George Kalamaras
The Madness of Michael Mitsakis
A hummingbird entered your throat,
and you went mad. So much for 1896 and swollen
toes. For the flaking of skin you had been
convinced was your insides trying to cry.
If I was asked to kiss you, I would immediately
defrost bees from the freezer and lovingly send
them swarming to Algeria where you might have
crossed the sea to cultivate sanity. The forgotten
remain forgotten. Especially a journalist like you
whose associative poems crowded the owls
from their resinous midnight release. What word,
what fracture of color, did you see
those last twenty years when you were institutionalized
and babbled moon to moon. Some said it was just another
poem. The wind knew better, bringing
the clockflower into your mouth so you could
tell time by the seasons. You were a Surrealist
before the wing-beat of Java sparrows pulsed blood
into the mouths of André Breton.
Michael Mitsakis, lost to us.
The way wolves eat history when history eats its young.
Lafcadio Hearn Dreams That He Will Be Reborn Eleven Years After His Death in the Body of Thomas Merton
I am a Russian fish owl embroiled in the chest of night on the eastern coast near the Sea of Japan.
If the moon were not a kerosene rag, then the mice would not lament.
For many years, I lived inside a Kyoto teahouse (no, not as some say, inside a shamisen plucked in a brothel).
My Greek mother has—for many years now—become a cup of Gyokuro tea.
If the rain were porcelain, it would be her.
I would like to say how much it hurts to drink starlight through the foreheads of the dead.
Winters in the primeval forest still snow inside me.
There are dreams of American monks and Asian Journals and electric cords we tell no one.
I was shocked into this life, named Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν, on the island of Lefkada in 1850.
This is what happens when you spend decades collecting ghost stories and taking a Japanese wife.
This is what occurs when they call you Koizumi Yakumo, beautifully written as, 小泉 八雲
Some pictures draw us. Draw us further into their slopes of shivering red. Of shivering red cedars.
There are gorges lined with conifers and swamps full of mice.
I swear—for some inexplicable reason I believe we should all avoid Bangkok fans and afternoon naps and wire cords.
What we dream will one day dream us—whether we coax it beneath a full moon or near the end of a meridian nap.
I have never been to Kentucky or even Fort Wayne, Indiana, except as a ghost voice impinging the thick skin of the sycamores.
What the wind winds through blows one soul into another.
I met a famous haiku poet last week, seated in his sparse two-tatami mat cell, who warned me never to use the word soul in a poem. Boil the image down into the rarely glimpsed largest known owl in the world, he advised.
I bow to the feathers of my Greek Icarus blood that have brought me this far.
I bow to the rocks of life, waiting below—splashed with sea salt and rain—that long to quarter me.
I bow to the dawn temple bells in Kyoto. Their breaking bows to me.
Kazantzakis Finds in the Mirror the Face of Zorba the Greek
First there was wind in his throat.
Then he felt snowmelt from Mount Athos.
Donkey bray and rain-smoked cigars came from the taverna.
The almost-voice of love in the streetwalker’s stance.
There is a mirror in my throat, said Nikos Kazantzakis.
And all the places without names.
He said you said I said.
What if you looked in the mirror and saw an armadillo?
Monks from Mount Athos are said to have burned his books.
And the dusty rains of the sirocco seared his brain
When they tore the pages
Of The Last Temptation of Christ.
Sometimes Kazantzakis covered the mirror with a black cloth.
Flowers. Frankincense. And morning processions.
Then there were bedtime openings as roads in his chest.
And he wept his head which wept the dark of his heart.
Once, Nikos swore he saw his reflection as sores in the moon.
Zorba dancing and singing and playing on the beach.
Mirrors, Kazantzakis insisted, are two or more ways of mouth.
What is agony? he kept asking.
What is the agony inside the agony of the wind—whingeing and hinged?
