Poems selected from "The suspiciousness of an alibi" (2010)

Poems selected 

and translated from the Greek 

by Yiannis Goumas

Self-knowledge

                                           How much longer will you poets stay awake?

                                                    Were you to spend a thousand evenings

                                                     and yet another thousand starlit nights

                                             you’ll always have in you what grieves you:

                                                                                                empty glasses

                                                       and fingers scratched by cruel verses.

                                      Your distant lands will always be built on myth

                                           and prayers will lie in ambush for yesterday

                                                                         hanging on their shoulders

                                                                the saviours’ lovely arrow cases.

                                                                                  And who am I to talk?

                                                                        A faceless usher of dreams. 

By birth

Rough chest- thorns have grown

inside the shirt

the skin is copper-coloured

and the ribs are dry walls in barren fields.

His mind was ruined in this place

and the province

a merciless, loveless mother of a thousand and one deaths

and secret ledgers under the bridal bedclothes

turns the key

locking her lads out of the house.

He walked alone for long

alone he dug the earth till his nails

bled

but never did he breathe the clear sky

and the “being” of this world

like a castaway by birth

abandoned by roads and sweaty distances

he keeps on twisting and turning

in the grave dug by our stubbornness.

His mind was ruined

in his chest thorns have grown.    

Colchis

We set out in the world

each one looking for what‘s in store for him.

You say it’s in the war that you look for a kiss

and I tell you it’s the thousand years

that I’m drunk on a wooden mast

a wet rag, eyes dried northwards

hands clutching the rope of a subterranean truth

that I may seek a footprint of yours.

Poor writings of another parody. 

We set out in the world

looking for discoloured railings

and the ghosts of a youth and a sullen spring

brows puckered up and loving

stray dogs basement bums

who never rested on spread out arms

what our need begets

and what only time can offer.

We set out in the world

each one getting what he deserves

and Colchis is taking years to appear.

Plural

Vivid are the colours hanging on walls

familiar scenes of past decades

oozing tobacco smoke

of incessant tight-mouthed puffing

and compulsive looks

eyes that have forsaken their morning star

and meet in low dim lights.

Friends as always the unfamiliar habitués

who keep on introducing themselves when they are short of drinks

hands extended

friends who always part a couple of hours before dawn

on the dirty steps of some memory.

Vivid are the colours hanging on walls

girls worn out

with serving coloured water all night long

in glasses cracked by endless clinking

changing names on chafed lips

now wipe our life like wiping a table;

on their hands the lines of battle

and the cloth wet with hidden memories.

Vivid are the colours

and like our years they hang shyly on verses.          

Paranoia

I am looking forward to a paranoia

ignoring what the big shots have to say.

Verses residing in our bodies

have fractured our joints

and draw blood from the unsealed veins.

That’s why I am looking forward

to opening a way with the sword of love affairs

and a lasting wish given on first of April

wholesale

or a bit from your own grim fall

as a land barren from origin

never fortunate to suffer unjust slavery.

Tyrannically I look forward

¾ are you at least listening to me? ¾

and I’m relieved by the downfall of certain young hopefuls 

unlined palms dig things to come

and pull down from scratch the ages’ truths

as if souls never sweat

or are in the habit of fasting love underground.

So I am looking forward

and though I possess a book of paranoias

I know that tomorrow the litany will end

and everyone will be interred looking at their watches.

Time remains the same

Fooled by time

and the deep cuts of a myrrh-bearing spring

we walk up the stairs.

On our shoulders

pallid mourning and assortments of cheap

bygone tears

and questions left unanswered by human eyes.

In our hands

oars fastened with shrouds of Columbus’ galley

that someone else had first sailed her to the west

in his heart hanging

a load of curses by an enslaved, total generation.

At our feet

drag years in chains

scraped and trampled on a thousand times

begging like old women for some nostalgia

before passing away

clinging to the faded footprints.

How many more stairs remain?

How many years?

Well, either here or in Hades

time remains the same.

Cello

I want a cello to be playing for me as I pass away

and a moon that knows how to pace

and in addition

a maestro to put an end to what begins

and show me at last

a few of the end’s tools

something of what in life I avoid.  

