The grin left his mouth and he began to look wary. I was the one who got straight A’s, the only one in this pack of D’s and C minuses. “Ten bucks, Paulie. You can read, can’t you? Go look it up. A British blue cheese. And if you lose, you also gotta buy a pound of the shit, and eat it with a pair of chopsticks.” That did him in. He waved me off. “So what. You know cheese. But you don‘t know shit about tools. Thought yer ol’ man was a engineer.” “Yeah, well, what you think you’re talkin about here is a Stilson, a Stilson Wrench. Adjustable, with teeth and a long handle. A plumber’s tool, fool. What you want one of those things for?” He tried to look like a poker player holding a pocket pair. “Get me one and I’ll show ya.” I thought about that for a second. I knew where I could get one, but the sure bet had bit the dust and here was another chance to do business. “Cost ya a buck an hour.” “Don’t need an hour.” “Buck an hour or any fraction there-fuckin-of. Final offer.” Paulie laughed. “Some altuh boy, wid a mout like dat …” but he dug into his pocket and came up with a coin that looked like it had been dipped in chocolate and dusted with tobacco bits. “Heah’s fifty cent. The rest when you delivuh.” Paulie had achieved heroic status when he organized the now famous watermelon raid earlier in the summer. A boxcar had been left for several hours on the spur track behind number five park and Paulie had picked the padlock, releasing hundreds of tubby fruits into the city. Kids from as far away as Railroad Avenue were toting melons on their shoulders, or sitting in small groups, slicing them up with kitchen knives, their faces and hands drenched with sticky juice. It was a hard act to follow, but whatever plan he’d hatched for the Stilson, it was designed to maintain his legendary, outlaw image. And as supplier of the necessary technology, I would earn a small slice of his notoriety pie. But I needed help with this enterprise, and I knew who I could count on. Anthony Morga was the smallest but scrappiest member of our tribe at Holy Rosary School, and I could get him on board for a tithe of the buck I’d make from the rental. He was a wary kid, always kind of skittish about promissory contracts, and as we made our way down the unpaved alley that ran like a neglected country
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site that could double as a library card catalog for the Mediterranean soul — except the catalog keeps writing back.
Mara: Today we're in the territory of Greek and Mediterranean poetry, translations that carry grief and habit and beauty across languages, and fiction excerpts that range from colonial frontiers to Cold War escapes. vequinox is behind all of it.
Pip: A lot of ground, a lot of voices. Let's start with the poetry.
Translations, Memory, and the Weight of Greek Verse
Mara: The anchor here is the work of translation — bringing Greek poets like Tasos Livaditis, Yannis Ritsos, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, Constantine Cavafy, and others into English, and what gets carried across and what gets left in the original silence.
Pip: Livaditis sets the terms pretty early. The poem "November Wind" opens with a door being closed and a reckoning beginning, and then it lands this: "I think music is the grief of those who never found the time to love."
Mara: That line does a lot of work. It takes the whole poem's accumulation of lost letters, absent friends, and unanswered words and names the feeling underneath — not sorrow exactly, but grief as an art form practiced by people who ran out of time.
Pip: Ritsos shows up twice, and both poems are about absence made physical. "Emptiness" is a house stripped bare where the mirror refuses to reflect the void, and the nails left in the wall after pictures fall still catch the last light — still expecting something to hang on them. "The Sick Man" is quieter, a man returning from some interior collapse, speaking in a detached voice while making a gesture of strange tenderness with an imaginary handkerchief.
Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "The Goddess Habit" works a different register entirely. The poem personifies routine as a protective deity, and it earns its ending: "Yes, goddess Habit, I believe in you and I serve you. You too, stay loyal to me until I get tired of you." That's a prayer and a negotiation at the same time.
Pip: Cavafy appears twice, and both poems are portraits of performance. "Leader from Western Libya" is a quietly devastating sketch of a man who learns to dress and speak Greek to impress Alexandria, and ends up so terrified of making a grammatical error that he says almost nothing — all those unspoken words piling up inside him. The later Cavafy piece, "Days of 1909, 1910, and 1911," is a young blacksmith's elegy: beautiful, unrecorded, wasted.
Mara: Titos Patrikios's "Final Defeat" is brief and brutal — a man who stuttered wanted to say something, and the speaker was always in a hurry. Antony Fostieris's "Five Painters" turns that inward: an aging artist who has just finished his most important work sits quietly at a restaurant corner, contemplating the thorny crown of the critics, while his companions talk about nothing.
