Trans Europe Express in english

Trans Europe Express A narrative poem

POTSDSAM_BERLIN_ATHENS The tower/ Elevation At the place where once seven times eight equals fifty six ash trees grew Einstein’s Tower was erected to a height slightly above the trees somewhere between the two World Wars.

From the tower’s main trunk the head only protruded and with its steel lid at half-mast the enormous eye gazed at the sun.

The brilliant picture passed unchewed through the oesophagus and was projected in a semi-underground room as if the Earth was in the depths and the Tower a periscope.

On winter’s cold day I went down into the Tower’s entrails and bending low I passed into the sun-room, there two German scientists suggested I sit before the screen I saw the star’s burning mass fill the mirror with light then focusing on a black spot in the ocean of nuclear apocalypse against the far end of my eye was projected upside down the outline of the black solar spot as if it were an island.

I recognized Attica there: all of the peninsula’s northern mountain ranges were aflame and at the place where Athens was supposed to be a hole pulsed like an octopus that had latched onto the sun’s blazing flesh.

When I left the Tower where I spent as much time as it takes for the light to reach the Earth from the Sun

it was summer indeed; the snow had melted and the tower’s off-white artifice - at once fleshy and skeletal delineated its friendly elevation against the verdant clearing.

I paused and sat on the grass to survey one last time the Tower’s humanlike form stretching its neck to oversee the world’s stars above the forest.

I bent my head my gaze lowered shamefully down to the ground I was poking at with a spent cigarette looking for the reasons for the dark reflection of my ancient land in the small shadows thrown by the weeds like the spokes of an invisible circle.

For, no matter how many turns the meandering river of history takes some peoples it encourages to risk launching into space brave questions and others it leaves by the wayside bent over by the shore staring forevermore at their reflection in the broken mirror of the flowing water dressed in expensive brands and chatting endlessly to supposedly charm one another.

It was time then to contemplate the Tower’s story during the last fifty six winters the silence and the fall I heard inside myself come out of the leaves the bomb’s long, everlasting echo and from Potsdam my mind turned to the unfinished business we call friends.

I saw them travel in the summertime off the beaten track in the Cycladic Isles and articulate the theory of the perennial ruin against what the physicists call relativity.

Shaking off me the moisture of the grass I turned facing southward and gave then a wink.

As if they were next to me these friends whom, while I remained inside the bunker ejected into the future time studying the sun, I commemorated as if they were dead.

The door handle / Rotation More than two or three times I walked up and down the entire length of Oranien Strabe in Kreutzberg.

Nowhere did I see the orange trees that gave the street its name the war probably‌ but at the corner grocery store with its wares in crates I saw the Turk turning on the axis of his dark finger

one bright orange as if it were the earth.

“Oranien aus Ost!” he called out and with a bow offered the fruit to the airy German mother – her infant in the stroller.

As he held it out to her he let it drop on purpose she folded her knees to retrieve the fruit from the ground.

Like a blade the Turk’s gaze sliced the space between her lily-white legs and was extinguished in the pure black.

Then, the grocer might have felt his heartbeat gallop like I did the day I opened the door of my house and saw the sea shimmer under the black hole of the sun.

Later on I covered the short route from country to country and saw laid out in a display box, at Bauhaus Archiv, the bronze handle from my front door in Faliron in a design by Gropius, the selfsame!

As I had fearlessly let the door back at the house open gawping at the sea, I easily found the way back and snuck inside the dark room of my childhood.

I then twirled the door handle three times in the air thoughtfully looking at the bronze pin emerge like a cuckoo bird and immediately disappear inside the blackness of the door.

I put it aside in the end, though of course it stayed stuck out poking its tongue out at me not closing the door, keeping it open during my absence.

The blonde German stood up and offered the apple back to the Turk relaxed, her arm bent.

Sliding his fingers on her white outstretched palm he took it fixed his gaze on hers intently and laughingly offered it to the child

tethered in the stroller who stretched back its tiny palm spread wide.

She all alone in the world, with a child and he with half a dozen children and a wife over there, in the homeland standing still in the shadow of the half-opened door like the dark side of the moon.

In the time it took for the piece of fruit to change hands the door banged shut behind me with the sudden meltemi gust you get in Greece in the summer, like in the Sahara the sand softens and melts under the sun while the cool wind of Northern Europe crosses the funnel of the Aegean and separates the olive-planted hills of Asia Minor from the wooded humps of Pindos.

The meltemi sprays with sand tanned bodies on sun-drenched beaches and likewise it generously cools our scorched souls or, even, makes them shiver of a night and as you blindly finger the cardigan causally thrown over the shoulders you suddenly feel like you’re looking at the future through an inverted funnel.

The islands are fish thrown in the fisherman’s paper cone and you the wealthy heir of the empty land are like a camel that ought pass through the needle-eye, this impending grey winter.

The theatre/ Excavation As I was casually walking down the stairs to the underground toilets of the mighty, though modest, SchaubĎŒhne theater while effortlessly taking the curve of the building's facade inside myself I understood that nostalgia takes its decisions alone or sometimes renounces them - with no consultation whatsoever, not even with hope.

The urinal was of the minimal dimensions of a pre-war anthropometry and this seemed to be also the case for the rest of the building’s spaces: they serve a scale of efficiency the volume of the stage and the staircase a right-angled blade which protrudes in the hall.

There is elegance in the refusal to take up lots of space, though there is no shortage, the common property thus increases of the audience.

The one who shares becomes happy by stealing something of his own from the mirror’s radiance with a passing glance he purloins it from those absent as if for a moment in the background the progenitors turned up, yes, though they are silent! as, even more so are those yet-to-be.

At the sink in front of me there wasn't the other only myself, leaning forward my face dripping I spat out and blindly searched for a tissue from the silver box with wet hands and then a second one for the road and a third for the long trip to suddenly find upon returning squashed and formless like the map of Greece in the pocket lining.

Outside a southerly was blowing the afternoon rain hither and dither as the day was collapsing half-seen through the clouds losing three minutes of life from one day to the next· the wind stirred the world by my feet decimated the yellow foliage of the ash tree mixed together the impending autumn with the escapee summer.

The place I had left behind was still breathing heavily in the simmer of the dry afternoon as if clutching the heat of an expired passion while on my feet still clung tiny pebbles from the western shore of the pitch black before dawn.

As he sun was setting the illusion simultaneously rose in me of an immeasurable ambition how else to invest meaning in the jail sentence of every day than by invoking grandiose aims which once realized immediately appear, as you double back, self-evident or merely childish.

He, the one after, has something to teach that one, the one before and that one, the one before, has something to give back to the first with arms raised to signify unconditional surrender: the victor surrendered to the defeated!

But by the time the arm is raised it is lowered back down as a caress upon the head of the first in the line of teachers which is an expression of passive aggression, as one blessed people, the German looks in awe at the other, the Greek meets his destiny addresses him: “What are you doing?” as if wanting to understand to ensure a bit more time before reaching out the steel arm to grab hold of - with no prospect of subjugating, feigning civility, the guile in the gaze.

The first in the line of teachers hurriedly replies: “Nothing.”

Thus the odium increases of the bogeyman enemy like the shadows spread and join up in the olive grove intensifying the trees’ predilection to polygamy; it happens at sunset and in the separate dusks of the civilized nations before the shadow rises from their earth and joins everyone UP under night’s amorphous daze.

Outside in the theatre square adolescent skaters spoke in incomprehensible tongues .- the mingling at play of free slaves and then, all at once, I understood that the Germans had been the forerunners of the Greeks.

Ambling in the building’s courtyards among forgotten bikes, rows of fire hydrants and the empty cases of theatre sets for performances

long gone and forgotten, I realized it is impossible to approach the point where I am, here, and just as impossible to go back, there.

So a grave remains open like a question mark here, as much as there spread over the watery field of Berlin or uncomfortably squeezed in Attica’s congested terrain impossible to dig into the mountain rock without smashing it the way the shovel gently invades the slow river’s sandbank.