Rita Boumi-Pappas Confronts Stalin, Finally, in a Dream
If I could go out walking with my dead friends
—Rita Boumi-Pappas
Heterogeneous branches of the tongue crowned in shadows
of dirt and poor. The murmuring of trees burned you.
You wrote about the wages of bread crusts
soaked in a bit of spoiled milk. Wrote
about those who could not afford time in a living
forest. You wrote “The Crow,” in homage
to Stalin. Asked your teeth when they hurt
if they could bite you. Instead. The dog you longed
to hold was a thin, pale cat sprawled on a rummaged Asian
rug. All the patterns of the poor infuriated you.
They clocked on and on for centuries. Filled you
with bus fumes from the cities in which you hid,
diverse as Athens, Sofia, and East Berlin. Now you see
the bird buried in salt. Now you don’t. The salt pleads
through you. Discarded cardboard boxes make a home
for the not-yet-dead. You call the archangel of the State
down into your mouth, where the Black Sea and the Baltic
exchange scrapings of dead fish scales into your sleep.
I beg. Beg you, Rita. Clothe your eyes. Step aside. Don’t drink.
Tasos Denegris Leaves the Crumbling of Greece for the United States
Then they put Greece under
a microscope. Put Tasos Denegris
under a microscope. Or was it
a spectrometer?
The entomologist let loose
the Eurasian Millipede.
Then the Hissing Cockroach
from Madagascar, on which
she performed close observation
of its reproductive organs.
Then the herpetologist
set forth the Dice Snake.
Then the deadly Ohia. Then
the Balkan Whip Snake.
Tasos Denegris heard all this,
read it in the morning
maps, then planned to dissect
politics as a way to better grasp
what could be waiting in the eelgrass.
In the wind-bent of the almond
tree. The lull of the laurel. In the branch
of smoke. His poetry called forth
the undertaking of odd jobs.
Dishwasher. Street sweeper. Hodcarrier.
Clerk in the Foreign Press Division.
Even his poetry fellowship to the United States.
There was food to be had. Food to be
avoided. Tasos knew there was a night sky inside
the onion he refused to caramelize.
A darkening inside
the train whistle. A bathroom
cramped into the back of a tour bus. There,
hidden in the tenderness of his wife’s
wrist, like a moonless
moon in a sun-drunk sky, he could imagine
the rest of the world. And what it might sing.
All the lab men, with their microscopes,
employed seeing-eye dogs. Adopted laboratory
mice to explore the moaning
of life in the meanderings
of the Minotaur. Revealed the Greek
crumbling of earth. The split split
splitting apart of hidden yet molecular sobbing.
And how Tasos Denegris considered
how a military regime could
somehow court autumn, blindfold
its people with leaves and brigands
of about-to-be blowing snow. Offer them
a momentary bonfire as a cigarette--
a final, comforting smoke—before leaving
the wind-swept dead of Athens, of Thessalonki,
collapsed. Against the wall. The air
and its autumn bruise among them
refusing to move.
Zoë Karelli Freeing the Bones of the Dead
Mysterious and dreadful meanings, whispers from thence.
—Zoë Karelli
Matutinal fire. Morning glory
burdening a vine with blue
from the inky depths
of the Aegean. The dead
are there. And the sad gold
fins. And the wavering
weeds. The dead, you told us,
never die.
Zoë. There are gesturing hands
and foodstuffs and trains
without whistles. Mouths
sewn shut. What did you hear
three years after your mother’s death
when—according to Orthodox custom--
you disinterred her bones,
transferring them to the family
vault? What words passed between you
and your brother, poet Nikos Ghavril Pendzikis,
when you held the skull and drank deeply
thereof?
I imagine the world
the way the world imagines us.
I imagine the dead seeking shelter
in re-membering what it means
to be alive. I imagine your heart giving birth,
unfolding the fire of the first flower.
Yannis Kondos and Franz Kafka Play a Game of Chess on a Board that Is a Floor of Rain
When you die I will roll
great rocks toward the city
and there will be no sound.
