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Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air, Thrice sit thou mute in this enchanted chair, Then thrice three times tie up this true love's knot, And murmur soft "She will, or she will not." Go burn these pois'nous weeds in yon blue fire, These screech-owl's feathers and this prickling briar, This cypress gathered at a dead man's grave, That all my fears and cares an end may have. Then come, you fairies! dance with me a round; Melt her hard heart with your melodious sound. In vain are all the charms I can devise: She hath an art to break them with her eyes.

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet a little while among the throng of flowered dresses you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness and even though you would still be alive a few more days I knew they were ready to let themselves be packed into liquor store boxes simply because you had asked that of them, and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army without having noticed me wrapping my arms around so many at once that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger as if to return the embrace.

The peach is a belly dancer's fruit. It has a navel eye for seeing the world through the skin, rounded buttocks good to place against the hand the way earth reminds flesh of its being. Through the eye of the needle, death is a country where people wonder and worry what it's like to live. The sullen wish to live and live soon to be done with death and the happy want to stay dead forever wondering will it hurt to live and is there death after death?

Mirror, mirror on the wall show me in succession all my faces, that I may view and choose which I would like as true. Teach me skill to disguise what’s not pleasing to the eyes, with faith, that life obeys the rules, in man or God or football pools. Always keep me well content to decorate attitude and event so that somehow behind the scene I may believe my actions mean; that one can exercise control in playing out a chosen role; rub clouded glass and then, at will, write self on it again. But if, in some unlucky glance, I should glimpse naked circumstance in all its nowhere-going-to, may you crack before I do.

Through these pale cold days What dark faces burn Out of three thousand years, And their wild eyes yearn, While underneath their brows Like waifs their spirits grope For the pools of Hebron again— For Lebanon's summer slope. They leave these blond still days In dust behind their tread They see with living eyes How long they have been dead.

Throwing his life away, He picks at and smells it. Done up. When did I do this up? I date its death to the time someone Said something. Back then. Everything else, all striving, making, Marrying, error, Is this old bird. Pah! He throws it. As the long string lengthens Out of his hand, It begins unwinding The ligaments of his hand.