So the grave remains open, yes, as an opportunity here, as much as there but, this intolerable action times two - the doubling of the eternal principle a hole here, in the rock of Attica and a hole there, in the valley of Spree with time makes one's eyes, the older one gets, without anyone seeing it go secretly cross-eyed.

As I go down and up the stairs it is impossible to decide under the brilliant lights of the SchaubĎŒhne hall - myself a movable, secret stage-set where I should be buried, here or there?

Who is prompting the actor which I am (not)?

What am I saying? What was I saying? Did I really, say?

With my hands dried I'll infiltrate the rain and I will walk; I will scan on the water every untold thought unbiased, like a scientist wandering inside the Gaussian plane until I have passed from country to country nostalgic for the time of the sun.

I will afterwards return to find the rain which is slowly inundating the crater from a Russian bomb: the grave dug long ago still open years later.

The fortification wall / Completion In the short time of construction of the one hundred and sixty kilometer long – give or takeBerlin wall the economy was revived of the entire country across the way - production was increased of steel and cement the non-existent, yes, unemployment in construction was reducedbut upon completion the recession was back, so now, the walls you are erecting around the city you call your own, your personal sovereignty, your dear – unguarded- self you must never give up building.

Move on to constructing more fortification alls when you think you have completed one - there are things to protect outside the walls as well and persons on whom your own safety hinges.

Because he who manages to raise proud walls through his lifetime will have contributed to the Country’s economy to the degree required from each one at random and all together separately by the modern era as it extends into the new century.

PARIS - BERLIN Revocation Surrendered to the pleasant daze from the flowing waters of the Seine I had stayed for hours with elbows resting on the stone parapet chin in my palms and cold fingers touching my temples‌ Reverse recall: the parapet rested on the stone wall and the wall went into the brown river’s bank as if it were a shore; the water flowed leisurely westward.

Sea! inescapable beginning and end of the ever moving cycle, it's you I miss, even as I in my dry state, invoke an unknown depth the rolling expanse the undulation of escaped dreams the rose of nobody rolling slowly a prayer on the water towards the place you cannot see; the sound cannot be distinguished between the high tide of expectation and the low tide of arrival.

I came early, I admit it to wait for you, before you arrived I will leave late without finding you the folded posture - with the head down, bentallows the fall without it ever happening.

But the time of violence comes when at midnight someone pushes over the low lifeless torso of the dissident Rosa into Landwehr Kanal.

Then, immediately, and without knowing it the city of Berlin is plunged in darkness - a night that lasted for twenty six years and still lasts for some.

The soul remains immortal as long as the memory of the body holds strong and then is lost for the second and last time - the person is murdered the symbol elevated the crowd founders sanctity carries the day as a memory.

As the small dog with the haircut squatted on the muddy grounds of the Luxemburg Gardens a little brown turd issued like a hook from the filament of the intestine and plopped in the rainwater puddle.

It went on its walk in its chequered coat while its mistress cast a backward glance to ascertain the short walk’s benefit in the excrement's form.

The animal leads and the human follows blindly with love as guide or inversely.

After hours at long last, he opened his two palms in the river the rose, in between, slowly flowing as he lifted his gaunt cheeks and with reddened eyes surveyed the sky to the north.

Calmness held total sway the Blue One carried the smell of the Ocean his head leant ambivalently towards the river’s flow slowly pulling along with it

the entire body; suddenly, a shadow weighed him down a prickling flashed over his torso.

He turned around to see what shadows him and what propels him; an unsustainable weight towards the deep: he followed with his gaze the shadow’s continuum toward the park’s far end and saw it join up with the four feet of the enormous iron monument.

She: “Only with the shadow falling on him of Eiffel’s Tower at sundown did he manage to suddenly remember our appointment of yesterday morning when I stood talking on my cell phone raised on one heel with my other foot bare suspended in the crystal pane of my room at the Intercontinental Hotel watching the languid waters of Landwehr Kanal.

As I spoke to him I was looking past the canal at the Zoo at animals of many kinds at the colourful crowd broken into pieces among the thick foliage.

Now I am brought here, to Paris, by the low-thrumming power of erotic expectation which, though, for no reason staggers and suddenly turns against itself like an upstream eddy in a river.

When the distance counter points to zero and what you expected is, you can see, already there, you virtually possess it, you can eat it, it can become you then, reservation will steal it away from you.

I didn’t have time to be sorry I came nor to weep for the river that pours itself ingloriously into the indifferent Ocean because just as I was halting my awed step and expectation was shifting

into desire or hope or need for escape, as I faced his body shadowed by the Eiffel Tower, he suddenly rose up out of the flowing river turned this way and fixed his gaze from head to toe on my -deer’s- startled torso.

Then, I, out of instinct lowered my horns de-fensive-ly; with my means of self-protection gently I caressed his face at the same time looking down between my two front hooves; he had on the same shoes as when I had last met him months ago.”

He: “A sensation of wood briefly swiped across my cheeks like a fuzzy branch or as if a stick with knobs crossed my cone of vision as I followed in a shadow’s wake and my gaze came to rest on the Tower’s four iron legs; I desisted from gazing further up from looking at the monster's full height to avoid being blinded by the sunrays.

A strange edifice which although it provides no shelter can generously fit a whole crowd in its shade or maybe it isn’t a building at all but a pair of pantyhose worn over a dual body with four legs made out of iron instead of silk: the enlarged monument to the absence of a whore who refused in vain under the bridge - amidst mixed laughter and cryingto give in to the whims of Charles Baudelaire because he, supposedly, had no money on his person…

I stood under the four legs and felt like I used to when I was small under the dark secret of a woman’s shadow.

How did I, so small, ever fit inside something so large?

Everyone fits, to the rhythm of a pandemic they jostle in the shadow of the impervious skirt “mother France” I called out except no one heard me not her either whom I’d invited from Germany to a rickety date.

She was standing invisible outside the shadow’s hiding place.

Getting accustomed to plain light the eyes see better than when the pupil is enlarged with lust as if love were darkness.

Yes: like at the moment of silence when two bodies join and the blinded man’s darkened hole of vision reflexively distends the pupil enlarges while breath involuntarily accelerates and then some…”

She: “I woke up alone on the large bed before me the empty bottle and on the canal, barges, birches, pre-war ash trees.

What the Russian bomb didn’t swallow up turned into grass for the deer to nimble I lost the dream, it is gone in the morning I declined to get on the first plane to land at De Gaul, in Paris.

The guard blocked my way before I even woke up “no need” he said to exchange the ache of homecoming with the real one my breakfast was steaming by the mirror just as the plane with my booked seat empty flew out of Tegel its right turbine in a flash sucking in a large bird.

I dipped the croissant

in my intercontinental coffee and gazed out at the canal in the distance: Rosa’s monument had disturbed me all evening all reminders, in Berlin, are of sadness over what’s missing yet it’s the sadness that brings you here sitting on your lap, on the bench, in the bathroom the accessories, the hair-drier, the room’s cry.

Sadness and the insatiable appetite for work…

I don’t want what I possess and I fear what I don't have I am alone, self-sufficient tied to my work post seated atop an ephemeral hierarchy that appears eternal I refuse to sacrifice what I have toiled to build or what others have construed as a marching order which is to say, my name.

I think of him, there gazing at the muddy water in the river the rain between two deserted countries the restrained luxury of Bavarian vehicles the ordered chaos of airports the clothing of famous brands the underwear tidily on the shelf fix me in the inactivity of what I know how to do securely pinned inside the picture frame.

The gift-curse of work remains uninterpreted mundane prestige a rather steep price to pay the cluster of bloodless years like a heavy deer, live left on the platter.

Who will lift what is foreign that keeps me marooned on the bed of feathers staring at the ceiling before getting up to set to work?”

He: “Along with dozens of tourists the elevator takes me up isiden the skirt.

I become fragmented among innumerable photographs within which picture to preserve myself as I am lifted upward and phones ring indiscriminately, memories fill up, the memory-cards,

the cameras shoot?

It’s impossible to melt like a candle when you should instead you are rising by grace of the elevator.

I blindly obey like the flame on the candle as it melts to light the darkness; a volunteer scaling the heights.

