Dimitris Angelis [Greece]

 
Almost Biblically

7a.
 
You are that broken body in the twilight which smells of fire because it was never tamed. You are the air which blew through defeated words and transformed into the wheat we gathered for our tomorrow bread. You are the appeal of the coming kiss which invokes the recollection of what is gone with the eyes of the dog that salvaged your touch through his gaze. You are the cliff temptation and the temptation of the inexhaustible garden, full of apple trees and unfathomable threads of poetry. You are the electricity of a Hispanic August at the dusk next to the river as you through a red jacket on your shoulders. You are a city when it drizzles on its syllables: my very own Song of Songs.
 
 
7b.
 
Because there exists an empty room where your luminous hands light up my nights. Because there exists a bed with an Indian tent at its centre to hide us from everyone without clothes or memory; because there at the end of the bed a dog and a giraffe are lurking.
 
Because there exists a chest to lean your immaculate name and for me my superfluous hands. Because within its drawers there is a notebook for us to write together a poem, which ultimately is revealed to have been written by somebody else.
 
Well, I am that one, the eternal other, and you are my Song of Songs. And every afternoon as it snows flames with immense ferocity in the room, our photos jump down from the walls and embrace each other.
 

21b.
 
Over the clouds of our city there exists another city fastened with ropes. The smoke of our chimneys are her fruit-bearing trees, the dreams of our children, the snowflakes on her gothic belfries, our most humble words, the wheat fields that feed the vanished mammals of our own world, carrying on their own life out there. Wheat stalks and scare crows spring up even from within houses, regal swans swim through the city canals, and at night it’s enough to pour some milk in a small saucer for the hidden moon to appear in your garden. There lives the gatherer of ravens, the cascabel family, Lenin’s embalmer and John the evangelist. There lives Pasternak the saint with his banned poem “Hamlet” and saint Sampson the Hospitaller with his chewed fingernails.
 
There are many rope-ladders, trap-doors and other apocryphal ways to find yourself in the upper city. I myself climb up there while being lost in your green feline eyes.

 
(Translated by Vrasidas Karalis)
 

 
Author’s Bionote:

*Dimitris Angelis (Athens, 1973) has published nine collections of poetry, as well as essays, studies and short stories. His collection “Anniversary” was awarded the Porfyras Prize of the Academy of Athens, in 2015 he was honored with the Corda Foundation Translation Award and his collection “Οn my Bed, a Deer in Sorrow” was awarded with the National Poetry Prize. He was Editor of “Nea Efthini” literary magazine (2011-2013) and he is actually Editor of “Frear” (National Prize for the best literary magazine, 2014). He is president of Poets’ Circle in Greece and director of the Athens World Poetry Festival.