—Yannis Kondos
Scorpions in their mouths.
Not their heart in their chests,
but Dostoevsky’s beard.
Yannis Kondos has saved only one piece of clothing.
A window or a hanky? Kafka bringing a bowl
of grapes all the way from Thessaloniki.
They sink into a chessboard of water, stare
into the development of rain. Thunder
hypnotizes them until they are dark as fire.
The wind around their game, calm
as a housecat napping before the woodstove.
Black and red squares dissolve in the salt-bath warmth.
They share jokes like an iron cough.
Kafka, almost a sleeping daybreak.
Half the moon is half the moon.
Kondos is fingering a stack
of books. Reciting Emerson.
Whitman. A passage from a letter
in which Abraham Lincoln
begs to assuage the agony
of your bereavement.
Such words, elegant in their formality,
coax Yannis Kondos and his Yannis Kondos
mouth. And he begs the wind to be rain
enough to make things right.
Let’s not play black and white, he tells Kafka.
You be Kurosawa; I’ll be Buñuel.
And the opposing chess pieces transform
into strips of film that move like movie characters
when the fluid of the moon flows.
No one has to win, you know.
The important thing, Franz, is to play
the way wind labors the leaves.
Yes, Kafka answers, moving a sad, muddy samurai
across the board, threatening Yannis’s man
who stares and stares into an ant-covered hand. Check,
he proclaims. Bathe in my mud-drenched rain.
And Yannis sinks into his own mouth, unable
to get out, as if a great rock blocked the way.
Not their heart or the wind therein,
but Dostoevsky’s beard, threads of his starving
mustache. Not the thrumming thunder, but discourse
with no sound. Not a chessboard
map of moving mathematically here to there,
but words to sink into, a floor of flooding rain.
The Death of Konstandinos Karyotakis Reborn in the Birth-Blood Poems of Dinos Siotis
after Dinos Siotis’s “Why You Would Have Committed Suicide Again If You Were Living Today O Konstandinos Karyotakis!”
Death is a deep-frozen bird thawed in the poet’s mouth.
Death is Wire Press and barbed fencing inside bodies of birds.
Death is a poem stalking the poet’s limp.
Death is an Armenian apple in the Greek poet’s mouth.
Death is the man asking for beer and a pack of Zante Filters.
Death is Pavlina. And Rhea. And Mando Aravantinou.
Death is Seferis and his incurable wound.
Death is Maria and Konstandinos sharing three cookies a day.
Death is the promise of the reincarnation of every stone.
Death is the Trojan Horse alive with swords, clubs, and spears.
Death is Troy, sleeping off a long night of lamb and wine.
Death is a quietly lit torch lighting the cobblestone way.
Death is syphilis, incurable at the time of a 1928 suicide.
Death is a gunshot in the heart of a man shamed into oblivion.
Death is Maria, her tuberculous cough caught in a photograph.
Death is how to tell his love that he could never share her bed.
Death is the dinner bowl, left out for unknown cats.
Death is a Blue Willow plate left out in the rain.
Death is a virus not yet agreeing to kill itself.
Death is the pandemonium of a pandemic pirating the mouth.
Death is a corpse wrapped in a tablecloth and napkins.
Death is the body risen on the third day from a cave.
Death is a prostitute resurrected in the body of a savior.
Death is The Book of Books learning how to read itself in trees.
Death is hyena scat dropped here to everywhere at once.
Death is how mice roam through the animal’s slow bones.
Death is Konstandinos reborn on the island of Tinos in 1944.
Death is death risen in the blood-lit birth of Dinos Siotis.
Death is, I am here, my brothers and sisters, in the groan of your bones.
Death is how we are given a second chance. And a third.
Death is not death, Dinos seems to say, in anaphoric allure.
Death is not death, he repeats, into bodies swollen and disowned.
