detail from: Ilinoja KRK Art

CHIARA CATAPANO – SELECTIONS FROM ALIMONO

(traduzione di Steven Grieco -Rathgeb)

I

Judging by how things go along the ridge of life

I will soon have to reckon with what tilts the balance

far beyond any sense of measure.

On my deathbed I would like them to read me Elytis:

No Christ better than Maria Nefeli could anoint my forehead

Before the black reaches me with my last breath.

Take me to Oxopetra and leave me there lying on the cliff

Like an open oyster.

Let the air scatter me, lest I be weaned by the worms deep down:

Let Nature be my shadow, and secretly absolve me

Although I may – for even a single day – have found that concreteness is evil.

We would only need to shed opinions like our clothes at night:

Instead here we are still imploring each other’s approbation

For how we bite into the freshly plucked fruit.

There is no religion that does not include a secret violation

In the secret chambers of faith.

I closed my eyes as if by miracle.

It was January, and a passage already opens in the summer:

My mistake is to force a single time upon things

And then live badly, in rhythm with the darning needle.

In silence man gathers wild plants from the white rock,

And the poet names them:

And in the interval between the act and the word eternity lives a thousand and

                                                                                         thousand times over,

Until the icon’s very gold reveals your countenance painted by God

On the panel in the wood of the cross.

Let’s have done with it now. I will abandon fear at the crossroads

And there with a light hand accept the Sphynx’s burden

And the questions that remain valid after all is revealed.

Thebes is shut inside a plague of ignorance, no siege so final

To knock down the walls and overcome the starving city.

We are alive by pure chance: luminous divinity rarefied in equations

Or laid down with velvet and purple in the farthest of far-off skies,

You shall forever bear our name.

We seek understanding

Lest we be answerable to our own selves.

II

Forgive me, barbarous young creature, if I am still distressed

when I utter your name: forgive us humans for our white despair.
Dance on the bitter tongue of the letters M E D E A

Pain’s effortless approach.

Your shadow on my head

Is like swallowed shell breaking in pelican-beak.
To leave these shores and always return to them like strangers

Corrupts your nature no less than it does the hawk’s,
Now swimming in the light above our heads.
Medea, thinnest voice bent like a pale cheek on lover’s shoulder
Lost,
And on the children’s tender flesh,
They too departed like vessels without a helmsman.

By how things go in life’s furrow
How they are lodged inside there, eternally –
In no religion will you find a remedy to this.
Your body is the tabernacle you sought, the slaves to be set free
Your senses weighed down by veils of doubt.
All the gods of the poet listened to us,
Listened and fulfilled us, and yet
We grope tiredly in the same darkness:
You and I, Medea, escorted by Alexander’s phalanxes
The heart afflicted like the soil after a storm.
We fail to grasp the reason for days of such deep despair.

VI

“Then I entered my empty house.”

Ulysses comes back after a hundred years.
Returns to his empty house where all have died:
Telemachus dead, the stucco of endless journeys in search of his father,
Penelope dead, hanging from the wood of the loom-cross of waiting;
The Suitors dead and nobody to recall any tyranny or smell of slavery.
The trusted Eumaeus also dead; and Argo, who won’t see his master again.
One hundred years, and he’s fresh, vigorous as ever: nobody waiting for him, nobody

Who at last learned how to tame death.

The rooms are of wind: light unstitches his eyelids.
Behind the steps beaded with ancient nights, our memory;
Behind the mewling of statues as corrupt as children to war,
There stands our dwelling. My youth...
I am not alone under the archway: beside me grim slave traffickers

Grasp in their fist a few feathers of the quivering wagtail,
And their palms scratch my live door to the heart.
My chambers.
A childish deafness cuts milk into Artemis’ nipples;
An age that’s worth a lifetime, incomprehension’s sharp scythe.
There, I see Maria Nefeli come forward, a snowflake that shifts the balance of the world.

This is the fate I’ve pulled onto my lap together with the thread and the needle

So that one day somebody may cut off my entire knowledge.

Thus Maria Nefeli unfolds the wagtail’s tiny wings upon her legs.

He speaks to a shade. The sea has corroded all inside him.
There is no destiny that can dwell in time’s motionless gesture

like in this my home.

This shelter: it doesn’t even carry memories of war.

Ah, to be undying! While all we cherish goes missing.

The house, like a closed eyelid, quivering.

In absence, what darkness?

Someone has lit candles in the uninhabited rooms,

He waits for the least opening, a flowering

After wandering so much.

Here is man’s first root, it suggests Maria Nefeli:

The first root is salt.

Others follow it, and like solid fingers they grasp

earth’s resurrection.

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