I am subjected to my own actions rather than being their supposed agent like Oedipus a virtually noiseless machine is hauling me up to the reversed bottom.

The deer?

I left it grazing on the side-plate of the meal which is itself: her!

As I lift off the ground I go inside the black cone of the steel gaze-from-above.

I had sworn never to become an Eiffel Tower visitor myself yet here I am an oath-breaker rising rising getting away and arriving simultaneously at the top of the iron iceberg.�

Like a new Hadmunsen like a hero born on the back of my own self I had to understand that the crossing of every boundary the conquering of every summit are nothing for one subjected to his own actions but tourism, pure and simple.

GIBRALTAR _ LISBON _ CABO DE ROCA

Traversal

The sparrow that flew into the house to stay longed for the tree outside and flew beak first against the window pane crashed and fell with its two feet upside down looking at the blurred sky of the ceiling.

Another bird cawing frantically kissed it beak to beak then flew to an inaccessible nook of the house.

Its mourning was a few minutes of the heart shuddering under the feathers and after that it forgot.

I likewise was gazing from Africa’s shore with a beating heart at the unassailable rock of the European peninsula with the Ocean under my feet like a River flooding the basin of the Mediterranean.

My nomad mind stalled before an invisible pane with no thump at the boundary between two Continents and tumbled like a drowning man into the waves.

The loner travels dry waiting for a ship at the edge of the pier.

The coffee is getting cold untasted in the cup because like the journey that isn’t happening so the mouthful will not go down the gullet.

The rock rises across the way and the atmosphere in between is impermeable; the humid air you inhale while you stare at the pier’s far end constitutes the primary matter of ambivalence.

You neither want to cross the straits nor not to you neither prefer to cast a backward glance nor does what you see ahead please you.

Inside your throat the hook

makes you stand tall: you are being drawn up the crane without use of a thread tautens the air the craftsmanship of the nautilus stuck in a drawer spreads like a map over the stretched hide of the sea.

She rises as if she were a mountain she falls as if she were a valley and in between as the foam breaks at the mountain’s summit captain Sava’s ship rolls on its wooden hull.

He, is holding tightly the hand of his wife Sue since danger bonds bodies with heat while it lasts.

Yet, after the great journey balancing on the pier with a filled cognac glass at hand he will divorce her sending her back home.

Frozen heart, empty glass, interminable Canada flatland.

The hungry sea beast that followed for days on end in the wake of “Joy” will go on – unerringly its course into the unknown in search of other food.

The ship’s prow in vain has eyes to see a port always it's of no consequence whether it is the ship that sees or that Cyclops, the Captain with the anchor sewn at the top of his skull.

I called out “Please, the bill” and added, “Conto!” gesturing with my hand as if writing something on the sky and my voice was drowned out but the steam whistle of that ship

whose prow was staring at me with two impenetrable eyes.

The gaze is a chain that pierces any and every width and affixes us to the unknown depth of things provided they have a soul.

Not one not two but seven whistles signalled at the end of the dock the risk of a safe departure and I conceded to move on through inside the hull.

Europe’s mist reached my nose long before Id even glimpsed the opposite shore.

The nose precedes the eyes the beak is the furthermost point the weather itself and word formations amass past its lips.

Plenty more fish in the sea and bountiful orange trees in the valley across the sea leisurely irrigated with Spain’s rare water.

Portugal’s famous port isn’t far no, not Porto but Lisbon where two pillars raise their stature forming an Ocean Gate.

He who stands between with a raised arm rejoices greeting the unknown world the gray shore of Vespucci across the way where it is still night in the morning – from his viewing post as on a warm palm the sphere of the world revolves without the long mantle getting wet of the one who is turning it in one hand while the other remains free to seize and punish those who come seeking the secret of love without due caution.

I threw a stone I found unexpectedly there on the paved ground between the two upright pillars

and poked a hole in the river; the concentric circles of the plummet will fade slowly off the American shore.

Ordained between river and sea – the Tagos where its bank fans out and the ocean wave funnels in spontaneously emerges like a local fruit like the whistling thorn in the middle of the dune, the sailor.

I wished to spread out my arms but was afraid I might sink certainly someone on the unseen opposite shore would wish to be in my place, back, here: And thus wishing – like myself – they'd throw a stone off New Jersey’s gray shore into the Ocean.

Therefore for me as well it is not needed to be gazing toward someplace just like yourself without saying it you invoke the journey that will again unite us and will cover the bones of our daily donkey on the sandy coast of Costa de Caparicca.

Whatever happened happened we came back the way we had left and you as the suitcase lies unpacked on the parquet floor are all for picking it up and heading back.

Where to? the place says it.

It is one thing to think about it and quite another being there the cure for ennui is ignorance the shore on which we longed to alight with dry feet is the root of our tree fed by the sea’s saltiness as the comely foliage waves and drips.

The tree travels and the fruit leads the way inside the bloom weightless it is born hither and dither

it settles and inundates the earth.

Once, I put in root inactive for a full fifteen minutes in salty air, at Roca Cape reading a story by Pessoa when I dropped one of the writer’s pseudonyms in the sand where it was half-buried.

Melancholy spills like a sewer from the paved hills of Lisbon directly to the sea giving the waves a yellow-black hue.

It is impossible to lose something when you haven’t the air is not void but full – chains.

He who waits does indeed arrive the apparition dresses up the thing in love it eventuates and then it's gone the tram jingles downhill soon enough turns uphill the station awaits.

Once again we got lost in the station we interjected the chemistry of rapture in the brain’s flow and the train escaped us.

In the incomprehensibility of the manifold rhizome-like system of the schedule of arrivals and departures a growing tree is aflame.

Remember at least not to let me lose you in this station or another The navigator of essence is sailing unperturbed suddenly, love awakens inside of him and then it goes out as when the act of lust is consummated except here the essence exerts an effect and effects a getaway.

The weather inebriated has no direction, follows no course it changes, it recycles itself it concentrates and again disperses without ever being the same.

While you live I live

ennui only comes to those who surveying the world imperfectly believe it is always the same day that arrives like me now on the coast and you sunk in a lost Atlantis are diven towards the light like a bird in the new day or like a bat you dive into the night though for you the distance is very great of the bottom from the mirror of the sun.

When your hunger is allayed with the first foodstuff you come across you will point the beak to your belly to pick at the feathers: you are testing the pain-you-cause-yourself and from up on the dock of Tagos you kick towards the unseen fish a bit of fresh bread frombetween the two goalpost pillars.

I here, I am you somewhere over, there.

Or You here, you are me somewhere even further away.

PATRAS _ VENICE _ ZURICH

Avalanche The port is the sea that spreads below you before the ship hoots?

Alone on deck and in the distance the rock of Aitolia where the sun is setting; or is the port the bodies of the nearby Asians and Africans in the container and is the hole in the metal the entry to the port for all mouths to share the precious little air that reaches the depths of the hull, so far down there...

Yes, through the hole, you can virtually see it: there rises in the background Europe’s unassailable fort!

As the ship’s prow cleaves the waves my mind dizzily borrows a storm image from a myth.

The suffering of the waves would be greater at the bow if they were ensouled than the huge ship’s which though inanimate rises up and then submits along the journey's trajectory

to a penultimate destination.

The sigh rises up through a hole in nature the rowlock creaks; the navigator his sail tattered worse still, floundering in chaos sets foot, ravenous, on the island of the Phaeacians.

He places the seaweed before his thighs for modesty yet he is kindled by the hope that her sire’s daughter is looking on him with lust though he be middle-aged or does he perchance, being a king, have no age?

Thus he evades his own fancy and he sits with eyes closed the despicable man wrapped in leaves while by him silently flows as if drying up, moribund the Corfu river.

I was seeing that isle as a black shadow with a pinkish halo while the deep vessel sailed two miles off the coast, to the west it rose, black against its black sea a teardrop on the water a day in the century an unripe olive in the grove tiny.

The wooden ship and the navigator, the castaway standing, his torso in place of a mast palm shading his forehead as if in a military salute; the shadow of the coastline his solace.