Jack Spicer Encounters Dimitris Papaditsas, Believing the Voice He Hears Late at Night Is a Radio Wave from Mars
Toenail clippings. Horsehair shirts. Monks from Mount Athos carrying stones in their mouths.
These things, Jack Spicer heard one night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, tuning his inner radio receiver to Mars.
Papaditsas was still alive, somehow broadcasting stray thoughts across the ocean as he meditated upon the Surrealist paintings of Nikos Engonopoulos and Giorgos Vakalo.
When one drinks a cup of tea, the moon is pouring the sad salt of Greece through its glandular curve. Here, spit into my mouth, and we will be one with an iguana lolling on a rock in the Galápagos.
Phrases like this puzzled Spicer. As he tossed his bed. And turned. Linguist that he was, heartfelt of Old English vowels, he knew Beowulf would never speak such atrocities, engaged as he was in fighting Grendel.
Or were these fragments of conversations—half-heard in booths he passed on the way to the can? Leftover bar talk from Gino & Carlo’s? From Enrico’s? Maybe from Plaka Taverna, on Kearny near Broadway, where you could down shots of ouzo, hear bouzouki music, and break a plate?
Words puzzled him. Jigsaw puzzles too. Why should a picture be fractured? A word? And all that transmigration. The olives, grape leaves, and wine of the Greek myths somehow becoming the peas and parsnips of Old English epics. Cabbage and wild boar filling the Anglo Saxons with lust.
We are all dusting into one another, even while alive, the unknown voice that was Papaditsas seemed to say, though through the static it was hard to tell. Like André Breton and Robert Desnos flaking into one another, it continued. Why do you think termites build mounds in French Equatorial Africa, in Ubangi-Shari, when the rains have ceased?
Of course, such words were disconcerting. Spicer took them to Robert Duncan. To Jess. To Helen Adam. George Stanley. Robin Blaser. And Ebbe Beauregard. Even to what he took to be a falconress, which seemed to preen itself and suggest all answers could be found while digging meticulously into oneself, nudging most ectoparasites away. We must study Lorca, he realized, telling each of his friends in turn. As a way to decode what of our mouths our ears most want to grant.
And it went on like this for weeks. Months. And more months. Jack unable to sleep. Hearing Papaditsas disguising the dark. Dispatching Surrealist reports. Into the dusky parts of Spicer’s brain—half asleep, half awake, the third half unable to do math.
Look, he heard, just before the visitations ceased, there is a sirocco coming into my body here in Athens, all the way from Arabia. But it is not dust or tobacco fragments from the warm winds entering me; it is bees swarming from your own backyard. Listen carefully to the sound of your tongue, Jack, absorbing water from wind from out of the soft center of bread. Your broken body there in your own sad mouth, the voice continued. The mouth of Greece crawling out to you night after night from a time before. Into your one-too-many drinks. Into the restless edge of your lexicon. The say-so-yes-no / right-way-wrong. In the muddled ecstasy of your time of mouth. In your time of what used to be. Most sound. Sleep.
On Prison and Holy Hashish: Elias Petropoulos, the Enfant Terrible of Modern Greek Letters
And I said to my wife:
—when I die like a dog here in Paris,
burn my corpse in the crematorium
then toss the ashes into a sewer.
This is my testament.
—Elias Petropoulos, Never and Nothing
You are dead in the way
a boy’s hair turns green.
You piss on the ruins
of Rhodes, and part of your mouth
becomes pus of the moon.
Cypress trees bow when your name
bows down into them. Vassilis Tsitsanis
keeps waiting for you with his bouzouki,
bringing you into the underworld
of rembetika—prostitutes, homosexuals,
hash smokers, and petty thieves. Horses
of the junta keep tracking you with their iron
hooves. The Colonels clean their teeth
with a pick, swearing you are still there
somewhere inside. Even after three different
jail sentences. Your common-law wife weeps
when your breath finally moves from the body
burdening the cot into a Eurasian nightjar.
Once again, she pours your ashes—as you
requested—into a sewer in France.
