By: KELVIN CORCORAN.

◊

From Position-Zero

‘Pius-strokes from position-zero!’ John Berryman

It came back to me, burnt bodies
hanging in the bird-less trees
singing for their lives, the unnamed
ghosts of smoke in Dadia forest.

The list is endless, the loss endless,
we might learn something by listening.
Ritsos, Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis,
heard the land and sea speak.

Heard the silver jackals’ evensong
tear ragged holes in the sky
spilling hunger, quarter tones,
a topography in risen light.

Palamas, look, I am walk through walls
as if not there with nothing excluded,
no turn of thought or tone forgotten
my voice is walking through walls

To the song of everything
with nothing excluded
of the image in the human person
there is a going out and return.

Try bottling that lot
live a stupid life for a while,
but all this in Berryman’s pocket
did not cancel his flight from the bridge.

Take it to the bridge, that pause,
for the revivification of song;
it came back to me, rushing upwards,
a topography in risen light.

*

I had a strange conversation in the trees
another buried church was a temple,
another campanile a revelation
over flat stones of bodies laid in ritual.

– You don’t escape chemistry fool,
for all your capering and thought.
See my feet, step step the Zeibekiko
on this sprung bed of spurge and mallow.

The olives will fail this year for want of rain
but there were visions like this off the road,
and the road turns and ascends in saintly air.
– Really, you think that, or is it just fancy talk?

I don’t know,

these unaccountable moments

arrive as if already known

but unsayable.

*

Of course, Dionysus runs up the mountain down
and we all scream and jig about a bit,
don a fawnskin, blow a pipe, sway and stomp.
– To refuse his lordship when he calls is ill-advised.

And the eyes of all the beasts lit up like fire,
a scattered constellation of spinning red orgies.

– Are you deliberately mixing different times now?
The archaic gone slangy cheap in the modern?
Apollo and the Hesychast diving off the mountain.
No, time is like that here, don’t turn away.

Those beasts, silver jackal, boar and various rodents,
know all this as the conference of the seasons
and we are dumb reaching for its meaning,
already there plain as day, dark as night, in all we do.

– To follow his lordship when he calls is also etc.

*

The wind will break the walnut tree,
scramble the vine and scatter the festival of poets
to honour Nifakis and the children freed from slavery.

By Panagia Theotouko, don’t turn away,
the campanile is playing Steve Reich
and here’s water from the well,
– Pass me the wine, Berryman said.

From here, you see from zero, east and west,
Narcissistic autocrats piss on their own shoes,
waterbomb helicopters flip over Taygetos to Sparta,
wildfires to profit present and absent perpetrators.

And yes, from here, the day rolls down to the sea,
invades the grass, the aconite and mallow

to set the mountain dancing and tune the birds for dawn.

*

So, you had the idea of setting out
on the sort of journey with a thought of return?

There was a bridge at night
and a dark river running,
occasional lights downstream
carried to an unfamiliar coast.

I remember driving over the mountain
ascending from the east on a twisting road,
and Cosmas, the silent village
as if tipping on a pivot to the west.

Deep the taste of honey
and all around the black pine;
the plane trees, oak and smoke trees
taking on their leaves.

I remember her face in a garden
and the wind in the trees
sounding the long song that takes us,
with a music known again.

The night a black wall forgotten.

The burning plain forgotten.

The high ones gone.    There’s no one there.

Daylight in canopied fragments glittering.

◊

The Sardine Season

It was the sardine season
and the sardines flew into our mouths
baked with garlic and tomato,
their skins silver, the sea silver.

And we turned our backs on Mistra
to find shards on the backward turning sea
wine froth, a bleached plastic sandal,
glyphs in torn fishing nets.

The house stands in a subduction zone;
spin the compass, Cythera, Crete, Libya,
Mistra, Sparta, Byzantium falling;
to the west the sea is four miles deep.

We swam around Pephnos,
that night the moon was burnt orange
the water as warm as the air,
absent voices buried in the bed of white rock.

There was an alphabet of sound
rolling in boustrophedon waves,
the harvest that year gone, man, woman, ship, gone
and we sing the sardine season.

◊

The End of Poetry from Rue des Hiboux

I’m at the poetry table looking out
at three foxes in the garden, Pavarotti in flight.
What can I do? Feed the foxes, turn up the music.

Melanie comes home and I shout,
– You have to enter to the music, and she does,
around the table and up the stairs
to send all the cursive papers flying.

I didn’t know the name of such longing.

If you strip the digital gloss, all voices degrade,
even Luciano — and those I want to hear keep leaving,
and the light in this room reminds me of Lee.

Light falling through high windows and Lee talking,
the sea in quiet conversation with the ceiling,
passersby in the street laugh, out for the night.

*

The light in the trees of the canopy
of leaves of new green is like a wave at the window
I would surrender to.

The coruscating light itself a door
opening to Spring rolling across a continent
I would surrender to.

If the old ballads were taken up again,
I wouldn’t know the name
of such 4:3 longing.

Melanie, we would sing as easy as
breathing in that falling measure
that no-one owned.

♦

KELVIN CORCORAN lives in Brussels. His first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, was published in 1985.  Numerous books have followed through to his most recent Below This Level 2019, The Republic of Song, 2020, Orpheus Asymmetric, 2020, The Republic of Song, (Parlor Press) 2020, and Collected Poems, (Shearsman) 2023.  He is co-editor of The New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood, 2023. His work has been commended by the Poetry Society, the Forward Prize committee and commissioned by Medicine Unboxed.