Unwearying mind sanctified grasp of oar blind archipelago the coast guard didn’t get wind of us and so the youngster playing ball with the thousand Nereids welcomed him as if she had gone out in the early morning on an appointment with destiny obeying an inner command.

The king

was the fruit of her dream although she was worthy of it it is hard to say how Nausicaa’s destiny turned and in all the rest of the other life having been left out of Athena’s plan she will seek to chance on Odysseus’ shadow on the waves.

The suitors, on another island, were inviting forcefully, patiently the much coveted conjunction.

The Albanian coastline the backbone of Dyrrachion are impossible to make out in the dark though they exist – you can smell the earth – right there.

It is impossible any longer to tell apart - being always inside itthe means by which you travel on land, earth or water.

Is it a train, a plane or a ship?

That young morning the stern quietly cleaved the Venetial lagoon's grey water incomparably thick like sperm and the city faced an invasion from the sea: dozens of containers filled with sardines from the sea of Kurdistan.

There, in Venice, the free citizens hid out of excessive zeal for over five centuries their face behind masks. Not that they eventually avoided in the slightest the tourist invasion since they no longer existed except as printed figures on bills.

The woman of the free city in her uniform of nudity was blindly fulfilling her mission with the stranger sailor or nobleman doge, cripple or nigger as long as he too wore a mask, like she did.

Love is the stranger’s mask when he mustn't be recognized by third parties and it leaves the bed when he does after the cry.

Just is whatever may not remain secret.

We remained actors under direction and went in and out for four nights of a secret hotel or prison on the canal as if it was Carnival time.

Around us all the strangers wearing masks had the appearance of being dead wrapped in black sheets yet they were still wet.

The exit from the hospital comes at a price those inside fight rabidly to hold onto life humorously as if they were immortal but the mask provides oxygen to a mouth with borrowed speech.

On the Thursday on the canal after the Carnival was spent for evermore I looked up to a northern slope behind the Alps.

Whoever was not able to be sovereign over the canal as a stranger suddenly appeared with a red lance and tumbled under the white mountains with the irrational thump of an avalanche -the aural enunciation of the word “bar and bar and barbarous burden”as if the dog has its home ground in the enemy’s pen.

I had no idea there was a Zurich Southerner me drunk on Greek ice on the forgotten mountains of Pindos on the water dam of the Mornos river… and when I did find out I went through transit a thousand times; so, to me, the airport and its markets became the whole city.

Thousands of clocks amid chaos and the open door of the Bank always has the last word.

Yet there’s no one there to make an illegal but freely chosen delectable withdrawal of the gold, the thousands of coins.

Wearing the mask of the supposed eighties’ generation slightly askew so behind it can be seen the mask of the sixties’ generation the transiting visitor and resident of the most famous Duty Free worldwide instead of gold will find a bag full of blood at the blood giving station of the Red Cross.

What's the use of that?

That dog which like Saint Bernard’s longs to rise post haste from the base of the mountains higher and higher still has no chance of saving and being saved because who is there to hear the sound of his mighty bell?

The inactive craters at the summits are for a while yet covered in snow and the Oceanic law will be left on its own; it will have no one to share its joy with which leads creatures to form couples in order to become one and immediately proliferate.

Yes, one by one we come and one by one we leave suddenly encountering the irrational ratio that brought us together in that fireplace where we’ll become logs and jointly – no more at loggerheads – we will sweetly burn.

It is not known whether there will be others after me to burn as I burn through and through alongside all the previous ones.

But who cares now about what will have happened at some point since compared to now tomorrow is even more macabre; it has been lost in memory’s fields without even existing: it is moving house with no hint of an apology to the even-further-morrow.

People have always seen as an allegory of the fall which is all their own and concerns them exclusively the fall and demise of things, all those it so happened he came across along the way, the fool, he stumbled on and with the humble contribution of his near and dear he named “universe” having learned the language just in the nick of time before the doctors took it back by mistake on a night which incidentally will be - following the resurrection Easter Sunday.

RUGEN_ALONNISOS

The stretch 1818 / 2008 The cat’s absence cast its silent weight on the house.

It started to haunt every dark corner in the neighbourhood there and there and there where she might be absence simultaneously stalks.

She isn’t there, or there or there inside the archway across the street in the recess of the landing from where can be glimpsed the Parthenon’s subdued splendour from the dead-end of Achaion St. But again suddenly her imagined presence haunts the next dark corner and it escapes in leaps as if it were a cat as if hope is, it too, a blade slicing the shadows in two.

I refused to search bodily only my mind lazily scanned every street corner and I was left like that, standing for hours facing a question which summed us up as a family in our reserved anxiety: if the cat is lost there will be nothing left connecting thread-wise the heart beat of everyone in the house.

The light from the lamps at every corner diffused into One: a lamp on the side of the sofa two small lights on the floor of the still-so-far children’s room in the kitchen the white one haloed by the shadow of the silent exhaust fan and one last light on the entrance staircase to signify a hospitable greeting.

In the indivisible light of lamps of a thousand watts in the exhaust of machines of a thousand horses communal cohesion has been lost even though the family home is no assembly of Dionysius the Aeropagite -corner of Skoufa and Democritus Sts. – to unify the out breath of the select strangers among themselves.

Might we not get to know each other better before we are covered by the cement sky inside the same house.

The child looking for the cat is looking for us but also for her, who has gone missing, we ourselves, sent it away when on our return from a long trip we left the back door open by mistake.

The black suitcases with their metal handles weighed in our hands and the flesh reddened with the cold as it enfolded the hardness of the cold metal.

She left out of revenge!

Or: having been left on her own for days she soon ran out of memory; and if she sniffed us, she still couldn’t make contact; the cat remembers the place and the dog the person.

The time of memory is not a sac you can sew nor food you can consume.

Before the door shut I ran like a feline, across to the exit and when I found myself alone in the street my taut torso was pierced as if by two burning rays first by the memory of the northern coastline of Alonnisos island and straight after by the unlived memory of Rόgen island off the northern coastline of the German inland.

The army was not guarding

some outpost and so as my gaze scanned the expanse of United Europe, freely, I measured the distance of my trace from the northern coastline of RĎŒgen-isle to the northern coastline of Alonnisos isle and found it the same: I was in the middle, in Budapest!

Could it have been so distant, really, the house that a short time ago was supported on the back of a fugitive and was now dissolving in a traveller’s illusion?

I raised both arms as if crucified along the North to South axis as I dug my two feet in the mud of the Danube; I was crucified by the memory of two places: the one I have already set foot on in the south and carry on my back and the one I’ll find on a new trip northward once I sail off once I take leave of my senses.

The same way it seems that along with the wave the surface of the sea is moving whereas its material remains immobile, likewise the shores safeguard the undulation of the same and always anonymous wave.

The mild sea waves, eternally undifferentiated enter together the one ear and the other.

It is impossible to tell apart what has been from what is to be what the breadth of available knowledge makes us perceive as unknown is known already; so, then, surrender to the blind guidance of desire there are no precautions against what is coming and against what you have thus far evaded but is returning.

The Obstacle amasses and blocks the end of the road

like the hairs from beautiful coiffures swirl and block the bathroom drain.

The otherworldly meow of the lost cat proclaimed: “How much longer will the carefree season be extended and when will we at last be visited by the heavy sword of divine punishment?”

“I am at fault because I exist.

There is no other way I can explain the presence of an inorganic object which has been growing recently inside my stomach” you told me before we travelled towards the northern coastline of Alonissos island where you hung from a rock with one arm wrapped around a pine and the other freely dangling over the precipice.

You surveyed the waves breaking below kept safe overhead by the precipice and the root; you had food: the wave, the thump inside you.

The wave resounded as if from a wooden sounding box in the body and with a mild splashing sound in a kind of spasm you extended a little the fingers of your open palm as ones does in sleep.

Then you bent way down your beautiful head and doubled over as if to better listen to the waves lapping or as if you grew tired.

Almost at the same moment at the time of the mountains' dance Caspar David Friedrich newly wed, was spending his days painting in the sandy stony and precipitous coastline of Rόgen island.

