First published in Exit #13
For Thanasis Maskaleris (2)
Poet, teach my poems how to dance! (3)
Now they can only limp along, alla zoppa (4),
As if in a trance to unheard music
Played on un-amplified instruments,
By young voices as wide eyed as Owls,
As if Minerva could reappear as cloned birds
Perched on the sting of the telephone line,
Stretched from my voice to your ear.
I am in exile from the waters of life,
An exile next to the waters of Tounela (5).
I sit and mumble with the frozen others,
Thirsting for the heats of the old café,
Where outcasts would sway back and forth
After finishing glasses of Ouzo and Retsina (6),
After breathing-in lungs full of pipe-holdings:
All done to let the smell of their thoughts decay.
Poet, teach my poems how to pray:
Aching twisted hand stretched for aching twisted hand.
Let’s not fight over who gets to eat the fishes’ eyes (7)
The trusty’s spooned onto out prison plates.
1) “Rebetis” is Greek for “outcasts.” They were deported by Kemel Mustafa after the Turkish Civil War following World War I These “outcasts” were sent back to Greece after their families had lived for years and years and years in Anatolia. They were sent back without being able to bring their wealth with them. Unable to work in the already depressed Greek economy the “Rebetis” became petty criminals.
2) “Thanasis Maskeleris,” is a Greek-American poet who used to be chairman of the Modern Greek Language Department at San Francisco State University.
3) “Poet, teach my poems how to dance?Ķ.” Is a variant of the phrase, “Teach me how to dance,” from Kazantzakis novel, Zorba, The Greek.
4) “Alla Zoppa” is a musical scale which has one onte which makes the scale “limp.”
5) “Tounela” is the river of the frozen Hell in the Finnish epic poem, Kalevala.
6) “Ouzo” is a Greek liquor made from the anise bush. It tastes like licorice. But the Rebetis also drank “Retsina, which is a wine aged in young-pine barrels. This exposure to pine sap gives the wine its resin taste from which it gets its name.
7) “Let’s not fight over who gets to eat the fishes’ eyes?Ķ.” Refers to an incident in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
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