Monochords

[...]

145
Work teaches you what you should do, and the skills you'll need.

146
What you want to suggest, the words will tell you.

147
Anyway, words come from deeds.

148
You gather pearls. They tell you nothing. Throw them back. They'll speak to you.

149
It's life above all, not thought, that gives you the right to speak.

150
If I can't make you see it as well, it's as if it's not mine.

151
For the string and the body to resonate, don't wear gloves.

152
Tell me again, my friend-so you start over.

153
I wish you good morning and mean it.

154
On the dark red curtain the horse's immense shadow.

155
Did you manage to say thank you? Nothing got left out.

156
All alone with their exhaustion, climbing the same slope.

157
It's not a single line, the road to the future.

158
To find the past, you have go ahead a long way.

159
A good relationship with your mirror? With the world, too.

160
Sunday bells for children and old men.

161
At dusk, the colors' brilliance keeps you from seeing the end.

162
No love. The world intact.

163
In handcuffs: and playing the violin so beautifully.

164
Much later you see what you saw.

165
Hidden under the white pebble, the red one.

166
The pregnant woman on her way to church goes through the olive grove.

167
Mountain, ocean, and a naked girl the other side of the sunflower.

168
To know a man, you need to carve his statue.

169
With her blue eyes she gives color to the world.

170
Every second a tree, a bird, a smokestack, a woman.

171
He speaks about the poor. His hand becomes a river.

172
You'll have to drill a number of holes in a reed before it will play a song.

173
The cross tells us other climbers reached this far.

174
In the mirror I see the swimmers and myself.

175
Mountain, bell tower, cypress, travelers.

176
Ah, summer of plump grapes, outside the monastery.

177
Old man, my friend, how youthfully you swing your stick at pebbles.

178
Grape harvesters and horses in the ocean. Bravo, comes the call from the balconies.

179
I go back naked to those places.

180
In the field I found Yesenin's cow observing a small cloud.

181
Our Lady dressed in black, in the golden corn.

182
Summer winds buffet the carts on the bridge.

183
Night of pleasure. Abandoned poems.

184
They hauled down the flags. Went back to their homes. They're counting their money.

185
This bird, how will it teach its song to the fish?

186
I completely erase the shadow with this golden pencil.

187
How well he impersonates himself, like someone else.

188
Darkness always behind my pages. That's why my letters shine so brightly.

189
I never understood how I got up here. All the way on foot.

190
The anchor, embroidered on your sleeve, took hold in your heart.

191
In your old age, the child you were, you still are.

192
My old house had nine windows. All were open to the world.

193
The handsome boatman put a rose in Polydora's apron.

194
Setting sun, your golden roses imprinted themselves on my page.

195
All the words are not enough to get anything said.

196
Ah, that biker in Luna Park, deep in the wooden well.

197
Breath of youth: the girl's breast wet from the ocean.

198
Deep well water, slaking the statues' thirst.

199
The sun still hasn't set, but they've lit the harbor lights.

200
Poetry. A lost pleasure-craft, says Elytis.

201
In young people's hands banners are singing.

202
I create lines to exorcise the evil that overcame my country.

203
A Greek, I say, naked with a basket of grapes.

204
Hairy masculine mountains with a delicate white chapel.

205
Arethusa, holding the lyre on her Cretan lap.

206
Some here with horses, others with trains and umbrellas.

207
Naked body-a greeting to the whole world.

208
You'll do fine with the dream; it doesn't ask for proof.

209
A pale sleepwalker, wearing a red chrysanthemum.

210
The tangible body, more elusive than its shadow.

211
Outside the shuttered house, the four winds, smoke, chairs.

212
With one moment of hope, they mortgaged our whole future.

213
Friend cloud, looking for your reward from humans: not from the clouds.

214
Sweet corn, grapes, a donkey, and the sky.

215
For everything you did, and didn't do, the same repentance.

216
Every so often a transparent leaf shades the whole city beautifully for me.

217
But what are you looking for, finally, as you drown in words?

218
There, where a cuckoo and a nightingale crossed, is my crucifix.

219
Smashed marbles, restored with cement and plaster.

220
I closed my books. The hill entered my room.

221
Beautiful dancer, don't say a word; dance.

222
It's raining, and I open my umbrella so my statue will stay dry.

223
The garden with its pistachios, Chryse, my poems, the piano, Niobe.

224
Up on the mountain I call out my name. It's really well known.

225
You know, in a little while it'll be gone.

226
A star tumbled into the thorn-bushes. I look for it. Don't find it.

227
The August moon, full of seaweed.

