memory
and the echo of a heavenly pendulum
a light cosmic step that guided and pushed
the old world towards a new life.
He resisted. And his breath
slowly froze, his last words nothing
but thick smoke.
Slow snowing in the joints.
Calm days, like snowflakes
decorated the desert that had no oasis
into which your leg,
(your leg) sank deep.
excerpt
his wife of eighteen years got pissed right off and left him; she
filed for a divorce which was issued with no contention at further
financial loss for Mr. Wilson, who moved to a shabby apartment
and he even had to sell his truck to pay off some of his debt.
These days Mr. Wilson finds enough satisfaction in his
present work since it pays him some money, which along with
the government assistance on which he also relies gives him just
enough to support himself. Today though his mind ran to his
ex-wife, who he found out was cheating on him long before the
downturn of the real estate market and that recollection truly
pissed him off to the point that he saw women as nothing but gold
diggers. His mind bothered him a lot lately, when he recalled the
last years with Ariel, his ex-wife who he could simply kill if he
would get the chance.
His angry eyes fell on a young man who responded to the
name Lucas, an Indian youth, who by handling his handsaw the
wrong way he misplaced a cut on the piece of wood he was working
and this was something Mr. Wilson couldn’t tolerate. He
clenched his teeth, grabbed the ruined piece of the plank from
Lucas’ hands and struck the back of the unfortunate young man
with such force that made the boy scream in pain and run away
from his teacher who was still holding the instrument of pain
ready to reapply it on the back of the youth.
“You stupid dog, you ruined your wood,” the teacher
yelled on the top of his lungs while Lucas, being in extreme pain,
kept on yelling and cursing in his language something his teacher
couldn’t understand and which made him angrier. The boy’s fists
tightened and he ran against his teacher when Marcus, who had
witnessed everything as all other boys had, stood in the middle
between the angry student and the scared teacher and upon hugging
Lucas, he whispered to him,
excerpt
Now Caitlin too was becoming angry, her face flushed. “Padraig has never wanted me. You do him a great injustice. He only wants to see me married to you. Until then there can be no more sinning.” She felt her anger subside like a guttering candle. She held her hands out to Michael, enticing him to come close to her again.
He did. He took her hands in his and gazed into her eyes with a mix of love, disappointment and confusion.
“You know I’m going to church again, Michael,” Caitlin said gently, soothingly. “I am a baptized Catholic. Father Riordan baptized me and Nora when we were born and my mother died. He was afraid that we might die too. Unbaptized. And be put in a sack in a hole behind Killyshannagh Chapel.”
“Finn MacLir would never have allowed that,” Michael said. “He would have seen you buried properly. Along with your poor mother.”
“My father was too distraught to know what was going on,” Caitlin said. “Una Slattery, when we were very little, used to take us to church when my father was at the fishing.”
“Do you realise how much you have abused your father’s trust, Caitlin?”
“I never did,” Caitlin protested. “I was a new-born baby when I was baptized. I was a little child when Una took us to church. You’re right though. These things were done without my father’s knowledge or consent, but don’t blame me or Nora.”
Michael remained dubious, his simple heart troubled. Though he knew that Caitlin and Nora were not to blame, he still felt that Finn MacLir had been cheated by others. But he could not put his feelings into words.
“Be that as it may, Michael,” Caitlin continued, “before I could receive Communion I had to go to Confession. I had to tell Padraig everything. Everything about us, Michael.”
“Does this mean, Caitlin,” Michael began awkwardly, yet with a heart-stopping surge of hope, “does this mean that you are going to marry me?”
“Yes, of course, I am going to marry you, Michael. You know I am. I love you.”
“When, Caitlin? When will we be married?”
“Soon. It takes a lot of planning.”
Caitlin’s answer sounded evasive to Michael. Hope dropped from him like a rock from a wall. Suspicion filled the hole it left. He lowered his eyes and half turned to walk away. “Whenever you are ready, Caitlin,” he said, his voice charged with controlled anger, “come and let me know.
Ocean’s March
Specters of castaway captains
with pipes still between their lips
on the lighted horse of lightning
sunken ships returning
to night’s harbors
the lost crews
standing outside closed doors
waiting
searching their lives silently
holding tropical pictures
azure fields with enormous lilies
and ebony naked women
Those cry and don’t see
But we
who spoke to the sea for hours
we who always retain
on our lips damp deep and young
the voyage’s sweetness
we accept the eternal gifts of death
And when mothers
curse the sea
and when the old captains
walk step by step worrying
in closed rooms
Poet
We left the poet’s house for last. When we entered
the verses, lighter than thoughts, flew in mid air
in a harmonious rhythm opposite our wild youth.
We needed hide our flowing tears and we wanted to look
elsewhere, this new world not to insult with our human
littleness, as though we seek to avoid the responsibility
of our age and there were lots of things we could still
learn: the endurance of time opposite the old people’s
stooping backs while the poet structured his verses
with care and ended them with an polemic epode.
Übermensch took the poet’s hand, as if after a long
absence He had found His most familiar face. The poet
still a beardless youth though obviously emotional before
the Übermensch.
“It’s kinda like football. All you gotta do is get through dat gimlet.”
I thought, it’s gauntlet, you ignorant shit. Then I started running.
They tried to stop me, with their arms, their legs, with kicks and punches,
but they didn’t tackle me or stand in my way. When I broke through and
stood panting on the grass, I had a fat lip and I could feel some blood trickle
down from my eyebrow.