Pip: The remaining poems spread the emotional range. "Impulses" holds a mastectomy at its center — the word repeated twice at the close, once as descriptor, once as fact. "Hours of the Stars" moves through water and myrtle and skylarks with a ceremonial lightness. "Introspection" names its destination plainly: the word "arts" appearing like a destination on the climb toward a destined Ithaca.
Mara: "Wheat Ears" and "Entropy" and "The Incidentals" and "Ugga" fill out the edges — a man reading the morning paper's catalog of violence before going to war again with his coffee pot, a coal seller sweating through summer to sell winter, primeval souls climbing from pages of books, and the twentieth century's art movements battling while Dali embraces Lorca timidly.
Pip: All of it circles the same question: what survives the passing of time, and who gets remembered. The fiction asks something similar, just with more people in the room.
Voices Across Frontiers: The Fiction Excerpts
Mara: The fiction segment covers a wide range of settings and genres, but the posts share a preoccupation with people navigating systems — political, social, colonial — that are larger and less trustworthy than they appear.
Pip: "Arrows" is the sharpest example. Friar Salvador is caught in a military council where the power dynamics are shifting in real time, and the excerpt ends with a sentence that earns its weight: "Not one day among the Spaniards, and already I smelled unshed blood."
Mara: The tension in that scene is precise — Infante's insubordination is theatrical, Losada's tolerance of it is suspicious, and Salvador reads the whole room correctly while being unable to do anything about it. The approval that follows Infante's suggestion to interrogate the caciques is described as mockery rather than respect.
Pip: "Jazz with Ella" has a completely different energy — a group smuggling a Soviet musician out of the USSR, the airplane cabin full of people pretending not to know each other, and Jennifer barely containing her relief while picturing Volodya hearing live gospel music for the first time in Vancouver. It's one of the warmer excerpts here.
Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" is quieter tension — Tyne waking up and walking into a kitchen where Moe and Ken are already dressed and waiting, and the whole scene turns on whether she can read their faces before she sits down. The line "Have you heard anything?" comes out as little more than a whisper.
Pip: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" is the most expansive excerpt — a Celtic woman named Ula, sold to a convent for six chickens and a pig, who has ended up among Indigenous people in what reads as early North America, and is slowly being reached by a monk named Rordan through the shared medium of song. The detail about the children calling him Mountain Thrush for his happy laugh is the kind of thing that earns a reader's trust.
Mara: "Redemption" follows a young man named Hermes preparing for a meeting with a university dean, coached by his aunt to find out the conditions before agreeing to anything, because nobody offers something without expecting something in return. "Poodie James" puts a lawyer for the Great Northern Railway in front of a civic hearing about hobos, and the exchange between the committee chair and the railway counsel is drily procedural — the shortest speech ever heard from a lawyer.
Pip: "Wellspring of Love" is a quieter domestic register — a girl named Rachael sitting by a stream, overhearing herself described as running with someone fast, and trying to figure out who she could ask about it without causing more trouble than the question is worth.
Mara: "Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter" is a biographical excerpt tracking how Kirkby's Arctic paintings became nationally recognized, and how the Inukshuk eventually became the symbol of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics — a consequence that started with a single ministerial meeting and a well-timed exhibition in Spain.
Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" closes on a man who spots someone he may or may not recognize — a face with a distinctive mark — returning to a place that once meant something. He could verify it, but he chooses not to. "I preferred to believe it was him," the narrator says, "because it's what I did. It's who I had become."
Mara: "Straits and Turns" is a travel piece set in Madrid, a narrator exchanging an imperceptible kiss with a Minoan-featured stranger across a restaurant, and "Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy" is a scroll and a water well and a horse riding toward a country of castles that threaten the wide open skies. "Red in Black" ends the range — a love poem about texting instead of writing a letter, and being called a student of the old school, and sending a kiss from the other side of the planet.
Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry and the fiction both — is about the gap between what people mean to say and what actually gets said.
Mara: The stuttering man in Patrikios, the unspoken words piling up in Cavafy's Libyan prince, Salvador reading the room and leaving afraid. The gap is the subject.
Pip: Next time, we'll see what else is waiting in the archive.
