Read an Excerpt
The Brazen Plagiarist
Selected Poems
By KIKI DIMOULA
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-14139-9
Chapter One
EREBUS (1956)
MELANCHOLY In the sky heavy darkness walks a tightrope.
And as the window takes me into its embrace,
with one of my hands
into the room I drag
the street's inconceivable barrenness,
while with the other one I grab
a handful of cloudmist
and with it seed my soul.
BRITISH MUSEUM THE ELGIN MARBLES
In the chill of the Museum room
before my eyes: stolen, fair
sole Caryatid.
Her dark sweet gaze
persistently fixed
on Dionysos' robust body
(sculpted in a posture of lust)
just two steps away.
His own gaze has fallen
on the girl's strapping waist.
An everlasting idyll
unites them, I suspect.
And so, in the evening, when the room empties
out the many, noisy visitors,
I imagine Dionysos
carefully rising from his stand
arousing no suspicion among
neighboring statues and sculpted stones,
vibrantly slithering
to undo the Caryatid's chastity
with wine and with caresses.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Some other tie may bind them
more strongly, more woefully:
On wintery evenings
and splendid August nights
I see them
stepping down from their pedestals,
discarding their formal daytime miens,
and with nostalgia's sighs and tears
erecting passionately in memory
Parthenons and Erechtheions they've lost.
IN ABSENTIA (1958)
UTOPIAS On my way
into work, 7:30 A.m.
I encounter March
cheerful,
hinting broadly
about spring and so forth.
I postpone my essential nature,
break my contract
with winter,
and strew myself as humus over the ground.
I become a small plot of earth,
lying outstretched
facing
a wholly sympathetic
universe.
I plant myself with flowers,
blossom with feelings,
and feel very well
within my boundless destination
and position.
"Spring Prohibited!"
suddenly a signa cloud
threatens. At once
a downpour starts speaking
accusing spring
and accusing me,
a black-browed wind
seizes my flowers
seizes my emotions
and forces me to the Office.
A serious transgression, then
and on her way in
by a woman of a certain age,
who has family obligations
and many years of service
to the public
and to winter.
TRANSFER Night quietly buries
in its tomb of silence
today's body,
mother of my works.
And I, around myself,
I gather orphans and minors,
these works of mine,
getting them ready
for their unknown stepmother:
the day to come.
INCOMPATIBLES All my poems about spring
remain incomplete.
Spring is always in a hurry,
my mood always long delayed.
That's why I'm compelled
to complete
almost every poem I write about spring
with an autumn season.
ROMANTIC DISAGREEMENT Of course I am
against disturbing the moon.
For many reasons.
Not only is it an unseemly exaggeration
personally I've long avoided exaggerating
because of exhaustion
but it is also improper.
So far, the moon's relations with the earth
have been
highly formal.
Discreet from its enchanting distance,
it offered perfect solutions
to mankind's musing.
And, above all,
every so often,
it silver-plates
this worn-out earth for free.
ON THE TRACK (1963)
TWO SHORT POEMS
FOR A RIDDLE AND A STREET
I My desires were never
told about you.
You were never predicted
by my dreams.
My premonitions
haven't met you.
Nor has my imagination.
And yet
for an indeterminate moment
I determine that you're inside me:
a feeling already ready.
II So vast was Stadiou Street
with room enough
for succulent noon,
your virility,
and me
walking beside you
one whole sadness
apart.
BIOGRAPHICAL PICTURE To my mother The house
looks at the public road
and the sea
by the logic of its four windows,
smiling stereotypically
with a wide orange
balcony.
On this balcony
on this smile
each and every afternoon, my mother
exposes
her indecipherable face.
Time wrote it down
with no excitement
night after night
in pain's fluid language
filling
page after page of decay.
And without one mistake of laughter.
She sits
on the edge of the chair
not to burden the afternoon
with the full weight of her bedridden heart,
just to exist
stopped in the midst of her life
by some dead calm of luck,
just to bear
the spasm of her surprise:
"Are there seas,
nervous ships
that push solutions
toward unhindrance?
