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

Spring 1999

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Argýris Hiónis

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From: Motionless Runner (1996)

Immobile on the Riverbank

HE WAS ALWAYS SEDUCED by stories of people to whom 
nothing ever happened, people who lived wíthout the event of 
their birth ever becoming noticed, people who never died because 
no one ever felt their absence. Difficult stories, the most difficult of 
all, told only with the mouth closed.

SITTING ON THE RIVERBANK, he gazes at the water 
flowing toward the sea. He likes this uninterrupted flow of the 
finite toward the infinite, this obsession of the ephemeral to 
become perpetual. He likes it but it makes him sad because, 
surrounded by the riverbanks of his body, he feels like stagnant 
water, like a swamp, a pit.

IMMOBILE, HE RESIDES on the riverbanks, watching the 
keels of ships passing overhead and salmon leaping against the 
current. Having abolished breath and hearing, he sees the scent of 
flowers and the singing of birds, along the banks, the heartbeat of 
the hunted dear as it bends low, for a moment, to drink, and the 
next moment, the acrid and murderous scent of the hunter, who 
plunges, in the same water, his burning head.
He has no gills, he is not amphibious; simply, immersed; not 
drowned, no; simply, immersed of his own will, permitting the 
world to happen in his absence, overhead, while existing in rock 
bottom, observing how the ceaseless flow makes the pebbles 
rounder.

HE LIKES THE SEA. He looks at the waves come and go for 
hours on end. He likes the sea because it allows him, or rather 
imposes on him, not to think. The sea is the surest way toward the 
stupidity he desires. Thought never turned out good for him; it led 
him always to dead-ends, to desperation. That's why he loves the 
sea, its ceaseless hypnotic back and forth, and his greatest 
ambition is some day to become fish, with cold blood, with a tiny 
slow mind and a voiceless speech.

SUNSTRIPPED AND STARSTRUCK, embraced by a
nature so overbearingly hospitable that she does not distinguish
him from her trees, he feels his roots invading gradually the earth
and hears the leaves of his heart rustling up an imperceptible 
poem.

WITH THE USE OF ALCOHOL, he tries to tame the wild 
days, since alcohol obviously has the capacity to repress the 
extreme, almost maniacal, and certainly useless insistence of the 
everyday to become eternal.

WHO COULD POSSIBLY locate the traces of a bird on the 
sky, the traces of a fish in water? Yet, he seeks them out, believing 
he could actually locate them. He believes he can scout the traces 
of God upon his soul. He leaves, they say, deep tracks, like those 
of a hunter on the snow, deep but temporary, since, just like the 
snow, the soul melts fast.

WITH APATHY, he sees his dreams drowning. Hands in his 
pockets, he observes them sinking out of sight. He has no rope to 
throw them, something to grab hold, no life-jacket, no saving raft. 
He stands there immobile, almost content, watching them drown. 
Deep down, there is relief, a consolation, finally to be without 
dreams, since dreams are known to have the ceaseless tendency to 
get shipwrecked and you must ceaselessly engage in rescue 
operations.

AND SUDDENLY, at eighty-five years of age, his father 
stopped aging and began to wait for him so they could age 
together.

Translated by Stathis Gourgouris

Page(s) 20-21

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