…the moment if they didn’t interfere with his driving them to their destination. On the other hand, could he ask them to stop? Why, could they answer, and what could he say to such a question? Strange beast, the human mind, as it went from one thing to another, like a crazy monkey who jumped from one branch of a tree to another, just like Costa’s which ran to his good trip back at the Four Seasons to which he was eager to reach on time, so his customer wouldn’t get impatient and take a different cab to the airport. He looked at his watch: his time was just fine; finally, he arrived at the Cypress Bowl, and he realized that his customers in the back were half dressed and half not, such was their erotic oestrus during the trip… upon realizing that they had arrived at their place they quickly fixed their clothes, the man paid the driver and taking his half-dressed sweetheart by the waist they walked to the front door of their place. The driver said goodbye to them and started his return to the city of Vancouver and to the Hotel where he arrived earlier than the time we had agreed with the smoker. However, Costa saw his customer waiting in the lobby. Costa walked over, grabbed his bag, put it in the trunk, opened the back door for him, and started the trip to the airport. Around the sixteenth and Granville, they started the usual little talk, “Where are you from? How long have you been here? Etc. Costa informed his customer that he came from Hellas and had lived here for six years. The customer mentioned that he was a Turk, from Ankara, on his way to Los Angeles for business. Oh, God, what just happened? The earth started swirling around like a wind vane, like a top on a flat surface. And all this buzzing noise was like a swarm of bees in Costa’s head, as if desperately looking for honey. Endless pounding against his two temples turned that buzzing noise into a thundering hatred. In which school have they taught him to hate this man so much? In which church have they turned him into such a fanatic? How many eons of anger and hatred has he lived, and why is he in such a dreadful condition? How was it possible that all his ancestors had resurrected and stood before him demanding revenge? Why all this hatred today, and why have all his ancestral parents, brothers, and sisters awakened…
If and Since He Had Died “Where did he retire? Where did the Sage disappear to? After his countless miracles, and the fame of his teaching that spread over so many nations he suddenly hid, and no one learned with certainty what happened to him (nor has anyone ever seen his grave). Some said that he died in Ephesus. But Damis didn’t record it; nothing was written by Damis about the death of Apollonios. Others said that he vanished in Lindos. Or perhaps the story that he ascended in Crete is true, at the sacred temple of Dictynna. However, we have his exquisite, supernatural appearance to a young student in Tyana. Perhaps the time has not come for him to return and appear to the world again, or perhaps he is roaming among us incognito. But he will reappear as he was, teaching the right things, and then of course he will reestablish the worship of our gods, and our refined Hellenic ceremonies.” This was the way he mused in his poor house, one of a few pagans, one of the very few who remained after reading Philostratos’ On Apollonios of Tyana— In any case, an insignificant and timid man, on the surface he played the Christian, and he, too, went to church. It was the era when in utmost piety the king who reigned was the aged Ioustinos, and Alexandria, a god-fearing city, abhorred the miserable idolaters. On the Ship Certainly, this small sketch, in pencil resembles him. Done rather fast, on the deck of the ship, one enchanting afternoon. The Ionian Pelagos all around us. It resembles him. However, I recall him as handsome. He was sensitive to the point of suffering, and this lit his expression. He appears even handsome to me now that my soul recalls him out of Time. Out of Time. All these things are old, the drawing, the ship, and the afternoon.
“One day you will remember of me”, he said “but you won’t be able to cry;” what did he mean and what was the meaning of words? Women stood at the crossroad, dark faced, holding the half open pomegranate like thousand faces of nothing. The prostitute, returning home, went to the kitchen and warmed the food and I, hell, failed between two evening songs. When Rosa had a john she used to place a carton on the corner so the memory of her father wouldn’t see her; someone, with an axe, came out in the night and started striking blindly. The whole city was panicking, searches, interrogations, occasionally someone would come, kneel before the icons and confess to everything since the beginning of the world — thus perhaps seeking a purpose or two lines in the newspaper and a small rose at the edge of the road; the stupid child would go by and pick the rose, he’d look at it and then as if he understood something he’d leave it in its place and only the gambler could guess that movement such as those that save you. Thus one by one they all got lost and I was the only survivor playing, at the critical moment, with the fringes of the tablecloth. I truly wonder why all these since one can be lost with a lot less things. I remember one who’s hunger pushed him to desire a street organ, which he sat down and ate, there, at the corner only spitting out the crutch of the soldier, and the fat ugly woman had revealed her big breasts over the balcony “don’t feel sorry for me” she said “I’m very clever” and she was staring at the end of the road; then we sat on the grass of the dark cemetery and helped the dead child.
