on the smoke-stained walls of night. Someone said:
numbers, numbers, light years, centuries, league on league. I didn’t listen.
Today a friend was talking to me. When he was thirteen — he said –
he sold oranges and lemons in Piraeus;
an Armenian friend of his sold stockings. Summer noons
they’d meet down at the harbor behind the sacks
set down their baskets and read poems
then maybe eat a koulouri, or an orange, and look at the sea
a fish jumping, the foreign ships. Starting today
I too have a friend. My friend
smells of oranges and the harbor. In his pockets
he has the whistle blasts of many nighttime ships. In his hands I see
the movement of the big Clock’s minute-hand. Starting today
I love him, I unbutton one button of his jacket.
I’m thinking now of going to bring him his young Armenian friend,
of going out into the street with a basket of stockings, of calling
“good stockings, cheap stockings, pretty stockings.” Surely
I’ll find the Armenian kid, noontime, behind the sacks,
I’ll recognize him and he’ll recognize me because on our lips we both
have the same traces of the gaze of the same friend.
Without this basket of stockings and this one of lemons
I’d have had nowhere to put my day, my words, my silence.
But I figure every comrade must have a basket like that,
only I don’t know how to find it, so I get angry and search.
November 15
The newspapers arrived. The Chinese are advancing.
We went out into the yard. A large moon,
a huge yellow moon. And how is it that we fit
inside these barracks, this barbed wire, this time?
November 16
I’m very tired. I wrote all day.
Those gaps, and that padding.
It didn’t fill anything. A ship went by.
Maybe the “Kos” or the “Herakleio.”We heard
its whistle blasts from up here. Tomorrow the mailman will come.
The only word, silence, wasn’t uttered.
November 17
We lit a fire with some dry branches,
we heated water, washed stark naked
out in the open air. It was windy. We were cold. We laughed.
Maybe it wasn’t from the cold. Later
a bitterness remained. Surely my cats
outside the locked house will climb up to the windows,
scratch at the shutters. And to be unable
to write them a word or two, to explain to them,
so they don’t think you’ve forgotten them. To be unable.
November 18
Kontopouli to Moudros. Not far. Still, a long trip.
The truck in the rain. Pockmarked landscapes
behind the wet window — the almond trees, a house,
another house, the chimney, drenched sheep,
two children hand in hand carrying school bags –
a long time since I’d seen children and roads. We arrived.
All the hands that grasped my hands are oaths,
which the rain can’t erase. I’m a mother
with countless children. I sit in the rain
and call out: “my children, my children,”
and I’m the children’s child, and I need
to lower myself even more, so I can enter
the tents of Moudros, and rise
to the height of their eyes, and wipe the rain off their cheeks
as easily as sun and rain become leaves.
November 19
The children grow. They put their hands in their pockets.
In their pockets they have a killed lead soldier.
Their mother wears glasses whenever she mends their socks.
All the mothers are ashen on Saturday evening
and more so on Sunday, when it rains.
Maybe that’s why I too got sick. I sit
on my straw mattress. Vassilis comes in.
He lights the lamp. He doesn’t speak. He waits. We hear
the click of Barba Fotis’s worry beads
like lights coming on one after another
in very distant houses or on ships.
November 21
Another Sunday. Headache.
Lots of cigarettes. Smoke. The windows don’t open.
I have nothing but a week
of rain and broken almond shells.
The faint light at the window six pieces of ice.
The lamp’s wick — I don’t know — is silence in reverse.
I count the blanket’s squares.
The whole time I think how a basket of bread
is just a basket of bread. I muse on it
and can’t believe it. Because how then
can the buttons on our shirts fall off,
and when the nights walk on the road how
can we find at dawn in the latrine wall
holes from the nails of stars?
November 21
Sunday is a large wardrobe with winter clothes
Sunday smells of mothballs and sage
it has the shape of a closed umbrella in the tiled hall.
People talk louder Sunday noon
they walk louder Sunday afternoon
they laugh louder Sunday evening
maybe so they won’t realize they have nothing to say
so they won’t hear that they’re not walking
and have nothing to laugh about.
But Barba Psomas has a lot to say
he can make cradles and ships out of fallen trees
he can read fortunes in dried beans
he can talk about the braids of cornstalks, about birds and the years
even about the cow’s shadow at sunset
or about the shoes hanging over his shoulder as if he had as long way to go.
That’s when I realize I know nothing
and that it isn’t fitting for me to heap up lines by chance
since I never learned to make a straight road
so that Barba Psomas could walk
without fear of ruining his shoes.
November 21
I begin not to understand a whole lot of things.
They bother me like a sock with holes
showing the skinny yellowed foot of an intellectual.
I don’t like people who wear glasses.
Maybe the moon understands the houses
maybe the houses understand their windows
but I don’t understand why a lamp should have that name
when a ship blasts its whistle in the night
and when lamps, ships, weeks and baskets of bread
are heaped in a mess on the floor
and I, hungry, open my mouth so they can feed me
with a bite of the bread I give them.
November 22
Frozen sunshine. I didn’t look at the colors.
I didn’t turn my eyes that way.
I know nothing but the ash of my cigarette
and the weight of this ash.
I muse on the most irrelevant things.
Nights, just as we’re ready to sleep,
the mice wake up
scurry back and forth on the table
gnaw our papers and the tips of our shoes
sit on the stools we sit on
drink the leftover oil from a can of food
and the next day we find a hole in our bread
and their footprints on the table.