I
I looked for you through the blinds
of sunlit anniversaries
and found you an incongruous tracer at dawn
an untuned fado
in Alentejo’s farm huts.
I kissed you with the mellow wine
of farewell
and dag ten yards
into the moist soil
to bury deep
your teetering figure.
I retained you at the now of a sablier
you slipped
before reaching for the next
intentional prompt
in the wormy lining
of my coat.
I found you standing upright in your position
sharp as a red banter in front of a comradely hearth
I left you as a waning presumption
into the cocoon
of Eta Carinea
Your laugh was acrid
and quasi murky
like the stonewall
of your neglected teeth,
it was evened out in the dunes
and the brisk tumors
of tropical days.
It was irreversibly lost
under the awnings
of petit-bourgeois flats.
Now the words resurrect
and become faces
with broken
the symmetry of cheekbones,
like maples smashed
by oxen hooves,
and the faces are excoriated
into vacuous phonemes
without a drop of blood
to caulk the shaft of the absolute
soaring overhead
like an unutterable trace
of the tails of transcendent reductions.
`
II
This night is onerous
I cannot hoist it on my shoulders
and the shimmering of the stars
seems to stab me in the abdomen
slicing in pieces
the night’s breaths
thrown in the weeds
of the castle town•
I just wanted to hear
-amongst the broken ceramics
and the urines of plump cats –
the mumblings
of a gentle crowd
that existed some time back
as a hiatus
in the eternal cycle
of Mediterranean olive groves,
a fraction of silence
in the signal of geostatic satellites
or yet a pause of the digital bits for those crushed
by their fate
our fate.
- Of those who give
a prolongation
to the one-act plays
in the ten ripples of time
for the innuendo
of the final curtain
and a footnote
in the diary
of the joyful Tibaza
unintentionally
in the eleventh precocious dimension.
- Unbearable this night
and malevolent like a two-edged sword,
bears a semblance of
the prescribed
in the staggering paths
of the motorships
away in the stillness
of the curves of horizon.
`
III
Therein lies the dead man who holds
two purple fans
to filter his boredom
in the likes of sparse clouds
during the dusks of Sierra Madre.
He is the dead
who fetches
in his sleep
the breath of his generation
like a gentle perfume
of sacerdotal furniture
from Woolnoth’s Virgin Mary
and in his getaway
the night of shadows
two unexpected thunders
blow up in his four-legged dreams.
This dead came once upon
with the unclouded smile
of oecumenism
from the haze of crematories
and now is thumping
the beads of his loneliness
like avenging skulls
of the lampposts of hanged.
This dead man
each time he frowns
drags down a sea
of archetypal stars
over his dormitory and has his pockets full
of scarlet lamps
for the sockets of the drowned.
When his remorses
fill up the sky
closes the windows
to the yellings
of a rebellious crowd
and drives a dagger
into two satin mannequins
that stand by him
like angels of a
predestined death,
and when he becomes
his own executioner
a spider
breaks off from its net
shrapnel-like
and deranges
the petit-bourgeois afternoons.
This dead
always eludes,
wears a sarong
same as the colours
of youthful beaches
and sees in the wrinkles
of the horizon
a rift
to the well of nothingness.
This suave dead
is the refutation itself
of his non-existence.
IV
This house
sums up the skirmishes of the constellations
onto the back of a wooden horse
and has an aroma
from the garden’s verbenas
to lighten the shadows
of its living dead,
this house becomes one
with the size of the moon
when the clouds stride over
its pale disk
like the stowaways of dreams
within its youthful rooms.
This house
is a window
of the small Cyclades
that closes the book of the summer
a silent night
of unfulfilled promises
and puts down its agony
onto a placid October’s cloud.
It hangs out with a red umbrella
into the sun’s ramble
to hide its guilt
and knocks down the marble
of a dead-end destiny
with the sluggishness of a midday coffee pot.
This house
talks with a star of its own
- under the unbearable burden
of limpidity -
with its tongue torn
into the two brisk syllables
of disjunction
as it is the way to the puzzle of existence.
It absorbs in its walls
sweat and blood
of improvised orgasms
and moistens the pulses
of an effeminate adolescent
du cotê de chez Swann
through a lit up window.
It hides two sobs
a crumbling autumn night
and three red letters faded
like the face of a handsome dead
who leaves
for only indelible
his enigmatic smile
to the descendants.
This house
continuously alternates
with its shadow
in the perpetual flow
of phenomena and holds
a Queen of Clubs
from its heroes’ lot
to water its roots.
This house tries to underplay
its death throes
when it hovers
a straw cloud
over the heads
of youthful picnics
and converses with its inexistence
in the spiral round of death.
It moans
the depressive air
of its history
like an old cow
in the middle of a children’s garden, -
this house
sees its dreams fading away
in the bisection
of long night-days.
V
How hefty this autumn
as if the avenging rocks
of oblivion
fall hunky lead into the chest,
and how light
all the same
as the dwindling twilight
of a day cut out
into its two symmetrical hemispheres
like the midday loaf
of a stone village house.
What a mellifluous breeze
what moon-shaped maidens
what blushing little shores
what nostalgy
what erotic agony
pallid like the porch
of death.
- And the small Tanagreans ever there
pinned into the alcove
of the small living room
shimmer in the moonlight
of the garden
solitary in the tempest
of a November
precursor of the forced rewind of history.
VI
(Para el compañero Camillo Cienfuegos)
This drowned here
is skinny
like a saint of Orders
and laughing is
as the dawn
of the proletarian revolution.
He was taking two evergreen reptiles
out of his pockets
to dangle
like his everyday preoccupations
in a thicket of araukarias
and a plucked old-cock
in a desamparados’ byway
to goad the sleepy oxen
of the heliotrope of tropics.
There hang upon him
like edgy daggers
tongues the clouds
of pampas
yet he kept on weaving in the sand
hairy girls,
brooches from the shirts of executed,
the huge square
spattered with thousands
of drowned pigeons
and a double-orificed crater
to spew out
the heavy aroma of cigars
the sweet nights
of hallucinations.
VII
A moist haze
in the bedroom
of the hotel,
style art-deco,
-11th floor.-
And a waft of a tropical breeze
to sweeten
three haunted dreams
of an August afternoon,
the lateral ones
two gnarly crosses
wherefrom my bowels hang
in the beyond of hallucinations,
the middle one
a medusa
curling itself around my head
with the aggressive drive
of a latina lover.
ΕΠΙΜΕΤΡΟ
Παραπάνω είναι 7 ανέκδοτα ποιήματα μου σε αγγλική μετάφραση. Τα ποιήματα αυτά στην αρχική τους μορφή έχουν ήδη εμφανισθεί μέσα στο 2014 στο Ποιείν. Ωστόσο τα παρουσιάζω και πάλι επειδή θεωρώ ότι η αγγλική τους μετάφραση τους δίνει μια νέα διάσταση και ενδεχομένως μια άλλη ποιητική «οπτική».
Η μετάφραση είναι της Βασιλικής Νάνου και η επιμέλεια μετάφρασης δική μου.
Πάτρα 3-12-2014