…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.
Reality The ship entered the αρεα of the thick fog. A bell echoes desperately at prow: the route is full of innumerable dangers now. On the bridge, however, the sleepless and bewildered captain watches and drives the ship safely. The captain … his eyes, his glance. Yes, indeed, his glance is everything, like now that his glance, straight, strong, mercilessly pierces through the thick layers of grey pleats of fog and inside the dark paths of the human psyche, into the dark sanctuary of Fate, it calms the wildest and roughest seas, it enters and stands like a guard into the hovel of the poor fisherman, it saunters tenderly around the anchors, the sleeping baby, the spread nets and finally, it comes, settles and serenely rests, next to the quiet light of the lamp. Certainly, the captain’s profession isn’t captain. He has different choices, different longings, and specialties. Different things attract him and in different things he’s involved. Yet, when the ship is in danger, they all run to him, who although they don’t see him as a man, they allot to him and he accepts the responsibility of many souls. He, who has no joy but knows of it, who isn’t free, yet yearns for freedom and struggles while he hopes. Let it be known: if the Fates never visited his baby cradle, Fates, Witches and pure Fairies would come next to his deathbed. The figurehead of the ship knows all this and loves him. She’s, his lover. This wild and hot girl with her undone black hair, fiery red lips and the light-blue belt goes and finds him secretly every night and they make love ‘together’ and chit-chat erotically for hours. One moonlit night: “Don’t forget me”, she says to him, “because I’ll die” One day when he was in a thick forest, rain caught up with him. He sheltered himself in the tree hollow and waited. The rain intensified. Among all the rain he noticed a few tree trunks burned by the fires of wayfarers and many pinecones scattered around the soil. Another time, a summer noon, he stood by a water well. Further away was a tower. A girl came, like Rebeckah to get some water. She puts the pitcher down, goes close to him, uncovers her voluptuous breasts and says, “Don’t touch them, they are roses and drop their petals; only caress them” Then again, “No, do as you wish with them, they are yours, my sweet man, I gift them to you.” This woman, who he fell in love with passionately, one night as the winds were blowing, he waited for her and he saw her going down to the harbour. She ran and cried along the deserted quay. She had tied her raincoat around her waist with a leather strap and the strong wind sometimes glued it on her body and other times it whipped her apron wildly and took away along with her voice, her long hair too.
14th of November As we focus our eyes to notice a difference among the pieces of day, we don’t know how to get a hold of ourselves, we miss the shape, the hour, colors, faces. We only listen carefully so that we might discern a sound that confirms the passing of time, so we can reverse the performance, box, broom handle, name, the dice that roll on the table, the limping wind that stumbles onto the barbwire the fork that hits the plate and its sound that continues internally. Otherwise a circle without a center remains, a whirl in the air with no movement but its own; it can’t become a car tire that crosses a forest and if once it becomes a square it’s not a window through which you look at the world or the three lined carpentries in an unfamiliar neighborhood, but only the relativity of straight lines, the analogy of corners, boring, very boring things. A mathematician and an astronomer could create something concrete and clear out of all these. I can’t. Yet I always liked the Observatories; the dark stairway, the clock, the telescope, those photographs of stars in homely positions: Orion without his sword, with no underwear, Verenice with her many freckles, unwashed, frumpy, a whole urban kitchen transferred to a metaphysical location, boiling cups, jugs, casseroles, the grater, salt cellar, baking tins, white spots, a bit of steam hanging onto the smoked walls of the night. Someone was talking of numbers and more numbers, light-eons, leagues and leagues. I wasn’t listening. Today a friend was telling me that when he was thirteen he was selling oranges and lemons in Piraeus; he also had a young Armenian friend who was selling socks. During the summer afternoons they’d meet in the harbour behind a pile of sacks, where they’d put down their baskets and read poems; then they’d eat a sesame bread ring and an orange and gaze at the sea, the jumping fish, the foreign ships. From today I also have a friend who smells of orange and harbour. He keeps many evening whistles of ships in his pockets. I see the movement of the big finger of the big harbour clock on his hands. From today on, I’ll love him, I’ll unbutton one of his coat buttons. Now I think of going to find his young Armenian friend to find a basket with socks on the road, to cry out, socks, beautiful socks, cheap socks. At noon, I’m sure I’ll find the Armenian youth behind the sacks, I’ll get to know him; he’ll recognize me since we both have the traces of our common friend’s eyes on the lips. If I missed that basket with the socks and the one with the lemons I wouldn’t know how to fill my day, my words, my silence. Yet I believe every comrade wishes to have such a basket, only that I don’t know where to find it and I get angry and I search.