A hummingbird entered your throat,
and you went mad. So much for 1896 and swollen
toes. For the flaking of skin you had been
convinced was your insides trying to cry.
If I was asked to kiss you, I would immediately
defrost bees from the freezer and lovingly send
them swarming to Algeria where you might have
crossed the sea to cultivate sanity. The forgotten
remain forgotten. Especially a journalist like you
whose associative poems crowded the owls
from their resinous midnight release. What word,
what fracture of color, did you see
those last twenty years when you were institutionalized
and babbled moon to moon. Some said it was just another
poem. The wind knew better, bringing
the clockflower into your mouth so you could
tell time by the seasons. You were a Surrealist
before the wing-beat of Java sparrows pulsed blood
into the mouths of André Breton.
Michael Mitsakis, lost to us.
The way wolves eat history when history eats its young.
Lafcadio Hearn Dreams That He Will Be Reborn Eleven Years After His Death in the Body of Thomas Merton
I am a Russian fish owl embroiled in the chest of night on the eastern coast near the Sea of Japan.
If the moon were not a kerosene rag, then the mice would not lament.
For many years, I lived inside a Kyoto teahouse (no, not as some say, inside a shamisen plucked in a brothel).
My Greek mother has—for many years now—become a cup of Gyokuro tea.
If the rain were porcelain, it would be her.
I would like to say how much it hurts to drink starlight through the foreheads of the dead.
Winters in the primeval forest still snow inside me.
There are dreams of American monks and Asian Journals and electric cords we tell no one.
I was shocked into this life, named Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν, on the island of Lefkada in 1850.
This is what happens when you spend decades collecting ghost stories and taking a Japanese wife.
This is what occurs when they call you Koizumi Yakumo, beautifully written as, 小泉 八雲
Some pictures draw us. Draw us further into their slopes of shivering red. Of shivering red cedars.
There are gorges lined with conifers and swamps full of mice.
I swear—for some inexplicable reason I believe we should all avoid Bangkok fans and afternoon naps and wire cords.
What we dream will one day dream us—whether we coax it beneath a full moon or near the end of a meridian nap.
I have never been to Kentucky or even Fort Wayne, Indiana, except as a ghost voice impinging the thick skin of the sycamores.
What the wind winds through blows one soul into another.
I met a famous haiku poet last week, seated in his sparse two-tatami mat cell, who warned me never to use the word soul in a poem. Boil the image down into the rarely glimpsed largest known owl in the world, he advised.
I bow to the feathers of my Greek Icarus blood that have brought me this far.
I bow to the rocks of life, waiting below—splashed with sea salt and rain—that long to quarter me.
I bow to the dawn temple bells in Kyoto. Their breaking bows to me.
Kazantzakis Finds in the Mirror the Face of Zorba the Greek
First there was wind in his throat.
Then he felt snowmelt from Mount Athos.
Donkey bray and rain-smoked cigars came from the taverna.
The almost-voice of love in the streetwalker’s stance.
There is a mirror in my throat, said Nikos Kazantzakis.
And all the places without names.
He said you said I said.
What if you looked in the mirror and saw an armadillo?
Monks from Mount Athos are said to have burned his books.
And the dusty rains of the sirocco seared his brain
When they tore the pages
Of The Last Temptation of Christ.
Sometimes Kazantzakis covered the mirror with a black cloth.
Flowers. Frankincense. And morning processions.
Then there were bedtime openings as roads in his chest.
And he wept his head which wept the dark of his heart.
Once, Nikos swore he saw his reflection as sores in the moon.
Zorba dancing and singing and playing on the beach.
Mirrors, Kazantzakis insisted, are two or more ways of mouth.
What is agony? he kept asking.
What is the agony inside the agony of the wind—whingeing and hinged?