The sky then instantaneously pierced his blond head emptying out his blue eyes as if the bones themselves were made of air, the temples;

Perhaps it was an internal explosion, of his mind: that was the first stroke. 1 So ever since then an inverse globe incized above the painting’s horizontal traverse axis defines the diffusion of thought the sense of infinity in the art of the great painter…

She pointed at Contiguity with her index finger lightly perched on the grass at the hoop of the precipice while the father bent between the young couple and kissed the ground with his head bare.

Only I, shadowed, by the rustle of the tree leaves was wearing the precise summer in a hat as if I were a painter yes! hold faithfully onto the emotion wrapping your body.

I was sitting on the bench of the small chapel and I was fixed in the same place by the spectacle of the suspension: your body emerging like a snake from of the tree’s weave and from my sitting place my eye gripped the edge of your hovering index finger steadily touching the taut and slightly curved thread of the horizon.

The nail of her index finger in its incidental position in relation to a still eye was scratching the horizon causing high and low tides with fleeting contractions that were ejected from her viscera towards the body’s extremities.

As a yacht sailed across the deep blue at full mast 1

It is not time (calendar dates) that separates Caspar David Friedrich's self-portraits, one from the next, but the strokes caused at critical moments by self-viewing. One such, at least, is a matter of historical record!

its prow facing Skiathos the edge of the sail swept the cutting edge of the tautened horizon and my other eye was pierced like an arrow the hidden summit of Mt. Athos, far distant in the clouds.

We are the same us here on the edge of Alonnisos with those there on the shore of RĎŒgen island -then and nowwe are slowly moving house in the manner of the chalk one holds inscribing in one single stroke the outline of the precipice in the air and continues with the outline of two joined figures at its edge.

Even if at the edge of the precipice man is a stone he has by his side as bilateral support the other stone; an indefinite eye created more to know and not so much in order to see will seize the scene and safely assimilate it to the sky’s mould.

What describes from below the sky’s outline exists specifically: it is warm, live and then cold but it breathes it belongs to summer and then marries the cruel winter.

The body, heartily, pierces the ether of the seasons and that third party who has learned to travel in all weather and heroically take a holiday all year round earning his keep in reverse like a retired adolescent will take off his hat and without feeling the chill in the least will benevolently greet the inexperience of the landscape; in the manner of an actor who yet for another evening

smiling, bows humbly to his audience.

SILESIA _ THESSALONICA_ ATHENS

Adoption In memoriam Adolf Rosenkranz How can the quintessential Jew with the Germanic thunder in his voice and the maestro’s baton at hand know that his Greek descendant still calls him “Adolph” meaning brother or brotherless having come, in order to listen to him, down the generational ladder by one and two and three and now four rungs?

Do the dead take an interest, one wonders in the children of their children’s children or can't they be bothered

as they try to peer further into the eons’ inscrutable ether?

If it is in fact impossible for the gaze of the dead to penetrate time’s –suddenly – cement wall why should I be thinking that he can see me?

Aren’t any of the dead closer on the generational ladder for me to make out their gaze in the dark as I stare at the ceiling before falling asleep?

Are there not the eyes of those I have known to see mother’s mother and mother herself with rather than looking even further afield at unknown eyes at large along the severed chain of the rusty generational ship that leans showing a dolphin’s iron belly?

He was climbing steadily down stone by stone stepping on Europe’s map uprooted from a field, like a tree with human speech, which sometimes was called German at other times Polish and is now the field of United Europe though I must say: for how much longer?

He stood, it was springtime, at a crossroad muddy from the melted snow of winter, in Austria, to chart his course and facing soutward he soon set foot on the ground of Slovenia, and Croatia and then Serbia.

Everything changes in the crossing of the Dunabe from one bank to the other separating those fated on the one side from the hapless ones on the other.

A second woman, the stepmother, took over his kids as he for the first time, from the springs of Vardaris faced the northern end of the Aegean Sea: gray! small wonder it seemed the same as the pond he dived in as a child in a village of Silesia with an unknown name.

Possibly only the rabbi, Singer’s father, knew what it was called as well as the villagers on a first name basis; he would gracefully gift a wreath of white roses and a violin to the maestro’s first lady who, more mythical and lost than all subsequent mothers sinks in the dust still holding the generational thread with the tips of the fingers’ bones inside the grave.

There are no graves therefore, are there no dead?

Where the world leaders tried to resurrect a nation of bones within one night by intentionally manipulating biblical images from the prophesies of Iezekiel raising arbitrary borders on the hills of Palestine the settlers stir the soup with a ladle and feed their children the bones of other children.

What you will commit, the crime is your punishment for the crime whose victim you were.

For that reason the maestro’s one and only son, with tuberculosis, perished prematurely from the disease before he was boarded up in a cage-compartment attached to the front of the train, though he had time enough to cultivate pumpkins and to recycle the dry roots and stems along with his colleagues as a free man in a Kibutz.

Meanwhile the silver spoons brought from somewhere in Vienna or Saltsburg were striking melodiously the cheeks of the teapots to melt the sugar cubes in the tea which flowed steaming on a cold winter in the house, on the shoreline of Faliron.

In the steam of the tea swirled the notes played by the wax hands of Dinu Lipatti and words were uttered in disorder in greek at one time, then in yiddish then in german.

You, I know, avoided speaking German though you could but when the scales tilted from the lightness of a convivial gathering to the intimidating formulas of an undefined hyperborean authoritativeness the weight of the language pushed you back: you'd pass a quick comment in greek and siddle along the stairs towards the kitchen.

Eventually emerging out of a great accident you left this house behind.

I wonder, did you find your rightful place in your new home?

Was it I wonder enough for you to leave the bitter experience behind like a nightmare, by turning your back or was the nightmare stronger than any happy illusion?

Was I wonder your ethos the outcome of suffering or more the resonance of the free being which they all knew lay in wait inside of you?

I had no time whatsoever to broach the subject but neither did you so much as mention the word we waited for more trying times to talk thinking that need is capable of occupying with words the country of opportune silence.

When they did come, though, the trying times when the space appeared through the window from where your soul will forcefully escape once and for all again the word was impossible to utter because the pain of the body disguised the allegations of the up until then pained soul.

For me

the trip from the mud of Silesia to Salonika and then to Athens ended once and for all in front of that darkened window, that does not illuminate but only sucks in.

No matter how I want to, I cannot bear the weight of the journey because no destination is discernible or maybe because I bear it as body weight, about eighty kilograms.

The muscles are not only exercised by bearing the weight of the world it suffices to walk naked or even to stand upright for the muscle to grow on the weight.

I am not at all interested in you in relation to myself but in seeing you clearly, if that were possible, as You; even if only rising like a column of smoke, you yourself.

Because always while you were close to the world to me you were an accessory of my own variously preoccupied outfit; could it be you'd also chosen to live divided? girded with the outfits of those around you?

Maybe I should not want for the path to become accessible to the secret.

Does the bottom of the abyss have night night and day? I think not.

Still, I thought that by turning my face a moment is enough of perfect clarity to understand without even being able to say.

Then again, the thought sometimes is soothing that inside the dream knowledge stirs; it then emerges that the abyss is the day like for that monstrous looking phosphorescent little fish that caught on the hook, stirs up the darkness and loses its being in the light of the sky.

The fisherman’s smile as he unhooks the fish his cigarette ash hanging above the nets begets a voice from inside: “there is a god!” because such words come unconsciously

from the belly, through the teeth and lips into the light either when the fish has been procured with difficulty in the plate, the bread in the hand and the wine in the cup or when you search in desperation for hope and you do find it once and for all in no matter what faith.

What I would like is not a confirmation that when I talk you are supposedly listening but to put an end to the suspense of dialogue.

As the balance slowly shifts of night and day -like now, in the middle of the month of Novemberit becomes harder to engage in dialogue the more the language of the dream, at night, becomes heavier that the shadows of light, in the early morning.

SCOTLAND_NORWAY_NORTH POLE

Perforation As the shadows fell randomly on me of the raised megaliths and enveloped my body a gray bird crossed the gate of the cosmic clock and stood at the centre of the circle, in Stonehedge; might it I wondered know more about this creation than I did?

