Diaries of Exile

October 27, 1948

There are so many thorns here –

brown thorns, yellow thorns

all along the length of the day, even into sleep.

When the nights jump the barbed wire

they leave tattered strips of skirt behind.

The words we once found beautiful

faded like an old man’s vest in a trunk

like a sunset darkened on the windowpanes.

People here walk with their hands in their pockets

or might gesture as if swatting a fly

that returns again and again to the same place

on the rim of an empty glass or just inside

a spot as indefinite and persistent

as their refusal to acknowledge it.

October 29

We sleep only a little; — it’s not enough.

All night the exiles snore –

tired boys, so tired.

Outside are the stars — enormous stars

shaven-headed stars whose hair sprouts wild

as from the head of St. John the Baptist

or our own Panayiotis.

There are toads in the mint, too.

In the morning a rosy sun hits us smack in the face

reflected by the sea in the most ordinary way

like those cheap paintings they sell on the steps of the Arsakeios School

and it’s strange that we actually like this kind of sun.

Alone, in pairs, often in groups

we stop in the yard or on the hill to look at it.

And that sun hits us hard in the face

like a barefoot villager beating his almond trees

to bring down the last of the nuts.

Then we lower our eyes, look at our shoes,

look at the dirt. Nothing has fallen.

October 29

Among the thorns and fallen red leaves

we found the naked head of a donkey –

perhaps the head of summer

left there on the wet stones

and around it some tiny blue flowers

whose name we don’t know.

If someone calls out from behind the fence

his voice sinks quickly into the soil

like a paper cone full of raisins.

In the evening we hear them off in the hills

changing the flat tire of the moon.

Later things find their rightful places again

as in the yard you happen to find

a brown button from your coat — and you know:

it’s nothing like the buttons on the costumes

of summertime actors — no, not at all –

a perfectly ordinary button you’ll have to sew back onto your coat

with that awkward, polite care

of the eternal apprentice.

November 1

The mist has black wings like jackdaws

it has no eyes at all

its blindness gropes our eyes our pockets

like an old fortuneteller stroking our palm.

We can’t hide anything anymore.

Here things turn inside-out

like a dirty sock we take off before sleep

and our feet are naked and our faces too.

Day by day we now speak in the singular.

Every shadow has the shape of remember

but the shadow of the mother’s unseen hand

takes the shape of every voice that doesn’t resist you

it becomes the mug, the coffee, a bit of bread, the thermometer

even the shaver beside the bowl in the little mirror.

There are two lamps in the room.

We shine the glass with newspapers

you one, me the other — we’re on duty today.

Our movements are nearly identical.

We don’t look at one another.

We enjoy this similarity.

We look out the window at a sky lost in mist.

So all things, then, have the look of forever.

November 2

Today Mitsos got a letter from Skopelos.

Antigone writes: “The island autumn

has filled with little yellow lilies.

Poor Mitsos,” she says, “you won’t remember those lilies at all;

you never knew a thing about botany.”

Mitsos

wiped his glasses, read the letter again. At his side

the pharmacology textbook lay forgotten on the rocks.

Mitsos smiles. He puts his glasses back on. He doesn’t wipe them.

I want to write Mitsos a poem

not with words

but with yellow lilies.

November 3

If we try to open a door

the wind shuts it.

And so, locked out

each of us grasps his keys

though the most we have is a pitcher

though none of us has a home.

Today I don’t know how to speak.

Today I speak in the first person.

When one of your own hits you it’s twice as bitter.

A bus passed by this afternoon.

A stranger greeted me in the fields.

I wanted to thank him. I didn’t speak.

I forgot to look at the clouds. Yes, the almond trees

turned a brownish-purple — it must be because fall is here

and the flies have multiplied; they sit on the page where I write.

And what if they did turn brownish-purple? Ants

have their house of dirt — it’s warm in there.

I don’t fit into my voice. My feet

stick out. I’m cold. And they’re watching me.

I must have done something very wrong.

November 3

Panousis is wearing a long overcoat.

A soldier gave it to him.

They dyed it black in his village cauldron.

Now it’s green — not even green.

In his pockets he has

five kernels of corn and two leaves of tobacco

and even the gaze of his cow. Panousis

wraps himself in a thick blanket. The blanket

is red and white. And Panousis’s sleep

is colored by that blanket. He always sleeps in

his cap, shoes and pants.