228
The Greek line of the hill. Its missing temple floating in the air.

229
O ship without a crew, as the sun sets where are you taking me?

230
Night insects tangled in women's hair and voices in the corridors.

231
Under that arrogance, a great wound.

232
Shouts from the vineyard: the fields are brimming with grape juice.

233
These fish speak only in the lower depths.

234
The whistles of sunken ships have taken over those houses.

235
What amazing discovery is the fishmonger calling out, this Tuesday morning, by the garden?

236
You need to enlarge your mirror-it doesn't fit you: it cuts off your head and feet.

237
Tears are manly, too. That's right. But complaints aren't.

238
Eleven brothers and a daughter. The house is empty; it's sunk, that ship.

239
In the darkness sometimes mirrors whisper the most important truths.

240
You open the window. Didn't I tell you? It's worth the trouble.

241
Dawn. Myself and the sentry on the long bridge.

242
And when you come it's as if you were running away. But perhaps I'm gone.

243
He borrows colors from the sunset to decorate his corpse.

244
At night, the ocean and its ships enter my room.

245
How the deep blue islands of cloud hover above the golden evening.

246
Your clothes, thrown down on the chair, still smell of the ocean.

247
Is your wound speaking? It's telling the truth.

248
Yet another medal on your chest: yet another wrinkle on your brow.

249
The more you wound them, the more distant they become. They're running away.

250
What are you talking about? The sky. Even if there is none.

251
This man has become hoarse from silence.

252
Evening. So the maid in the customs house is gossiping with a star.

253
This brawny hand holding a flower.

254
How elegantly the coalminer combs his wet hair.

255
The hour when the grape harvesters go home and turn on the lights.

256
Would you use the same gesture to peel an artichoke and a star?

257
I enter a marble temple whenever I speak your name, my country.

258
A profound Karlovasi moon over the croaking of the love-besotted frogs.

259
He strikes the earth, draws water, offers a drink to the dead and to his horses.

260
The lantern in the barracks where tired soldiers are asleep.

261
Shuttered house. Outside, the moon, and a sentry pissing in the colonnade.

262
How far away. And it was yesterday. Hardly any time at all.

263
Which words and how many to speak my silence, so it can at last fall silent?

264
Poetry didn't always have the first word. It always had the last.

265
If you stay awake, the things you lose come back double. But only those.

266
The flags' long strides, up high, above the young men's shoulders.

267
I'd have liked to say something Greek, and for it to get away.

268
The murderer's clothes were worn by the sheep. It bleated to the stars.

269
You who know what is hidden among statues and words, should bear witness some day.

270
Mounted on hazardous scaffolding, we are cleaning our temples' pediments.

271
A huge proletarian moon over the sleeping city.

272
Conscious of his importance, he always speaks softly.

273
Anyway, there's what doesn't exist.

274
In the place where an embarrassed silence falls, I put a candlestick or a water glass.

275
The big dog comes at dusk into the children's empty rooms and whines.

276
To meet pointlessness we wore a golden mask.

277
How precisely these free days guarantee they'll continue.

278
Some things they took from him, some they gave. Now he grows rich on loss.

279
On the marble floor the loop of the horse's bridle.

280
Admirers multiplied. Friends disappeared. Not one was left.

281
He goes for walks in his head. He treads the clouds with his feet. Applaud him.

282
A body hedged about-the modesty of inexperience.

283
To speak constantly about wrongs is like being wrong.

284
He stretched the noose into a tightrope and walked it with a yellow umbrella.

285
An insatiable desire for visibility, his hiding-place.

286
How quietly time collapses in a poem.

287
The things they called him, he called them in return, as a favor.

288
Afterwards, in Oedipus' name, I ordered blue glass eyes.

289
Up in the belfry I smoke a cigarette beside the evening star.

290
Slowly, the evening rested its builder's trowel on my pages.

291
The headless statue may be waiting for my head.

292
Poem, don't abandon my body to the wolves.

293
Himself by the window. Himself in the mirror. A space. And the lamp.

294
I've been waiting here an hour. And the boatman has launched out to sea.

295
The slightest offerings of sleep strengthen you in the daytime.

296
Underneath the words there's always a naked man, pretending to sleep so we can see him.

297
Out of ideas, my city, after midnight I play at traffic cop.

298
A fiery sunset, kindling a purple blaze on Orestes' windows.

299
The ship leaves. I stay behind with the streetlight.

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