Buster nodded. “Okay. Now you gotta have a name.”
“I already have a name.”
“A gang name, pal. A gang name.”
Buster thought about this for a minute, biting his lips like a
schoolgirl, then he laughed.
“I got it! Yer name is lucky cauze, like I said, dis is yer lucky day.
You gotta knife?”
“No.”
“Dat’s all right, yuh kin use mine. Yuh hafta cut yer gang name in
yer arm like dis,” he said, holding up his freckled forearm. Thin, crooked
letters scarred the sunburned skin with what looked like BUSTER. I
couldn’t believe how stupid it looked.
“But first yuh gotta do one thing.”
The gang spread out and formed a large circle with Buster and I at
its centre.
“Yuh gotta fight,” he said. “Yuh gotta fight ME.”
He went into a crouch and poked a fist in my direction. I thought, if
I had a gun, I’d shoot him. Suddenly the whole morning struck me as a badly
drawn episode in a comic book. I shook my head, “No way.”
Buster came out of his boxing stance. He looked puzzled. He
came up and patted me on the cheek. Then he drove a sharp left into my
stomach. There was barely time to tense my abs and the shock of it drove
me back a step. I crossed my arms over the pain and took a deep breath.
“Come on dere, Lucky, you gotta. It’s the ‘nitiation.” He sounded
sweetly reasonable, as if all the world agreed, this is the way things are
done. “An hey, if ya win, you kin be leader.”
“I don’t want to be leader, Buster. I don’t even want to join your
gang.”
“Too late, pal. An I’m gonna keep hittin ya till ya tryan hit me
back.” He laughed a mean little laugh and backed down into a crouch. The
ring of gang members moved in a little closer, their bodies tense,
…shrinking, yet unable to vanish completely. I don’t know what I have to say or what I have to do. Sometimes this obstacle appears to me as though a tear drop flopped on a music composition that will keep it silent until it dissolves. And I have the unbearable feeling that all the rest of my life won’t be sufficient to dissolve this tear drop in my soul. And a thought haunts me that if I were to be burned alive this obstinate moment would be the last to surrender.
Who would help us? Once, when I was still a seaman, one July noon, I found myself alone on an island, crippled in the sun. A soothing breeze brought to my mind tender thoughts, it was then when a young woman with a diaphanous dress revealing her body lines slender and willing like a gazelle’s and a somber man who stared in her eyes from a yard away, came and sat not far from where I was. They spoke a language I couldn’t understand. She called him Jim. But their words had no weight and their glances, mingled and motionless, left their eyes blind. I always think of them, because they were the only people I saw that didn’t have the grasping or haunted look that I noticed on everybody else. That look that makes them resemble either a pack of wolves or a flock of sheep. I met them again the same day in one of those island chapels that one finds as he goes by and loses them as he walks out. They still kept the same distance from each other, then they came together and kissed. The woman turned into a cloudy image that disappeared as she was of small stature. I asked myself whether they knew that they escaped from the world’s nets…
It is time for me to go. I know of a pine tree that leans near the sea. At noon, it bestows a shade upon a tired body and at night, as the wind passes through its needles it starts a strange song, like souls that have abolished death at the moment when they start becoming lips and skin. Once I spent a night under such a tree. At dawn I was as fresh as if they’d just cut me off the quarry.
Ah, if one could live like this, irrelevant.
…despite the heavy atmosphere
and, as everything changes, here is the fog
the ship enters the fog area
impossible to see ahead of us
curtains of fog in layers
and the first raindrops
start falling
and a sudden, wild wind starts
to ruin the sails
the boats the masts
it destroys everything on the ship
it groans around us like a beast
and the wooden ship rocks
how far the images of our homeland —
under us, the abyss opens
and darkness thickens in the horizon
as if it was possible
it thickens
darkness falls
dawn comes
curtains of rain replace the partitions of fog
the bright sun is hidden
and only the cursed wind
ravages the palm trees in the faraway islands
our ship delays
it delays a lot
when are we to arrive
to the foreign land?
The Atlantic, I repeat surrounds us
it’s a huge ocean
we are timid it is fearsome…
Lesson
The sound of a shell in the mouth
of the beautiful woman prepares us
for the ultimate lesson and teaches us
how to die with dignity when
her naked body remains unnoticed
though it stands erect, provocative,
tempestuous before our eyes so
we can learn how to depart with
our heads up during that first snowfall
covering our footsteps at dawn,
in the secluded room, and the lone chirp
of a hungry bird tells us one
day we won’t ever be hungry
memory runs to the light sleep
under the grapevine, middle of July
when cicadas continued
their perpetual revolution of
species unaccustomed to obeying
rules or laws when we sleep in peace
dreaming of Helena’s naked body
under the light bed sheet during
that first autumnal rain and the fresh
smell of earth, soil desperately
seeking understanding when we must
learn how to die with dignity and
this, our ultimate lesson in humanness
All My Belongins
All my belongings have remained
as if I died long ago
dust to dust the place is full
and I inscribe crosses with my fingers
all my things recall
the hour we spent together
when my books lost themselves
the clock has stopped at that hour
the happy hour, enchanting
was the sundown
I’ve been dead so long
the window has always been closed.
No persons nor the sun ever enter
my deserted house echoes
that hour again, the only hour
that lasts from morning to the eve
and I don’t know what this place is
nor who inscribes the crosses
and all my things remained the same
as if I died long ago
Manolis Aligizakis 