If he took off his boots, surely a bird

would lay its eggs in there

and then Panousis would have nowhere to put his feet.

His sleep every afternoon

is like the oak’s shade over the water.

Now he has to save up

another five kernels of corn for the game of nines

until his moustache grows back and he goes home to his village.

November 4

Lots of things give us trouble. Lots.

We have to wash our plates, our clothes

carry water from the spring in big pitchers

sweep the room two or three times a day

darn the occasional sock, darn our words –

Yesterday’s conversations soon get holes

faces change as you look at them

and perhaps you’re changing too — because looking at your hands

you realize they’ve gotten used to these tasks

to these days, these sheets

they know the wood of the table they know the lamp

they move in the same way with greater certainty

they are never surprised. The fire

needs stirring, it’s dying down –

that is what’s on our mind.

In the afternoon five old men called me over

made me coffee gave me a cigarette

talked about the monastery of St. Dionysos up in Litohoros

about the saint’s watery hand that sent away the bad shepherds –

Five old men with gentle eyes and white moustaches

who make cigarette cases day and night make frames

piece together tiny scraps of colored hay

small as the head of a pin — hard things to work with

and some pots with geraniums, two Greek flags

one for land and one for sea, some five-pointed stars

they want to make a dove, too — they can’t do it –

they’re good old men — I wasn’t listening to what they said

and that is what’s on my mind. They called me “child.”

I couldn’t say “father.” Old master Thanasis says

he’ll make me a stool: “So you don’t have to sit on the ground, son,

and get your pants all dirty.”

And now I’m thinking of all the things I, too, should be making

how I should get my pants so dirty

that master Thanasis won’t care if I sit on the ground

and I’ll be able to call him “father.”

Then I figure I’d be worthy of sitting on his stool

as if astride the branch of a plane tree at the monastery

and I’ll shrug these troubling things from my shoulders

the way I brush off that little spider creeping along my arm

and I won’t be at all cold in winter.

November 5

Our morning passed in quiet conversation.

I read what I’d written yesterday. I liked

that part about the five old men. I found it

simple and real. And I silently wished that’s how things

might actually have happened.

Now it’s getting dark.

Time for me to add up my spendings and earnings.

I’ve never been good at accounting. I get confused.

I know that many consider me an enemy.

But those who love me are more

and are better.

I am indebted to both.

But I still can’t find the word

that would suffice for both them and me. Which is how

I know my debts are multiplying.

How could my song reach that far

if I didn’t get there first?

Fine. Fine. The weather’s good.

Tomorrow or the next day we’ll talk again. Now

I’m watching the color of the evening change on my page.

A branch scratches my cheek with its nail.

So then, joy still has roots.

The guard’s shadow falls on the barbed wire.

November 6

Nothing. Nothing. We were wrong.

The words are narrow, our beds are narrow –

you can’t turn onto your other side.

Until now we said:

if we all work together at carrying these stones

the stone within will melt. Nothing.

I count the fingers of my two hands.

I find them correct.

I don’t know how to count all the rest.

Which means it doesn’t add up.

At the end of this tallying hangs a curse.

November 6

Evening. The bell for the evening meal.

Shouts from the boys playing soccer.

Was it yesterday? — I don’t remember; — a stunning sunset

so violet, so gold, so rosy.

We stood there. We watched. We talked

alone, alone, tossing our voices into the wind

so as to tie things together, to unbind our hearts.

A letter arrived in the yard:

Panousis’s son was killed.

Our talk nestled against the walls.

The sunset suddenly nothing.

The night had no hours. The knot loosened.

Panousis’s aluminum plate grew cold on the table.

We lay down. We covered ourselves. We loved one another

around that untouched plate that no longer steamed.

Around midnight the black cat came in through the window

and ate some of Panousis’s food.

Then the moon came in

and hung motionless over the plate.

Panousis’s arm on the blanket

was a severed plane tree.

Well then — must we really be so sad

in order to love one another?

November 7 — Evening

Sunday passed quietly. The boys played soccer.

I painted an almond branch on a wooden cigarette case.

I’m sure Barba Drosos will like it.

Though he might like a bird with an open mouth better.

I like to think about what Barba Drosos would like.