Rita Boumi-Pappas Confronts Stalin, Finally, in a Dream
If I could go out walking with my dead friends
—Rita Boumi-Pappas
Heterogeneous branches of the tongue crowned in shadows
of dirt and poor. The murmuring of trees burned you.
You wrote about the wages of bread crusts
soaked in a bit of spoiled milk. Wrote
about those who could not afford time in a living
forest. You wrote “The Crow,” in homage
to Stalin. Asked your teeth when they hurt
if they could bite you. Instead. The dog you longed
to hold was a thin, pale cat sprawled on a rummaged Asian
rug. All the patterns of the poor infuriated you.
They clocked on and on for centuries. Filled you
with bus fumes from the cities in which you hid,
diverse as Athens, Sofia, and East Berlin. Now you see
the bird buried in salt. Now you don’t. The salt pleads
through you. Discarded cardboard boxes make a home
for the not-yet-dead. You call the archangel of the State
down into your mouth, where the Black Sea and the Baltic
exchange scrapings of dead fish scales into your sleep.
I beg. Beg you, Rita. Clothe your eyes. Step aside. Don’t drink.
Tasos Denegris Leaves the Crumbling of Greece for the United States
Then they put Greece under
a microscope. Put Tasos Denegris
under a microscope. Or was it
a spectrometer?
The entomologist let loose
the Eurasian Millipede.
Then the Hissing Cockroach
from Madagascar, on which
she performed close observation
of its reproductive organs.
Then the herpetologist
set forth the Dice Snake.
Then the deadly Ohia. Then
the Balkan Whip Snake.
Tasos Denegris heard all this,
read it in the morning
maps, then planned to dissect
politics as a way to better grasp
what could be waiting in the eelgrass.
In the wind-bent of the almond
tree. The lull of the laurel. In the branch
of smoke. His poetry called forth
the undertaking of odd jobs.
Dishwasher. Street sweeper. Hodcarrier.
Clerk in the Foreign Press Division.
Even his poetry fellowship to the United States.
There was food to be had. Food to be
avoided. Tasos knew there was a night sky inside
the onion he refused to caramelize.
A darkening inside
the train whistle. A bathroom
cramped into the back of a tour bus. There,
hidden in the tenderness of his wife’s
wrist, like a moonless
moon in a sun-drunk sky, he could imagine
the rest of the world. And what it might sing.
All the lab men, with their microscopes,
employed seeing-eye dogs. Adopted laboratory
mice to explore the moaning
of life in the meanderings
of the Minotaur. Revealed the Greek
crumbling of earth. The split split
splitting apart of hidden yet molecular sobbing.
And how Tasos Denegris considered
how a military regime could
somehow court autumn, blindfold
its people with leaves and brigands
of about-to-be blowing snow. Offer them
a momentary bonfire as a cigarette--
a final, comforting smoke—before leaving
the wind-swept dead of Athens, of Thessalonki,
collapsed. Against the wall. The air
and its autumn bruise among them
refusing to move.
Zoë Karelli Freeing the Bones of the Dead
Mysterious and dreadful meanings, whispers from thence.
—Zoë Karelli
Matutinal fire. Morning glory
burdening a vine with blue
from the inky depths
of the Aegean. The dead
are there. And the sad gold
fins. And the wavering
weeds. The dead, you told us,
never die.
Zoë. There are gesturing hands
and foodstuffs and trains
without whistles. Mouths
sewn shut. What did you hear
three years after your mother’s death
when—according to Orthodox custom--
you disinterred her bones,
transferring them to the family
vault? What words passed between you
and your brother, poet Nikos Ghavril Pendzikis,
when you held the skull and drank deeply
thereof?
I imagine the world
the way the world imagines us.
I imagine the dead seeking shelter
in re-membering what it means
to be alive. I imagine your heart giving birth,
unfolding the fire of the first flower.
Yannis Kondos and Franz Kafka Play a Game of Chess on a Board that Is a Floor of Rain
When you die I will roll
great rocks toward the city
and there will be no sound.