A Little Sleep The distant voice of the lottery vendor. The swaying of the tree. A canteen steadied in the sand. The west is burning. A purple reflection over the seashore. The few houses painted crimson, silence and sundown. You have a summer handkerchief in your pocket, a sorrow you left behind on the ledge like the ripped shoe of the spring that was left on the rock when the last group grabbed three meters of sea and left stooping among the tents of the wind. How fast the sun goes down in your eyes; your coat is already smelling of moist, you put your hands in your gloves like the trees get in the clouds. Where the tempest stops your glance is re-ignited where the sky ends your song and your whole face are reborn. There is a yellow star in your silence like a small daisy on the side table of the sick man a little warmth on every yellow leaf that turns the pages of time backward. It is enough that you know. The other communication doesn’t end at midnight. The line is continued from deep inside and from afar with a few stops, interruptions, accidents, it continues and autumn finds shelter on the railings of the station or the fence wall of the Orphanage, it listens to the call for silence on the damp roofs and to the gramophone of the seashore bar, that the moon turns, a scratched vinyl, a very old tango. No one dances. But you, turning the moon to its other side, beyond midnight, further from the ledge, you listen to the great music while you saunter in the harbour with the twelve boat masts like a speechless restaurant server who cleans the autumnal tables folding carefully the napkins of the night, gathering the stack of plates with the leftover fish bones. The sea and the songs continue. All these that the locked people left outside belong to us: the hurrah of the wind in the darkened rooms, the music that descends in big waves and hits the window shutters, the silence that opens its purse and looks at itself in her square little mirror, and the woman who wraps herself with the army blanket and sleeps next to her bag and you too, as you light your cigarette with a star over the calm plain of your soul like the guard who stays vigil over the sleeping soldiers and thinks of his woman of the sea the city with the flags the trumpets the sun-dust and the glory of men. And next to you, you know it, this big smile like the circular alarm clock next to the asleep worker. It’s time to sleep a little. Don’t be afraid. The clock is properly wound up. It’ll get you up on time with the bucket of dawn that draws water from the well, with the crawl of a proclamation that noiselessly sheds light under the door of your silence. Be assured. It’ll wake you up.
Sirius We saw her unfold the spin wheel of time opposite the wind and the pashas we saw the beak of day touching her sun tied on the iron stake of a rock and the eagle coupled her sides. There she armed herself while each of her gods stood forty yards high and started talking to children and geraniums at times even men got teary. Then you would think they tossed barley into the fire or dice on the chess of virgin Mary as time takes away time and brings back her sea-kerchiefs and the vigils of the north wind. Time unfurls the flutes of colors and the blouses of girls that into their eyes convoys of birds and flowers travel. At the lower levels the olive tree leaves embitter us and at the higher level pines breath signals a shiver of guilt sprouting on her skin and platoons of cypresses climb up the hill as the hours start to blaze she offers atonement libations to the fair weather; she assumes the ephebe July and establishes the new crops like Aeneias white horses thresh Logos and the golden plains from end to end fever spreads into her veins for hours and hours like weather does to grapevines that the performance of a group of disorder appears straight by the edge of the precipice. The hours stagger on their red heels and on their faces intensifies the blushing aroused by their hearing focused on the far away when silence announces inexplicable oracles and truth demands ransom as years go by she becomes an orphan and hangs over the waters when she seeks to blindly attach herself onto something as the camel driver gets fooled by the mirage of the desert and assumes seeing far away the sword of Alexander the Great pushed into the scabbard of the Dead Sea. We saw her floating over waters and ruins like a big star when the mermaid rejoiced in tearing up the forgetfulness of the sea floor and during the night Glaucus fought against the hours striking them one by one over the castle of Astropalia and the bell of Virgin Mary.
Manolis Aligizakis 