And winds that uproot what is stagnant?
And these colors, easy to absorb,
which the alcoholic afternoon imbibes
do they exist?" She didn't know.
Her life didn't know.
Now
she risks a strange movement:
she thrusts her body slightly forward,
and then pulls it back
heavy rowing of memory
her tears go shore by shore.
Little by little
the afternoon, her face and the balcony
are undermined by twilight.
Their shape grows insane.
They themselves get shut up in dusk
our eyes can no longer enter.
Night is falling.
Sykia, Summer 1961 EASTER, TOWARD SOUNION The sea, unperturbed and untwitching
as if the land clutches it tightly
by the edges, pulls and stretches.
At the edge of the cliff
propping up the view,
vertigo smells sweet
suicides tumble ...
To the left, the season,
in an irrepressible descent of holy color.
And right there, a gloomy shrine
encloses a Christ, apparently unrisen.
For on him a plastic wreath
still forgotten
prolongs the passion of the Cross.
Concerning
the Sabbath that was past,
Magdalene, Salome, and the spices there's no clue.
Coincidence:
from my heart, too, the stone
was not
rolled away:
for it was very great. THE LITTLE OF THE WORLD (1971)
I WENT THROUGH Because these wings are no longer wings to fly. T. S. Eliot
I take a walk and night falls.
I make a decision and night falls.
No, I'm not sad.
I've been curious and studious.
I know things. Something about everything.
The names of flowers when they fade,
and when words grow green and when we grow cold.
How readily the lock of feelings unlocks
with any of oblivion's keys.
No, I'm not sad.
I went through days of rain,
surging behind
the liquid barbed wire
patiently and discreetly,
like pain in the trees
when the last leaf leaves them,
and like fear in the brave.
No, I'm not sad.
I went through gardens, stood at fountains,
saw many statuettes laughing
at invisible causes of joy.
And boastful little Cupids.
Their stretched bows rose as
half-moons in my nights, and I was lost in reveries.
I dreamed many a lovely dream
and went on daydreaming.
No, I'm not sad.
I walked around a lot in feelings,
mine and those of others,
and there was always space between them
for wide time to pass.
I went by post offices and went by again.
I wrote letters and wrote again
and tirelessly prayed to the god of answers.
I received brief postcards:
a cordial farewell from Patras
and some regards
from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
No, I'm not sad about the day's leaning.
I talked a lot. To people,
to lampposts, to photographs.
And a great deal to chains.
I learned how to read palms,
how to lose hands.
No, I'm not sad.
I've even traveled.
I went this way, and I went that way ...
Everywhere, the world was ready to get old.
I lost this way, and I lost that way.
Lost something of my attentiveness
and of my inattentiveness.
I also went to the sea.
I was owed some breadth. Let's say I got it.
I feared loneliness
and I imagined people.
I saw them drop
from the hand of some tranquil dust
that moved through a sunbeam.
And others from the tinkling of a tiny bell.
I resounded in the chiming
of orthodox wilderness.
No, I'm not sad.
I also caught fire and was slowly consumed.
I shared the moons' experience.
Their waning, over seas and eyes,
into the dark, has sharpened me.
No, I'm not sad.
As much as I could I resisted this river
at high water, not to be carried off.
And as much as possible I imagined water
in dry riverbeds
and went adrift.
No, I'm not sad.
The night falls right on time.
THE PLURAL Love:
noun, substantive,
extremely substantive,
singular in number;
gender not feminine, not masculine,
gender defenseless.
Plural the number
of defenseless loves.
Fear:
substantive,
singular to start with
plural afterward:
fears.
Fears of
everything from now on.
Memory:
noun, proper name for sorrows,
singular in number,
singular only,
and indeclinable.
Memory, memory, memory.
Night:
substantive,
gender feminine,
number singular.
Plural in number
the nights.
The nights from now on.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Brazen Plagiarist by KIKI DIMOULA Copyright © 2012 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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