Like a wrong story

The young who grew into men just now

have for a haunt the haunt of old timers

they sit quietly at the bar

and order their mirror on the rocks;

good old symbolisms bygone jokes

and casual music for dried up tastes.

They roll the years without filter

and for paper they wrap indispensable poems

changing their rhymes and their “don’ts”.

They look suspiciously

they have their fishhook lying by the door

fully aware who’s coming and who’s waylaying.

From an early age they had read the story

lots of waste and no answer.

When will a breath soothe their bodies?

They write with earth and erase with rain

they are soaked working their papers by hand

but the pencil tireless on a straight course

for us an unruly plough

disciplined to them.

The young who grew into men just now

roll the years without filter

and look at us suspiciously like a wrong story.

Parenthesis

My withered loves

smell of sulphur, their breaths of alcohol.

Boats made fast on the pier of a day

awake with a start

and faded by the midday sun

like a book I laid aside years ago  

and remember but little now

sighing deeply and rubbing my eyes.

My withered loves

wear gowns and stiletto heels

throw their want on their shoulder and look at me puzzled

oiling their warped rifle

loaded long ago

and levelled, ironically, at their own breast.

My withered loves

have been hanging around for years now

and pass their life like an open parenthesis.

Carré Fix

A birch tree is leaning northward

for years now dressed in black

her hair down to her waist

a girl withered in strange ideals

now pains memories

and sings men’s verses to herself:

our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.

She smokes, not a filter tip, in anticipation of the livings’ resurrection

and with her breath she censes the earth’s bones

as in the past fate censed her.

Time is ground in her headaches

and flows from her eyes

like the spring Aphrodite washed her body.

A birch tree stands in the north

her hair, yellowed foliage

offered without resistance

to the mortal tends of a so-called autumn. 

Accidental

Dust falls from on high

and here are we vexed about the future.

How can the soul rejoice after so much salt;

She drinks at night

and smokes sick verses at dawn

she sports gold-embroidered stoles

given by a slender hand

and lies to rest as the sun looks at her

as the sun makes her hair blond

and devoutly scalds her blood.

Dust falls from on high

and here words refuse to meet.    

Apology

Zincs are playing music

this rainy all-night do.

A bunch of keys is up to Salome’s tricks

waiting for our head to lean on the empty plate.

No, I mutter sotto voce

I’m not the one who beat the sun hollow

or he who is beating the tambourine.

Sanctum 

Take hold of this stone

open your hand and like a flash throw it in this sanctum

named sea.

Afterwards with silence grazing the lips

grab at the wave

and drag it out to drain

till you find the poems I used

to find you

to be able to look for you in this very death.

Now

It took me years to realize

that the line was cut deep into the rock

and what pours out and roars is neither voice nor breath.

Years later did I realize

that glances tauten and spread day by day

leaving bare-breasted in the wind what hands build

and abandon like ships in full sail      

what the muses sung melodiously under the willow tree.

Now as I watch you setting sail it occurs to me

that the port sustains yet another aspect

another look

which masses of azure seaweed cover with their beauty.      

Laconic

I got lost in corridors and passages

in the empty wakefulness of this barren age

and for years I hear how spectres weep

that we keep afloat in absent poems.

Memory’s earthenware jug

Hidden in memory’s jug

and soaked in blood and wine

I saw time’s unbroken stone

a hope’s last lamp

for struggles left incomplete

leaving behind an empty moon.

Loners multiplied in basements

for years angels hid the cause

they dug deep to raise the gallows

oldsters and babies turned to dust

trees renounced their fruit

and pains ceased without childbirth.

Fires were lit in all squares

all the dead were proclaimed saints

they rinsed sins with water

they wore tinplate panoplies

they put secret love affairs to the sword

threw irons and concrete in agonies.

Others petrified and didn’t participate.

Can you shut sorrow in a drawer?

Paper and stone, poems apart

from the folly poets didn’t have

in songs another sort of famine

a part of our life they didn’t have.

Hidden in memory’s jug

I seek the water’s inebriety

time isn’t defined with grace.

Did the hands of Achilles or Paris

bury the dead sun-god

with the shield upright on the grass?