And if in fact it did, what was it that it knew, a bird?

What did I know about birds?

The house I left in the city of Edinbrough is pushing me back though I had believed myself able to live before the age of the electric bulb, I was swiftly propelled to the light by the sound of a six-cylinder engine and driving slowly the Jaguar of such and such a make I crossed the border of England and Scotland.

I was returning defeated toward a new journey.

Except, the house pushes you into the out-there and he, in his lack, the homeless one remains imprisoned in the non-journey.

It was impossible from afar to face the destination rising in mid-ocean like an antenna: the pumping Tower at the Brent Delta platform in the middle of the North Sea. Where the steel lance falls, out to sea, in the unbreachable depths a tentacle of raw oil will start rising to darkened heights against the corroded shoreline of the Norwegian peninsula.

I drowned a thousand times before the ice melted alongside the Vikings.

I prefer driving the Jag on the Scottish hills than taming the waves on the Brent Delta platform.

Even if here, on the platform, the dusk is more robust I want to fly away, to flee.

The red ball of the sun seems like it’s slipping and disappearing having fallen off the iron table into the expiring flow of the Golf Stream.

Here, in the North, as the stream leaves off, it’s a life saver: it sharpens and melts the pure white prow of ice as it travels Southward bound.

A sun shaped flower shed its petals in the gulf of Mexico and with a fly as its castaway it has crossed over the Atlantic Ocean’s mountain range like the trajectory of a star.

I burn gas therefore I am; I watch in my mirror the world leave backwards whether that is the rock on the shore of Scotland or the impassable border between fulfillment and sustainability.

The treasure is forever hidden the wealth to be found under your feet grabs hold of you and hurls you to hell’s burning pit.

The child, the grownup getsto be a grownup by burning organic matter the enemy lays claim on your food and the friend shares with you from your own plate.

Your enemy is you.

I searched for friendship after the years had passed and I saw

that it has what I have: “Take” I said, “the weight off my shoulders I’m returning it because it is a part of your own body”.

I balanced by chance the weight evenly to all the body parts one hand here the other hand there my one hand me the other one you.

I raised them straight ahead and steadied myself on one back leg like a sleepwalker; counterweight journeys and here we go all over again.

Across the way the tips of the coastline sharp as knives for the first time I camped at the time of their celebration – the hippies’ a tent in a fiord eating salted fish while reading Hamsun’s Hunger.

The sun took months to set just as the page takes forever to turn in like fashion, in the polar summer carefree, with its arms full of fruit history turns a leaf over -why, is there really hunger?

-how to speak of what you know nothing about? the word’s a different place before you eat out of a plate piled high and a different one when it tilts and it becomes impossible to reach to the bottom.

The child fills like the world as if songs were a cargo to charter a boat for.

I didn’t regret it for one instant: with zero morale I crossed the threshold of the Grand Cafι in the city of Oslo: there were supping at a table with a single chair Hamsun, as a child, alternately with Grieg and Munch.

Suns decorated the salubrious hall and suddenly a passing light appeared Henry Ibsen was coming through holding Emily-Hedda

and in his other hand a black-and-white ball.

This is the kind of place where you may get the mad idea of joining her at her table to listen to the words of the drunkard Munch, in English: “I have been sitting in the Grand Cafι and I have been barely able to think and I have felt as if I were going mad…”

As in the golden coffee shop of the painter Van Gogh the same here: winter passes as if it’s just another winter, before or after.

It doesn’t matter in the least if you are wearing the same shoes or different ones if you miss the same people or different ones; you don’t know whether they are missing or if it’s you keeping them at bay.

The father, open mouthed, sits leaning sideways in a spanish armchair: is he really the one who got sick and is unable to breathe I mean, is it the father, the one in the picture or is it the son in the mirror, shortly before the end? the one who in the place of his son sacrifices the convulsing lamb?

Ah! so Munch also had a father ah, so he too, as a man, has been a little child.

Because everyone we met while we were children we think have always been grownups.

Do the hyperboreans love with a supposedly great love or do I see them the way I look at a full plate when hungry and straight after, sickened…

More than Munch, Grieg and Hamsun my hero in Norway became a woman bus driver because she really did hoist Northern Europe on her back long before the teakettle vibrating at the base from the steam provided the lead for the design of the first steam engine in the Isle of Britain in frozen Europe.

In the heat of Greece, in the sun the cold, the shade, the living is easy; everything here preexisted slowly turning inside Hero’s engine like bean stew mixed in the pot with the ladle; but when time is up history will prove more powerful than technology.

Supreme over all remains the active geography which is why I am suspicious whenever people speak indiscreetly of nature; the ground is not a tree unlike the snake, which is a branch.

The volcano will swallow the hydrogen bomb.

We think instruments make music whereas it merely passes through them.

The tunnel, the platform, the bridge connecting Scandinavia as if it were a single country bears the music.

The wind whistles through the bird-traps over there somewhere, left lying in wait on Santorini isle.

Is there a match, I wonder, between Grieg’s piano concert and Greek summer?

Peer Gynt and Odysseus?

Hamsun and Myrivilis? the battleship Averof at Faliron and Tirpitz sunk in its fiord?

The german battleship was sunk without deploying its guns in the bay’s dragnet the soldier crossed the borders under the water, as a deep sea diver to join up the world as indeed he did join with a pair of scissors and a torpedo the most unlikely places feeling their metal burn the pierced body of the world-ship.

Through the sabotage the soldier fulfilled the original destination of places to be joined and diffuse under the temple’s gaping roof of the deity named entropy.

I wish the guard was myself at the temple of entropy though you’ve been dead, soldier, for many years.

You step always on the same sea here or there and moreover, from the summit of the icebergs of the North Pole if your eyes grasp the whole of creation situated downhill while you are being embroidered by the threads of the meridians as they intersect at one point there is no way you could change your view or change the world!

War is War, the docile father of the soldier!

Even in the retreat of the ice?

Yes, life infuses every place it prompts the agitated polar bear to move on the edge of the razor as it melts without an audience like at rehearsal, in a circus.

The pole will become a polis the polis will become a sea the municipality? a swarm! the rubbish feed for the seagull.

The world is moving at top speed even at the point of the spinning top from where god keeps it steadily upright and leaning slightly to the side, like a hostage.

He likes to make and he likes to destroy and he is tested, he laughs and he cries he is an authentic creator I, closing my eyes, touched my finger on the globe and when I opened them I saw his shadow joined to my finger over the Pole.

Then, on an impulse, I felt like singing the song

because from high up there my voice would be better heard.

When there is no door to the room when the house has no roof then the carpenter comes to fix things and during a break from his work he sets the pencil behind his ear he rolls a cigarette lights the match and the world goes up in a blaze (no Helen to light the church candles).

Impossible to make a getaway before you can, that red circle will have hid in the Ocean sliding under the iron table of the Brent Delta platform.

I believe that the friends I found on my way up from the fortieth parallel on as I counted “forty, fifty” and tomorrow, who knows, maybe “sixty” walked alongside me on the same level surface because as I opened and closed my mouth soundessly from inside could be heard - louder than the six well-maintained cylinders of a Jaguar engine – the song of Hamsun Munch and Grieg like the song of a group of friends around the table at the Grand Cafι or else thw Suns' Coffeehouse somewhere in the gray streets of Oslo or in the side-streets of forgetfulness, on Paros.

When I close my mouth the friend’s song will have returned to him who dictated it in a whisper so that I, singing it, could hear it a bit more clearly even if now its time has been and gone for good.

METEORA_MANI_SIAKA, SOUTHERN SICELY

Surfacing / Submersion Out of the night violently comes the pre-dawn light of the new day if you have your back to the window and gaze out every few minutes the murky glow advances kicking at darkness with every step.

It took hours for your dilated pupils to become acclimatized and the naked body wrapped in the night's feathery mantle.

The slightly longer day violently comes every subsequent afternoon as winter is running out though life is not done and a new expectation is growing with the knowledge that the new summer lies ahead.