—Yannis Kondos
Scorpions in their mouths.
Not their heart in their chests,
but Dostoevsky’s beard.
Yannis Kondos has saved only one piece of clothing.
A window or a hanky? Kafka bringing a bowl
of grapes all the way from Thessaloniki.
They sink into a chessboard of water, stare
into the development of rain. Thunder
hypnotizes them until they are dark as fire.
The wind around their game, calm
as a housecat napping before the woodstove.
Black and red squares dissolve in the salt-bath warmth.
They share jokes like an iron cough.
Kafka, almost a sleeping daybreak.
Half the moon is half the moon.
Kondos is fingering a stack
of books. Reciting Emerson.
Whitman. A passage from a letter
in which Abraham Lincoln
begs to assuage the agony
of your bereavement.
Such words, elegant in their formality,
coax Yannis Kondos and his Yannis Kondos
mouth. And he begs the wind to be rain
enough to make things right.
Let’s not play black and white, he tells Kafka.
You be Kurosawa; I’ll be Buñuel.
And the opposing chess pieces transform
into strips of film that move like movie characters
when the fluid of the moon flows.
No one has to win, you know.
The important thing, Franz, is to play
the way wind labors the leaves.
Yes, Kafka answers, moving a sad, muddy samurai
across the board, threatening Yannis’s man
who stares and stares into an ant-covered hand. Check,
he proclaims. Bathe in my mud-drenched rain.
And Yannis sinks into his own mouth, unable
to get out, as if a great rock blocked the way.
Not their heart or the wind therein,
but Dostoevsky’s beard, threads of his starving
mustache. Not the thrumming thunder, but discourse
with no sound. Not a chessboard
map of moving mathematically here to there,
but words to sink into, a floor of flooding rain.
The Death of Konstandinos Karyotakis Reborn in the Birth-Blood Poems of Dinos Siotis
after Dinos Siotis’s “Why You Would Have Committed Suicide Again If You Were Living Today O Konstandinos Karyotakis!”
Death is a deep-frozen bird thawed in the poet’s mouth.
Death is Wire Press and barbed fencing inside bodies of birds.
Death is a poem stalking the poet’s limp.
Death is an Armenian apple in the Greek poet’s mouth.
Death is the man asking for beer and a pack of Zante Filters.
Death is Pavlina. And Rhea. And Mando Aravantinou.
Death is Seferis and his incurable wound.
Death is Maria and Konstandinos sharing three cookies a day.
Death is the promise of the reincarnation of every stone.
Death is the Trojan Horse alive with swords, clubs, and spears.
Death is Troy, sleeping off a long night of lamb and wine.
Death is a quietly lit torch lighting the cobblestone way.
Death is syphilis, incurable at the time of a 1928 suicide.
Death is a gunshot in the heart of a man shamed into oblivion.
Death is Maria, her tuberculous cough caught in a photograph.
Death is how to tell his love that he could never share her bed.
Death is the dinner bowl, left out for unknown cats.
Death is a Blue Willow plate left out in the rain.
Death is a virus not yet agreeing to kill itself.
Death is the pandemonium of a pandemic pirating the mouth.
Death is a corpse wrapped in a tablecloth and napkins.
Death is the body risen on the third day from a cave.
Death is a prostitute resurrected in the body of a savior.
Death is The Book of Books learning how to read itself in trees.
Death is hyena scat dropped here to everywhere at once.
Death is how mice roam through the animal’s slow bones.
Death is Konstandinos reborn on the island of Tinos in 1944.
Death is death risen in the blood-lit birth of Dinos Siotis.
Death is, I am here, my brothers and sisters, in the groan of your bones.
Death is how we are given a second chance. And a third.
Death is not death, Dinos seems to say, in anaphoric allure.
Death is not death, he repeats, into bodies swollen and disowned.