I The house near the sea The houses I had they took away from me. The times happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile; sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds, sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting was good in my time, many felt the pellet; the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark or the little wagtail inscribing figures with his tail in the light; I don’t know much about houses I know they have their own nature, nothing else. New at first, like babies who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun, they embroider coloured shutters and shining doors over the day. When the architect’s finished, they change, they frown or smile or even grow resentful with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who’d come back if they could or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become an endless hotel. I don’t know much about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop to think; again sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms with a single iron bed and nothing of my own, watching the evening spider, I imagine that someone is getting ready to come, that they dress him up in white and black robes, with many-coloured jewels, and around him venerable ladies, grey hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly, that he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me; or that a woman — eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted, returning from southern ports, Smyrna Rhodes Syracuse Alexandria, from cities closed like hot shutters, with perfume of golden fruit and herbs — climbs the stairs without seeing those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow resentful easily when you strip them bare. II Sensual Elpenor I saw him yesterday standing by the door below my window; it was about seven o’clock; there was a woman with him. He had the look of Elpenor just before he fell and smashed himself, yet he wasn’t drunk. He was speaking fast, and she was gazing absently towards the gramophones; now and then she cut him short to say a word and then would glance impatiently towards where they were frying fish: like a cat. He muttered with a dead cigarette-butt between his lips: — ‘Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight the statues sometimes bend like reeds in the midst of ripe fruit — the statues; and the flame becomes a cool oleander, the flame that burns one, I mean.’ — ‘It's just the light. . . shadows of the night.’ — ‘Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate, a dark breast, and filled you with stars, cleaving time. And yet the statues bend sometimes, dividing desire in two, like a peach; and the flame becomes a kiss on the limbs, then a sob, then a cool leaf carried off by the wind; they bend; they become light with a human weight. You don’t forget it.’ — ‘The statues are in the museum.’ — ‘No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it? I mean with their broken limbs, with their shape from another time, a shape you don’t recognize yet know. It’s as though in the last days of your youth you loved a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid, as you held her naked at noon, of the memory aroused by your embrace; were afraid the kiss might betray you to other beds now of the past which nevertheless could haunt you so easily, so easily, and bring to life images in the mirror, bodies once alive: their sensuality. It’s as though returning home from some foreign country you happen to open an old trunk that’s been locked up a long time and find the tatters of clothes you used to wear on happy occasions, at festivals with many-coloured lights, mirrored, now becoming dim, and all that remains is the perfume of the absence of a young form. Really, those statues are not the fragments. You yourself are the relic; they haunt you with a strange virginity at home, at the office, at receptions for the celebrated, in the unconfessed terror of sleep; they speak of things you wish didn’t exist or would happen years after your death, and that’s difficult because. . .’ — ‘The statues are in the museum. Good night.’ — ‘. . . because the statues are no longer fragments. We are. The statues bend lightly. . . Good night.’ At this point they separated. He took the road leading uphill toward the North and she moved on towards the light-flooded beach where the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio: The radio — ‘Sails puffed out by the wind are all that stay in the mind. Perfume of silence and pine will soon be an anodyne now that the sailor’s set sail, flycatcher, catfish and wagtail. O woman whose touch is dumb, hear the wind’s requiem. ‘Drained is the golden keg the sun’s become a rag round a middle-aged woman’s neck who coughs and coughs without break; for the summer that’s gone she sighs, for the gold on her shoulders, her thighs. O woman, O sightless thing, Hear the blind man sing. ‘Close the shutters: the day recedes; make flutes from yesteryear’s reeds and don’t open, knock how they may: they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily, anemones out of the sea; O woman whose wits are lost, listen, the water’s ghost. . . — ‘Athens. The public has heard the news with alarm; it is feared a crisis is near. The prime minister declared: “There is no more time. . .” Take cyclamen. . . needles of pine. . . the lily. . . needles of pine. . . O woman. . . — . . . is overwhelmingly stronger. The war. . .’ S oulmonger . III The wreck‘Thrush’ ‘This wood that cooled my forehead at times when noon burned my veins will flower in other hands. Take it. I’m giving it to you; look, it’s wood from a lemon tree. . .’ I heard the voice as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out a ship they’d sunk there years ago; it was called ‘Thrush’, a small wreck; the masts, broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like tentacles, or the memory of dreams, marking the hull: vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around. And gradually, in turn, other voices followed, whispers thin and thirsty emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side; you might say they were asking to drink a drop of blood; familiar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it falling into the heart of day, quietly, as though motionless: ‘And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you. Your law will be my law; how can I go wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone. I prefer death. Whose path is for the better only God knows.’ Countries of the sun yet you cannot face the sun. Countries of men yet you cannot face man. The light As the years go by the judges who condemn you grow in number; as the years go by and you converse with fewer voices, you see the sun with different eyes: you know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you the delirium of flesh, the lovely dance that ends in nakedness. It’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway, you suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine, eyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes: you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness. The Doric chiton that swayed like the mountains when your fingers touched it is a marble figure in the light, but its head is in darkness. And those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms struck the obstinate marathon runner and he saw the track sail in blood, the world empty like the moon, the gardens of victory wither: you see them in the sun, behind the sun. And the boys who dived from the bowsprits go like spindles twisting still, naked bodies plunging into black light with a coin between the teeth, swimming still, while the sun with golden needles sews sails and wet wood and colours of the sea; even now they’re going down obliquely toward the pebbles on the sea floor, white oil-flasks. Light, angelic and black, laughter of waves on the sea’s highways tear-stained laughter, the old suppliant sees you as he moves to cross the invisible fields — light mirrored in his blood, the blood that gave birth to Eteocles and Polynices. Day, angelic and black; the brackish taste of woman that poisons the prisoner emerges from the wave a cool branch adorned with drops. Sing little Antigone, sing, O sing. . . I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking about love; adorn your hair with the sun’s thorns, dark girl; the heart of the Scorpion has set, the tyrant in man has fled, and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae, hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess: whoever has never loved will love, in the light; and you find yourself in a large house with many windows open running from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first, because the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds the sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and south your eyes will empty of the light of day the way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent. Poros, ‘Galini’, 31 October 1946

When Winter's ahead, What can you read in November That you read in April When Winter's dead? I hear the thrush, and I see Him alone at the end of the lane Near the bare poplar's tip, Singing continuously. Is it more that you know Than that, even as in April, So in November, Winter is gone that must go? Or is all your lore Not to call November November, And April April, And Winter Winter—no more? But I know the months all, And their sweet names, April, May and June and October, As you call and call I must remember What died into April And consider what will be born Of a fair November; And April I love for what It was born of, and November For what it will die in, What they are and what they are not, While you love what is kind, What you can sing in And love and forget in All that's ahead and behind.

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim, Whose voices make the emptiness of light A windy palace. Quavering from the brim Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night, They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering; Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing; Who hears the cry of God in everything, And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

a whisper arrives. two thousand. two thousand or more. did you hear it? that bomb. the torture of red sand turning green the anguish of earth turned to glass did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more yams cremated inside the earth. poison trapped in glass like a museum. did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more tears we cried for our Land for the fear you gave us, for the sickness and the dying two thousand years of memory here two thousand. two thousand or more peaceful place this place. happy place till you come with your bombs you stole our happiness with your poison ways you stole our stories two thousand. two thousand or more our people gone missing. did you hear it? where’s my grandfather? you seen him? where’s my daughter? you seen her? Mummy! you seen my mum? Dad! two thousand. two thousand or more times I asked for truth. do you know where they are? two thousand. two thousand or more trees dead with arms to the sky. all the birds missing. no birdsong here just stillness. like a funeral. two thousand or more a whisper arrives. did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more it sounds like glass. our hearts breaking. but we are stronger than that we always rise us mob. two thousand. two thousand or more you can’t break us. we not glass. we are people! two thousand. two thousand or more our Spirit comes together. we make a heart did you see it? in the fragments. it’s there in the glass two thousand. two thousand or more our hearts grow as we mourn for our Land it’s part of us. we love it. poisoned and all