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Vol. 36 No 3-4
Greek Poetry: New Voices and Ancient Echoes

Spring 1999

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Yánnis Patílis

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From: The Scribe's Mirror (1989)

A Body in the Apartment

Souvenir of a decade

I
Sometimes it happens that a gust of wind
A humble servant of church bells
Passionately swoops down from the mountain's shadow
To bring you — now — a message baptised
In silence and dream
Sometimes it happens that you lie down waiting
As if the rear-guard of the future
And calm as if after a burial
This gust of wind
Passing through the interstices of men
To reach your door.

It was an evening
Like the one when the chiding Archilochos
Confronted Thasos from afar, grunting
There she is, like the backbone of an ass
Weighed down with savage wood —
That kind of evening
When the first time it was seen in London
Everyone started flying at once
The moment when the psalm sprouted in my mouth
Like a seed of wheat that grows
Until it turns to wholesome bread.

II
During those same years
There were some people who fried eggs
There were others who were enlightened
I remember someone who inhabited a hand
A palm he called the Grace of God.

And there was an old man who sang
As long as the song lasted he grew young again
And then got smaller and smaller
Until he became an infant wailing
And his mother would come and take him
Take him up to the sky.

During those same years
Someone was extracting uranium from garbage
One night he had lost his faith while flying
Finding himself in a trash-can
A real war waged all around
They sprayed him from above with black cards
While his own people were flying inside caskets.

III
Sometimes it happens that a gust of wind
A tomb digging in your memory
Scatters the dust all over your papers
Right then you want to hold on to something
You want to hold on to the white wall
To the cypress tree.

It's raining
Inside cafes, inside homes
You want to stay
You're holding on to the rain
You're holding on to the cypress tree.

And yet,
You must be violated and you must violate
And above all you must die
You must become dust before you become sky.

IV
Nothing is more certain, the sky gave you birth
Here is your body
The living relay-staff of so many people's love
You can see their grief
On Attic epitaphs
Or engraved on roof-tiles
Just before the fall of Viminakion or Sirmion.

Perhaps because of those long-haired Avars
This body, passing from hand to hand,
Found its way to this apartment
Because this body is the bread
Eaten and never spent
It is Socrates' numbness after the hemlock
The severed tongue and arm
Of Maximus the Confessor.

This body
Whose only weapon is its nakedness
Was hunted by the all-mighty, the all-armed
The emperors, the vlads, the czars, the commissars
Its beautiful flesh was hunted
By fleshless ideas.

V
Not those with pseudonyms
Nor those who drop leaflets
From the clouds

Here is my body —
History's living foundation.
(1980)

Translated by Stathis Gourgouris

Page(s) 70-73

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