Jack Spicer Encounters Dimitris Papaditsas, Believing the Voice He Hears Late at Night Is a Radio Wave from Mars
Toenail clippings. Horsehair shirts. Monks from Mount Athos carrying stones in their mouths.
These things, Jack Spicer heard one night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, tuning his inner radio receiver to Mars.
Papaditsas was still alive, somehow broadcasting stray thoughts across the ocean as he meditated upon the Surrealist paintings of Nikos Engonopoulos and Giorgos Vakalo.
When one drinks a cup of tea, the moon is pouring the sad salt of Greece through its glandular curve. Here, spit into my mouth, and we will be one with an iguana lolling on a rock in the Galápagos.
Phrases like this puzzled Spicer. As he tossed his bed. And turned. Linguist that he was, heartfelt of Old English vowels, he knew Beowulf would never speak such atrocities, engaged as he was in fighting Grendel.
Or were these fragments of conversations—half-heard in booths he passed on the way to the can? Leftover bar talk from Gino & Carlo’s? From Enrico’s? Maybe from Plaka Taverna, on Kearny near Broadway, where you could down shots of ouzo, hear bouzouki music, and break a plate?
Words puzzled him. Jigsaw puzzles too. Why should a picture be fractured? A word? And all that transmigration. The olives, grape leaves, and wine of the Greek myths somehow becoming the peas and parsnips of Old English epics. Cabbage and wild boar filling the Anglo Saxons with lust.
We are all dusting into one another, even while alive, the unknown voice that was Papaditsas seemed to say, though through the static it was hard to tell. Like André Breton and Robert Desnos flaking into one another, it continued. Why do you think termites build mounds in French Equatorial Africa, in Ubangi-Shari, when the rains have ceased?
Of course, such words were disconcerting. Spicer took them to Robert Duncan. To Jess. To Helen Adam. George Stanley. Robin Blaser. And Ebbe Beauregard. Even to what he took to be a falconress, which seemed to preen itself and suggest all answers could be found while digging meticulously into oneself, nudging most ectoparasites away. We must study Lorca, he realized, telling each of his friends in turn. As a way to decode what of our mouths our ears most want to grant.
And it went on like this for weeks. Months. And more months. Jack unable to sleep. Hearing Papaditsas disguising the dark. Dispatching Surrealist reports. Into the dusky parts of Spicer’s brain—half asleep, half awake, the third half unable to do math.
Look, he heard, just before the visitations ceased, there is a sirocco coming into my body here in Athens, all the way from Arabia. But it is not dust or tobacco fragments from the warm winds entering me; it is bees swarming from your own backyard. Listen carefully to the sound of your tongue, Jack, absorbing water from wind from out of the soft center of bread. Your broken body there in your own sad mouth, the voice continued. The mouth of Greece crawling out to you night after night from a time before. Into your one-too-many drinks. Into the restless edge of your lexicon. The say-so-yes-no / right-way-wrong. In the muddled ecstasy of your time of mouth. In your time of what used to be. Most sound. Sleep.
On Prison and Holy Hashish: Elias Petropoulos, the Enfant Terrible of Modern Greek Letters
And I said to my wife:
—when I die like a dog here in Paris,
burn my corpse in the crematorium
then toss the ashes into a sewer.
This is my testament.
—Elias Petropoulos, Never and Nothing
You are dead in the way
a boy’s hair turns green.
You piss on the ruins
of Rhodes, and part of your mouth
becomes pus of the moon.
Cypress trees bow when your name
bows down into them. Vassilis Tsitsanis
keeps waiting for you with his bouzouki,
bringing you into the underworld
of rembetika—prostitutes, homosexuals,
hash smokers, and petty thieves. Horses
of the junta keep tracking you with their iron
hooves. The Colonels clean their teeth
with a pick, swearing you are still there
somewhere inside. Even after three different
jail sentences. Your common-law wife weeps
when your breath finally moves from the body
burdening the cot into a Eurasian nightjar.
Once again, she pours your ashes—as you
requested—into a sewer in France.