The violence of experiencing overtakes knowledge like the persistent wave of the rising tide at winter’s end it is vertiginous and straightaway makes the stomach clench on the train, in the horror tunnel before it dives thunderously into the depth of time although a deceleration

to the rhythm of the day’s growth in mid May or thereabouts reduces the vertigo before it dissipates in the blur of he heat.

In the eheart of winter I stood on the edge of the rock of Meteora raising against the rays of the sun a glass with one thousand kilos of beer emptying into the void.

I was seeing below me the river of Pinios as it flowed, parched, forcefully sucking into itself the last water from the bottom of the lake.

At the same time next to me on the mountaintop rose the rocks of Meteora, a bulldozer's incision on the ground brought to light the riverbank with the little round pebbles and the white snails: there was a time when the riverbank used to hang at the top of the mountain.

Where a river used to be is now a road and without the water flowing no distinction can be made between high and lowly That there should have been a river thickly running on the mountaintop! what really is The Case seems inconceivable; as if it were some kind of feat for cotton to be draining the last of the water at the bottom of the empty sea of Thessaly.

A memory game: the collision of vehicles on the road comes about when it is designated as one-way by the one going and designated as one-way by the one coming: the two drivers then encounter Error face to face as the other’s fatal mistake.

I knelt on shaking legs before indifferent nature in between two mountains.

As the yellow river flows - beer turned to urine it separates your two soaked shoes

and you moo with relief like a cow.

The world is a riverbank getting deeper and deeper.

The shadow of him who for six days lovingly gave form to creation and on the seventh hid behind the weight of the work to get some rest, spreads horizontally to the edge of the plateau as if the time of dusk were the final hour.

On that final hour his shadow scans the world pebble by pebble with the speed of a long drawn tread.

The river drowned my gaze at a corkscrew turn and all that reemerged from the grayness was a large bird.

It raised its head and its feet took up position in the feathers under the belly, like a plane drawing up its wheels.

It was already in flight, leading with the neck, how splendid!

Made taut by the sound of a gunshot warm from the hold of two impatient hands grip and grip and grip the shotgun my heart.

The bird hastened to meet its target it's gone, it flew away, is no more it applauded the wind with heavy wings and swooped downward to the impassable haunts, finally, of Mani.

The Heron, dead like a human being, soaked my open arms with tears: no matter that the world is as wide as a pair of arms - and this can be seen at first sight – it cannot contain what is small.

The weightless flight beneath the sun throws on the earth a moving shadow the size of a bird.

The bird's shadow on the earth is a plough digging;

in the tilled rows I saw unruly trees spring as it travelled over the mountain Orthys.

I touched with the serrated tip of an oak leaf its wings as if they were summits.

It passed over the rock mass of Oiti and disappeared along with the train in the clouds that cover the unstirring back of Parnassus and Pyrra keeps throwing stones over her back walking the wolrd in solitude.

Unmoving? Yet for how long? because next to the birds the mountains are in flight you can see it as a ripple in the shape of the Gulf of Corinth.

The unexpected wave rippled sideways against the shadow cast by the Heron's belly; the creature that knows at one time to swim and at another to freely cut through the air -you see it as an arrow still manages to walk though awkwardly when wounded it cannot soar because, a bird is not a song and it's not a hammer...

Then the carlights with a screeching of breaks hit on its frozen eyes and trap the night inside of it.

As if it were another, it then turns into two birds: the one wounded will expire in the hairy embrace of unpredictable man while the other pursues the journey past the wooded side of Mt. Helmos which holds up as an embanment Arcadia's gaunt earth so that it doesn't end in the deep bay as the muddy nesting ground of fish.

With the speed of the earth's rotation, faster that the time it takes to shift one's gaze, the bird headed

-its shadow sliced in two by the mountain range of Taigetos to the South and beyond.

It did finally stand still on the stone before last of Tainaron and purveyed the sea we all have always before us.

It gracefully folded its neck twice and placed the beak in parallel to the scarce rain water sitting in the folds of the rock by the shore forming a lake the size of an embrace.

Imbibing, it reduced the level from a little to even less and finally to the salt that slates the stone and shimmers in the dusk.

Travelling at night in the sea of Tunesia I docked at the port of Siaka it was dawn by then and was sorting some strange fish throwing them from the net to the ground.

They swiveled around their own body piercing themselves before giving up the ghost with their red wings stretched out.

Then I turned to look out to sea at the peaceful waters reaching to world's end; holding its breath, the weather had arrested time.

Whatever I had brought from there to here, from the unknown world of the depths to the light, neither writhed anyomore nor did it bring up memories as if the last ounce of air had been spent here, on the stones of the wharf.

It was then the unbelievable was witnessed by a pair of eyes which I call my own, and those of a few more fishermen besides: A new Island, out at sea slowly raising

its back into the light.2 Confused by the distance I thought it was a cetacean come to give birth on Sicely's southern shore having left behind the circular sand beaches of western Crete.

The pregnant cetacean passed en route over the abyssmal gorges – some five kilometers deep of the Mediterranean where the Africa Plate unwittingly subverts the glorious future of the european peninsula.

Except the cetacean did not breathe with life but only with time -if one is allowed to put it thus because outside and beyond us but for a while within us, too, lives mighty Saturn.

The new Island risen from the depths into the middle of space took up its position, gray, among the strange world's phenomena.

Later, all the poor wrapped on the dock with the rags of the slipshod day came down wlily nilly to offer proof that it wasn't me who was mad but the earth itself for animating the rock.

What was not born of human imagination was baptized by the inanimate earth itself; “and yet it lives!”

I cried inwardly and full of awe, I embraced the nearest human body yes, somewhere on the wharf of Siaka!

Might that have been an offspring of Saturn too? are we trully? yes, alive!

2

The underwater volcano of Empedocles appeared in the sea, in July, 1831, thirty kilometers south of Siaka and a few days later, sank back silently, before it had time to stabilize as an island mass on the temporary map of the Mediterranean Sea.

not our mind, but Gaia herself gave birth painlessly but not haphazardly to the new Island.

A barren field in the ocean the risen depths drying in the sun, this is no dream it is power without will a baby without a future.

Everything can be restrained, even rage and those who expected that the end is coming with another earthquake because a new island showed up, were wrong.

Just as the day approaches uninvited within the night likewise She has many ways of singing the song that will bring about grief or joy.

When th sun be in midheaven steadying creation by touch in its new phase as if it were a moon we will pull withcourage, and restraint too, the boats through the sand towards the unusually warm water of the Ocean.

We will silently wield the oars towards the new Isle so the splattering does not startle nature.

Listening only to our breathing and to the water we will fix our eyes on the new Isle pulling behind the intense staring our subdued body in the boat.

Why is it impossible for fear to win over boldness especially when an unnatural calm allows the mind to make plans ignoring the storm -as if it never existed.

Before however, slowly and guardedly we scale with dripping legs its precipitous shore, the new Isle, just as mysteriously as it appeared will as slowly be gone in the black waters.

No one believes in a lost memory even though many it be shared by many by you and I who never bring a camera along.

Legend will cover over the rock of the momentary event like a sea and then forgetfulness will bury it at the exact spot where it emerged into light.

Only the bird standing carefree on the edge of the rock as it is making ready to fly from the white shore of south Sicely to the white shore of Tunisia will have flown over the island of a few days.

As once it seemed to me that the stars are but holes in the metal strainer that covers the sky with behind them everywhere the celestial fire burning so now I think that underneath the mantle of the sea that covers the erath the same fire burns which gives the world form.

Floor and ceiling, identical!

As the pot is boiling in the earth's depths covered by the celestial strainer inside it the day is simmering the meat or the pasta looking momentarily just the same as the century.

Like the bird is another bird -at Tainaron, at the edge of Sicelyso am I

another man: at the top of the bald Meteora with the yellow Peneios river licking my feet.

Who ever makes his home on an island which I saw one day grow in the sea out of naught and next day saw it disappear again into no-where?

ROME _SKOPELOS

Submersion / Surfacing Exhausting the possibility of finding myself somewhere at some time I arrived at St. Paul's Square at the center of a preceding world in Rome.

