Odysseus Elytis

MARIA NEFELE : I walk in thorns in the dark of what’s to happen and what has with my only weapon my only defense my nails purple like cyclamens. ANTIPHONIST: I saw her everywhere. Holding a glass and staring in space. Lying down listening to records. Walking the streets in wide trousers and an old gabardine. In front of children’s-store windows. Sadder then. And in discotheques, more nervous, eating her nails. She smokes innumerable cigarettes. She is pale and beautiful. But if you talk to her she doesn’t hear at all. As if something is happening – she alone hears it and is frightened. She holds your hand tight, tears, but is not there. I never touched her and I never took from her anything. MN: He understood nothing. He kept asking all the time “Remember?” What’s to remember? My dreams alone I remember because I see them at night. Days I feel bad – how to say: unprepared. I found myself so suddenly, in life – where I’d hardly expected. I’d say “Bah, I’ll get used to it.” And everything around me ran. Things and people ran, ran – until I set myself to run like crazy. But, it seems, I overdid. Because – I don’t know – something strange happened in the end. First I’d see the corpse and then the murder. First came the blood and then the blow and cry. And now, when I hear rain I don’t know what’s waiting... A: “Why don’t they bury people standing up like archbishops?” – that’s what she’d say to me. And once, I remember, summer on the island, all of us coming from a party, dawn, we jumped over the bars of the museum’s garden. She danced on the stones and she saw nothing. MN: I saw his eyes.  I saw some old olive groves. A: I saw a column on a grave. A girl in relief on the stone. She seemed sad and held a small bird in her cupped hand. MN: He was looking at me, I know, he was looking at me. We both were looking at the same stone. We looked at each other through the stone. A: She was calm and in her palm she held a small bird. MN: She was sitting and she was dead. A: She was sitting and in her palm she held a small bird. You’ll never hold a bird like that – you aren’t able. MN: Oh if they let me, if they let me. A: If who let you? MN: The one who lets nothing. A: He, he who lets nothing is cut by his shadow and walks away. MN: His words are white and unspeakable his eyes deep and without sleep... A: But the whole upper part of the stone was taken. And with it her name. MN: ARIMNA – as if I could still see the letters carved inside the light... ARIMNA EFE EL ... A: Gone. The whole top gone. There were no letters at all. MN: ARIMNA EFE EL – there, on the EL the stone had cut and broken. I remember it well. A: She must have seen it in a dream since she remembers. MN: In my dreams, yes. In a large sleep that will come sometimes all light and heat and small stony steps. The children will walk in the streets arm in arm like in some old Italian movies. Song everywhere and enormous women in small balconies watering their flowers. A: A large blue balloon will take us high then, here and there, the wind will beat us. The silver domes will stand out first, then the belfries. The streets will appear narrower and straighter than we imagined. The terraces with the white television antennas. And all around the hills, and the kites – so close we’ll just shave past them. Until one moment we’ll see the whole sea. On it the souls will be leaving small white steams. MN: I have lifted my hand against the mountains, the dark and the demonic of this world. I’ve asked love “Why?” and rolled her on the floor. War and war and not one rag to hide deep in our things and forget. Who listens? Who listened? Judges, priests, police, which is your country? One body is left me and I give it. On it those who know cultivate the holy, as the gardeners in Holland, tulips. And in it drown who never learned of sea or swimming... Flux of the sea and you stars’ distant influx – stand by me! A: I have lifted my hand against the unexorcised demons of the world and from the place of illness I have exited to the sun and to the light self-exiled! MN: And from too many storms I’ve exited self among humans exiled!

Spotlight a SCENE ONE: Open-air court in the ancient city of Athens. The accused arrive and proceed among curses and cries of Death! Death! SCENE TWO: A jail in the same city, beneath the Acropolis, walls half-eaten by dampness. On the ground, a miserly straw mat and in the corner, an earthenware jar of water. On the outside wall, a shadow: the guard. SCENE THREE: Constantinople. In the harem of the Holy Place, in candlelight, the Queen throws a pouch of gold coins to the Head Eunuch who bows and looks at her significantly. By the open door, his men at the ready. SCENE FOUR: Drawing room of a large Monastery. Oblong table, the abbot at its head. Sweaty monks come and go bringing news: a crowd spills into the streets, setting fires, destroying everything. SCENE FIVE: Nauplio. Greek and Bavarian officers outside the King’s quarters converse in low tones. A messenger takes the dispatch and heads toward the steps that lead on high to Palamidi. SCENE SIX: In front of an old and empty lot in contemporary Athens, a crowd, motley with priests and bishops, gathers to cast a stone, “the stone of anathema.” SCENE SEVEN: Low buildings of EAT/ESA. In the courtyard, drunken soldiers. Braying and lewd posturing. The officer leaving some cell says something to the military doctor. Behind them thuds and cries are heard.

Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one Donkey bolts uphill for a little cloud St. Heracleitos’s day and something’s up That even noses can’t diagnose: Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem Of Fate’s nightgown and leaving Us in the open air of capricorns exposed Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no chandeliers Only a gold anemone’s engagement for a diamond Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon’s half- shadow needs You to console even the graves Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth Lost even to bloodhounds With its weeds onions and creeks Must be restored to its idiom So what! A word contains you peasant of night’s green Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth generation Inside the orange groves gold words Sharing the scalpel’s chisel Tents as yet unpitched others midair Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves Twin scythes for theater or temple Fresh valley springs and other curly streams Of thus and so. If ever wisdom Planned circles of clover and dog grass Another world might live just as before your fingerprint Letters will exist. People will read and grab History’s tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky remain Unbridled as children want it With roosters and pinecones and blue kites flags On Saint Heracleitos’s day child’s is the kingdom.

Often, in the Repose of Evening her soul took a lightness from the mountains across, although the day was harsh and tomorrow foreign. But, when it darkened well and out came the priest’s hand over the little garden of the dead, She Alone, Standing, with the few domestics of the night—the blowing rosemary and the murmur of smoke from the kilns— at sea’s entry, wakeful Otherly beauty! Only the waves’ words half-guessed or in a rustle, and others resembling the dead’s that startle in the cypress, strange zodiacs that lit up her magnetic moon-turned head. And one Unbelievable cleanliness allowed, to great depth in her, the real landscape to be seen, Where, near the river, the dark ones fought against the Angel, exactly showing how she’s born, Beauty Or what we otherwise call tear. And long as her thinking lasted, you could feel it overflow the glowing sight bitterly in the eyes and the huge, like an ancient prostitute’s, cheekbones Stretched to the extreme points of the Large Dog and of the Virgin. “Far from the pestilential city I dreamed of her deserted place where a tear may have no meaning and the only light be from the flame that ravishes all that for me exists. “Shoulder-to-shoulder under what will be, sworn to extreme silence and the co-ruling of the stars, “As if I didn’t know yet, the illiterate, that there exactly, in extreme silence are the most repellent thuds “And that, since it became unbearable inside a man’s chest, solitude dispersed and seeded stars!”