I’m happy and know that I’m happy –

it doesn’t get in the way of my happiness at all.

A good moon gives me light to write by.

I have a telegraph pole as my friend.

I hear some bells — from the sheep

grazing down in the field. The sheep

are my younger brothers. I’m thinking

of a new fairy tale with bitter laurels

with sheep and a wild girl

her braids wet under the moon.

Why am I still speaking? Am I afraid?

I have to go for the evening meal. Goodnight moon.

Goodnight bells. Panousis is calm.

November 8

We’ve almost gotten used to the barbed wire the faces the thorns.

We don’t need to shave so often.

The days and the hands move slowly. We’re used to it.

Bit by bit the leaves on the grape vine turned yellow.

Now they’re brown and red. The wind

blows through them in the afternoon. We struggle

to bind our attention to a color to a stone

to the way an ant walks. A bumblebee

creeping along a dry leaf makes as much noise

as a passing tram. That’s how we realize

what silence has settled within us.

Strange weather — almost like summer.

Sunshine hangs in sheets from the bare-branched almond trees.

Scattered clouds in the bright sky like large censored postcards

WRITE ONLY TEN LINES — the rest

we’ll have to pack away in mothballs

we’ll need it soon we’ll need it. For now we need

undershirts and woolen socks woolen gloves

because from the way the stones sit in the morning

we’re sure winter is on its way.

Last night they took away our soccer ball.

The playing field with the pennyroyal is deserted.

Only the wind butts the moon with its head.

During dinner under the lamp

hands crumble the insides of bread

with a secret restrained impatience

as if winding an invisible enormous stopped watch.

November 9

Last night the newspapers arrived.

The most recent dated November 4. The hands run

the mouths run and the eyes. The news from China

about Mukden, the Yangtze, Peking — these names

we loved them so dearly last night

and loved one another beneath the slanted eyes of China.

What they say about the houses that become ships

we saw last night with our own eyes

they lit some little paper lanterns over the cupboard.

What use is writing to us now. Tonight

we learned again some things that the pen can’t grasp.

Tonight we learned that we have to be happy

in order to love one another.

We hurriedly snuffed the lamps and lay down

because we were so happy that we had

to clench our teeth not to shout. And then

the masquerading mouse would take fright and go hungry all night.

November 9 — Evening

Winter came suddenly. It smells of rain.

Great north winds uproot the thistles, blow them against the barbed wire.

We’ve put on our jackets. Put our hands in our pockets.

A cloud came down into the middle of the road

took the telegraph poles aside, is telling them something.

Whatever they say, we know

that bread is always bread and what’s right is right.

Their secret conversations don’t bother us at all.

The afternoon truck passed by loaded with flour

leaving behind a torn sack and some orange peels.

One by one the exiles went out and pissed on the grass

pushing the wind with their foreheads

then they stood and looked at the clouds.

Somewhere it still smells of pine sap and crickets.

November 10 — Night

Wind and more wind. A shutter

applauds the desolation. The severed hand of night;

the broken lamp of the moon; the crumbs of nothing.

Where did they put the baskets of grapes?

Where did they hide the summer shoes?

That good trustingness, the anticipatory assent?

The mail truck chugs on slowly behind the wind.

Only the empty barrels of bad weather roll over the roof.

The roof tiles break, the bells fall.

And again the clouds and the wind

and the stars coughing all night

and the well between two words.

You can’t make anything come clear.

The mute child the mute father

one lamp beside another

the mug and the cigarette

the fishbones on the wall from a half-finished gesture

the blinking of the blind man’s eyes

two sealed stars.

Don’t say anything more. A foot

oh, a sure foot to step on the soil

to not ask, to walk,

a deaf foot — it doesn’t hear a thing

when we speak behind our teeth

pretending we don’t know anything, pretending

we can get by without speaking.

November 11

Night fell and I have nothing to say.

Whenever there are no words there is quiet.

I think of a turtle pulling in its legs and head –

it must be so silent in there. I don’t think.

This evening we had a sunset of the kind caught

between two seasons, when the boys grow older

and in their sleep they have no feathers and the hares don’t converse

and they don’t know who loves them and whom they love

and the inner silence of the turtle still has no meaning.

So — we should go to sleep. Turn out the lights.

November 12

In the afternoon we carried stones. Quick work

hand to hand. The winter sun;

the barbed wire; the water jugs; the guard’s whistle.