I thought it was a Sunday but I was probably wrong, Monday maybe? because the cobblestone space was empty with only some birds bending over it testing the force of their beak resoundingly against the stone.

As I strolled the birds fluttered in a swarm and shifted to the side.

I opened with my feet a curtain of black wings and closed it in the next step; so I never got to set foot onto the stage.

Some further steps along I was going through yet another curtain as I turned my head back the furore of wings and feet was settling back down like rivulets draining into the broad back of the sea, the cobblestoned expanse.

Walking under the cloister, out of the way, I slowly found a destination with a steadier tread helped by the distance between the columns: the spacings of a duration of two inbreaths and three exhalations.

In this city, you are forever transiting from stage to stage and some precious door whether open or closed defines for you the end of the road.

The performance is postponed, it doesn't happen as in the rehearsals one leg passes in front next an arm comes to meet it

but by then the joining has ben lost to the next leg; when consciousness takes over the management of stepping forward the body collapses like a scarecrow.

One leg back, a different one to the front: this way the body's cohesion is dismantled like the team's determination dissolves when the score is so uneven that it seems impossible to stem the tide in the time remaining.

Without arms, without legs I was also left with no players in the field carrying on my back the inescapable score thousands of fans supposedly were booing me my ears were buzzing where could I have possibly found such a crowd of faithful that were now turning against me without it even being a Sunday and without, I don't think, a Monday coming up I wasn't even the team playing ball in the stadium I was merely kicking at air.

I had left behind the pillared emptiness with the dozens of columns but instead of proceeding via a fold-up tunnel to the dressing rooms I was entering the portico of St. Paul, in the centre of the preceding world not so very far from the crowded Olympico stadium where Roma now holds its games.

Nobody knew whether I actually do exist I existed only as a moving shadow for the birds, a while earlier...

She: I saw him come into the high-ceilinged space dressed in black with a slow tread certain, like he knows the place: vaults, chambers the heavenward arches the sculptures one by one

in the recesses of the side aisle.

Still, he didn't in the least look all dressed in black as if he was animated by the resentment that guides a good christian.

As I purveyed the world from the cupola he stood out, a distinctive target, from the multicolored crowd in the church the smashed candelabrum of the world strewn across the marble floor.

My gaze was trained on him amidst the colorful crowd the smithereens of the candelabrum moved on the floor in a pretense of being ensouled.

Unperturbed, alone, with an animal's audacity in his posture he drew back his head as if by walking he would grow taller.

Out of the column supporting him sprang the spinal marrow rising higher than the cupola.

He glided on the floor as if on roller scates and with a ninety degree turn immediately found what he was after.

Gliding swiftly down the steps of the dome I went out of the tunnel and stood behind one of the building's middle pillars as sturdy and impenetrable as a building on its own right.

I saw him standing there in the shadow of the figure of Pope Alexander the Seventh as he imparts his last blessing and from below Death raises the empty glass and pours him some wine.

It is impossible that I'm hidden from the eyes of the others by the building's middle pillar though it be the largest in the world.

I had no time to react

when he suddenly turned his head annoyed by the intense wave spewed out by the pupil of my hidden eyes and was insolently prodding him in the back.

I hid at once but it was too late a whole wall had crushed down on me yet I still held myself upright as if I were the pillar.

I wonder why I held on then and didn't fall? although all I have held onto is an old mortgage since the time when the two of us resided on the same bed.

He held my hand during an old summer while he gazed– the way he is now looking at Deathlovingly into my eyes.

As a child I used to swim around a hospitable boat that floated above the sea depths of Skopelos.

I would earnestly dive underneath the black hull and swim across the length of the boat; maybe you remember too... were you then called Marina?

I would surface gratefully into the sunlight to suck air for a second try and would keep myself submerged with awe to the point of bursting.

I would see through the mask the anchor chain disappearing in the dark wetness as if the hovering, blind, boat is held secure by an unknown hand from down there in the inaccessible bottom.

There are risks involved in hanging out over the abyss: the curvature of the hull pointing to the deep bends the arc of the boat while conversely the safety of the port drowns the longing for homecoming in a spoonful of dirty water.

The child mistook the bottom of his spoon for the abyss the bright surface of the water for a ceiling like that Saint who is now genereously dispensing his blessings, as if he were eternal.

The Other, at the same moment, as a skeleton, is laughing from below and passing round the grave's nectar in a glass; Caεsar will taste it for the first and last time.

A ridged surface like the sheet on an empty bed -sea wave veil of the mountain rangeprotects the world above, from the earth's inside.

The submerged one exclaims with incomparable kudos: “Come unto me!” as if he were emerging to shout a round of the world's lower part to those above like a utopia!

I loved the boat's belly in the deep looking up at an slant, awed prepared to forego the self evident grace of breathing or of youth only for a short while, for as long as the lungs hold out.

Then, back out again, I inhaled, emerging from the sea without wanting to.

The other one always wanted for me to taste the joy of life; he made sure I was positioned at the middle point of a bowstring stretched to breaking point – alas!by the desire for what lies beyong reach.

Joy does away with the word and all it needs to say is a single “no!” to what there's so much of that no more of it is possible.

Treading on the precious floor under the shadow of the wine-dispensing Death and further down past the dying Pope's benedictions at the bottom of the immesurable stairs in the chucrch where the great becomes lost in the small I marvelled at the boast of the consumate work.

“If you have something to say only say it if it's great!”

Bernini whispers ironically in my ear terrified in truth of having someone whisper to him the name of his superior Boromini.

She: He's gone back to his favourite work” she moves her lips, in soliloguy... “hey, you, over there, next to Death... I can see you”.

He is chatting now with the Pope above now with the dispenser below the precious red, marble veil keeps apart those above from those below and it enfolds him.

I am a living breathing apparition which he left behind before coming by himself to surrender to Rome's magic.

By beating it he must have thought that he would grasp a primordial vision: time's refuse tip filled with miscellaneous rubble with smaller time-moments.

First he saw me, face to face before I hid from him behind the pillar and then he forgot again attending to the subject of the ineluctable struggle between the skeleton and the flesh.

That same body that used to be mine under the sheets the world has split in two.

The dismal underworld of two joined bodies that sprawl on the mattress wearying it: under the mattress, and further below, the lust, the passion... even inside the ground.

Desire, it annoints us en masse, the delegates of madness.

I did see her, yes, wandering behind the world's thickest pillars my eyes screeched as if they were brakes the knot inside me loosened and straight away something rose up into my mouth, like blood.

There was something I wanted to proclaim to utter, like a bird, just a caw!

I was immediately embarrassed and fled in disarray past the forgotten icon; besides, it probably wasn't be her after all the years just someone in the crowd resembling her.

Or was it actually her, at some point?

Or is it that wherever I find myself I call to me unwittingly whoever in the crowd looks like her?

I swiftly turned my bulimic gaze towards the Pope again who, unfazed, was stonily blessing Death as if I wanted to subjugate an imaginary ejaculation or as if recalling chilldhood: when emerging from a deep dive I would tear off my mask and took shuddering breaths right at the point of bursting, just in the nick of time!

I was again passing under the boat, the sea surface above was spreading a sheet, the impenetrable shroud of luminosity brought on the involuntary retrogression: Repetition!

I want to one more time!

One more time is enough for the stone to resoundingly hit stone for the beak to dip into the cold material in case it might take root, as it quests for water and on the glass surface the winged dinosaur is mirrored that lives in every small, defenceless cuckoo.

I am the worm caught in the cruel beak.

If the bird in its haste is not duly careful

instead of entering unharmed, like Jonah, into the body's warmth protected by feathers and quaking with a thundering heart, it will snap its beak oh, and cut me in half on the spot (and again, and again).

I will fall back down cut in half I, the worm yes, the worm and I with no skeleton, only wet and odious flesh in the immaculate stonework of Saint Peter's square at the center of a precedent world, in the now weakened though still eternal Rome. ‌.............................................................

The worm admitted at the moment it was being cut in half by the beak, painfully, that since it failed to join two bodies unto one when it had the chance, it was itself led not meaning to and at all events violently from being one to end up as two body-corpses.