[This should do it]
Richard Kessling, Melbourne in Australia
I have my shades on. A quarter past two.
P.M. I've eaten a large spinach pie.
It cost me little and includes napkins
and a plastic bag which I shall fill with figs
on Tuesday morning. An ant grabs fragments.
The plate is borrowed from my landlady.
She taught me several words of Greek for plate
as well as for the knife. That's ???????.
It's said "Ma Carey" with the stress on care.
Sounds like a film.
Kessling, it's very hot;
my mind is wandering and I'm following.
A man, a Greek, is digging a long hole
in the street below, but I don't know why.
He doesn't sweat. His wife removes his hat,
drops it in a bucket and puts it back
on him. Cool water streams over his face.
She helps to break large stones with a hammer,
talking. Extremely attractive. She bends
beautifully, bare-footed, trousers cut knee length.
I wish that she loved me and I was rich.
I have my shades on but it's not enough.
The ant is almost at the balcony.
It can't escape. The floor's really well-sealed.
This morning I evicted the spider
from my shoes. He's been there - perhaps it's she -
for five days, hunting from beside the heels.
It was desperate to run but had no shade.
She has powerful legs, that woman.
Gets down in the hole now, helping him, talking,
about whatever's down there. Water pipes?
Something of concern.
I have my shades on.
How are you, you inoperable fart?
The Greek for fart is not in my dictionary,
not even under "Doctor-General".
Two forty five: good poetry takes time.
Across the street, two teenage girls stand tense,
balconied in strident loud pop music;
finger tips flicker, keeping time, heads nod;
"I want... I want... I want..." Perhaps "I wish..."
I fail to hear the list of the desires
or else don't understand. Overlapping
as small streams merge fleet pulses in a tide;
an older song, on a peculiar scale,
from a take away, somehow more dominant
in its undercurrent, unsynched to the
insistent Western chant
What is the matter?
much repeated.
Yes.
What is the matter?
I've written far too long. I'm tired out. Much as I like to hear my voice,
I'm off.
*
Too many beers for lunch. Hours wasted.
People volunteer and I want the company.
I take what I am offered; for my soul,
of course. Then a long talk in the garden,
all in my own present tense upside down Greek,
that I enjoyed, though exhausting. One thing:
tomorrow night, up in the hills, free goat,
music all night.
Now I'm up; the sky's showing off
what can be achieved with indirect sun.
It would take some painting! Hunting birds out.
I wonder if dusk clarifies for them
perspective as it does for us. Best clothes
are being shown off below. A lot of Greek.
An American has just said "squid" for "hi".
I want a walk. I've had enough of this
so “squid”.
*
Morning. Draught German lager.
I've left the balcony. I'm in the pub.
Eighteen hours have passed - quite good hours
and I'm feeling slightly paraplegic.
A man or a woman shaped like an egg
plods down to the water's edge, legs floppy,
guts floppy, hat floppy; an octopus
clutched in a cut off hand pops up, violent,
from behind the wall of the taverna
wop - rather it disappears and then goes wop!
If I stood now I'd see the hand's body.
An army truck goes past. Wide diesel creaks.
The deaf shepherd walks the sea's edge, his dog
slightly ahead, both all-seeing. The egg's
a woman! immersed now, a wet radish
in a fading white hat in a blue sea talking
with a woman's voice. To my left, a huge
strongish man in a t-shirt stretched round him
"Start with Gramosite" drinks beer; grey curly hair
dappled by little specks of bent sunlight
from the vine lauding over him it seems
boughs raised, as they've been trained, as Victory
is anthropomorphised as Capa's -
is it Capa? picture of the dying
soldier in the Spanish Civil War. More
assertive than the hands up of the dead
entering eternal fire; and more confident!
But gestures often say two different things
as smiles indicate intending murder
as well as love and fear; or confusion.
Stars flash in the rising tide, breaking open dark.
From my polarising shades, the sea shines;
nothing's amiss; nothing can be wrong;
as Jarman interviewed was positive,
urbane, intense, resistant to darkness.
My second sip. A duck comes in the bar
and says "AGG" to the owner, both sitting;
he shooes at it; his grand-daughter falls back
wards over a plastic chair which falls on
her as his wife jumps exclaiming rushing;
the duck gains ground, the child begins to cry
until silenced by hugs; the duck says "quack"
but I ignore it, gulping my cool beer;
the radio fanfares: "Now supermarkets."
Male voice. Supermarkets blah blah
for several minutes. Supermarkets.
Female voice. Yes, supermarkets. Blah
and blah and blah with some words that I know.
Supermarkets are they blah or blah-blah.
And so it goes until the teeming words
seemingly die like spawn in drying spring pools
or the sheet yellow under the olives,
Cape Sorrel, late March, eventually dead.
Not that you've seen that, I think. Make metaphors
or think of how weeds take over specimens
if one just stays clear. Slowly their voices
merged into the cicadas until I was
listening to a lyra and a fiddle.
Weeds are the finest flowers in my garden.
Spring's a random time. Give me high summer's
wordless rooted persistence against fire.
An hour's passed. My beer's warm. Someone
it sounds Anatolian blowing something.
An English rose is being gauche, goggled,
in her twenties, hat with a pretty man
ducking her, to the prompt of "Don't you dare!"
She's orange flippers. An old scratched record:
an unaccompanied woman, pained voice,
pure voice; no one hearing a song of loss;
my beer is done. One tenth my allowance.
The supermarket two come back until
becoming a piano voiced over.
I have no idea what is being said.
A combined popping of stopping mopeds;
Italians, one's shorts open at his cock,
bang in showy and light large cigarettes;
they sit, each like a young cross emperor;
one stares at me so I stare back and win;
god help us. The shorts are closed to laughter.
I haven't seen an Italian walk. In Leros
I climbed to the hilltop of Xerocambos
and found what I believe's a Roman light
camouflaged as a Christian church. But the old walls,
a thousand years B.C., I think, were wrecked.
The Italian army billeted there
in 1912, heaped up the stones randomly.
Archaeological evidence pulled apart
because those shits had nothing else to do.
Folly on a British scale. Arrogance!
Gerondas, here, a farmhouse blown out
from its centre. Only the weight of its stones
stopped it from collapsing; on a wall
in the yard, possibly where it was put, a canteen
Wasser Wehrmacht 1943.
All patronise the Greeks, elevating
Aristotle and Plato unless they say
that Greek civilisation's solidly
from Egypt. Or worse. Till they put questions
that cut the thrust of our advances
like knives in the neck of a bull.
Worse still, Aristotle never imagined Britain.
Harpoons exploding inside a whale's body.
Whoever took Aristotle's Politics entire?
He's a name to use: like Winston Churchill.
But I'm with the whales and bulls and doubting thought,
pulled like a rope as in a tug of war
and make myself untied.. Greece was nearly
socialist, could well have tipped up Stalin.
But, no, that's quite silly. You can't beat
wankers like that. You have to go round them.
I mean all three of the Yalta teddy bears.
What is important to keep full in mind
is the betrayal by my own country,
British troops shooting Greeks in Athens
in nineteen forty four, the war open.
Greeks who'd fought Fascism. They were murdered
because, like Berlin and Rome, London
was into manipulation to match
hypotheses they dared to call ideas,
a set of program declarations
asserted to be realistic, daft
as Adam Smith or Bentham. Destructive.
This Macedonian nonsense. Quiet
people led to jump forward like a dog
when you touch something of its it hasn't touched
for ages. Britain letting Bosnia go.
A Greek last night kicking a screaming dog.
(1995)
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