Here day ends. The evening brings cold.

We should shut ourselves in early. We should eat our bread.

Good work, comrades, easy work

hand to hand. Not everything is this easy

there are things that can’t be passed

from hand to hand. You see it

even if the face barely changes. You see it

in the cut across the eyebrows

in the mouth that opened but didn’t speak

in the silence before supper and even

in the two fingers that raise the lamp’s wick.

When we’ve eaten, our plates remain unwashed

the mice climb up on the table

the moon rests its chin on the iron bars.

Everything has stopped like a murdered man’s watch.

The hand that moves to grasp something opens on the knee.

The scissors paring toenails go no further –

the nail is tough. And you can’t get angry.

Warmth is postponed. Speech and silence are postponed.

Only the lighting of a cigarette around midnight

puts an untimely period on all that remained half-finished.

November 13

The wind assumes its original position

the trees return to their old shape

no longer the wood of the bed-frame, the coat hanger, the wardrobe,

the wooden bowl on the villager’s round table

the wooden spoon that ladles out food

but now the tree with its branches and its shade

in the clouds and wind that strip the land of color

that dress with a certain nakedness free of forgetting and of memory

the houses, the bread, people and their works.

Things are simpler than we thought

so much so that we are sometimes startled; we stand

looking and smiling precisely there where we pressed our nails into our palm.

All this happened slowly, bit by bit. We didn’t notice.

Maybe tomorrow the old things will happen again. Nothing is certain.

But maybe out of all this will remain a tighter grasp of the hand

two eyes that gazed into two other eyes with no tilt of hesitation

a lighter that lit five cigarettes without preference;

and the number five wasn’t one, two, three, four, five,

but only a single number — five.

Of course all this doesn’t make a poem

and here I toss it onto the page like a useless stone on the stones

that will maybe someday help to build a house.

Tonight when I believe everything no one will believe me.

My lamp shines with disbelief. Panayiotis, too.

November 14

When we turn our eyes again to grasp

some difference among the pieces of the day, we don’t find

anywhere to take hold — we lose the shape, the hour,

the color, the face. Then we listen

try to make out some sound — whatever sound

would verify the pace of time, so that there could be

a representation in reverse, box, broomstick, name –

the dice that fall on the table

the wind that limps on the barbed wire

the fork that strikes the plate and continues deeper in.

Otherwise what remains is a circle with no center

a rotation in the air with no motion other than its own

it can’t become the wheel of a car crossing the forest

and if it sometimes becomes a square

it isn’t a window for you to look out at the world

to look at the three carpenter shops in a row in some unknown suburb

only a relation of straight lines, an analogy of corners

dull things, very dull. Perhaps a mathematician or even an astronomer

could fashion from all this something firm and clean.

I can’t, though. And yet I’ve always liked observatories –

a dark staircase, the clock, the telescope,

those snapshots of stars in postures entirely domestic,

swordless Orion, pants down,

Berenice covered in freckles, unwashed, frumpy,

a totally bourgeois kitchen, transported

to metaphysical ground — coffee pots, jugs, pans

grater, salt shaker, baking dishes, tiny specks

of white, radiating slightly, hanging

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.

To its far end Monday

is full of holes and small crosses of dust.

November 23

Blankets spread on the barbed wire

others on the trees and on the three crippled guns.

The blankets have their own language

they speak better than people do

they hide neither the separation nor their differences

nor their solitude nor their warmth.

Still, they sit and talk on the same barbed wire

and this is what gives them the same stance

like that of eyes over water and bread.

The field guard’s dog knows us now

he chews through his rope and comes over to us.

And when we feed him

and when we talk to him

and when Barba Anastis picks the ticks off him in the sunshine

then the blankets become alike

so alike that you no longer know which is another’s and which yours.

And that he understands more than anyone

which is why he lies on his back and shakes his legs in the air

and his great tail becomes a dust-cloth

shaking the dust off the years and off our hands.

Dick, Dick, rascal Dick,

can you lend me your tail for a bit?

Because it’s not easy, not easy at all

to say thank you, to say I’m hopeful again –

you know that, dog, and that’s why I love you.

Oh, enough, stop your tail,

I can’t bear it any longer, stop I say,

Oh, don’t you see?