Haris Vlavianós

[Variation]


following W.S.
I

Crystal-clear water in a glistening vase.

Yellow and Red roses.

White light in the room, like snow.
Fresh snow (it's the end of winter)
softly falling on the invented place.
The afternoons are returning without sounds,

without secrets, without impatient faces

Round vase.

Porcelain painted with roses.

Yellow and red.

The water - unruffled emptiness.


II

And still the water,

the snow,

once were enough to compose

a new whiteness

- more necessary than the meaning of flowers

blooming inside the cool memory of happiness.

(Your ecstatic gaze

confirms that imagination

can lay bare the memory again and again).



III


The mind seeks to escape.

This thought

(the possibility of the specific metaphor)

has been exhausted.

The roses, the vase, did not exist.

They do not exist.

The words however

keep falling -

snowflakes of a real life

in the margins of the poem.
...

When will you have to say
yes
to feel the passion of those days
(February 1990 absolute reassurance
in the gaze in the smile the first
embarrassed gestures)
possessing you again?

You can still hear her voice.
No you can still remember her.

What is not real
(the reflection of the face on the water
the hand that suddenly rose
to draw the circle of valediction)
should look real.

What never was
should be again.

The mind
in a perpetual rotation
invents the words that you will utter
(you will offer) at the right moment.

Beauty is not the question now.
Maybe it never was.
Nor is the pace (even the rhythm)
of today's confession

(to say I love you is to say I want you to be)

Emotions
(fear guilt grief rage
are you trapped in the whiteness of the first image?)

are swiftly disguised into lines
lines extracted from a conceivable body. (Unreal)


So?

Lines: (We need to move on I am still on your side)

The gods will not return (they never left)
*
Is everything expended? Let us begin to live
*
To be able to write: I have been happy for an entire day.
*
He has lost everything. Even loneliness.

And history?

To bow to necessity
or to the accidental? (of the plot)

(to the necessity of the accidental?)
and history?

skillfully cut
at the point where freedom
"is clothed in the cloak of responsibility."
(Responsibility of the one who stirs the ashes
who ceaselessly speaks
who asks for absolution devotion love) (submission?)

Which image of the world
are you trying to re-construct?

(Which pronouncement (vision) continues to be incomplete?)

Ingenuous metaphors
harmonious alliterations
thoughts that attend to the panting of language

So?

and history?

the woman who hides
her eyes under the veil (mistress? for how long?)

(is she looking at you? at others? at her past?)

. . . at the moment

when someone takes the chair away (last chance)
and the music begins again
the moment
you reach out
to hold on to the void
and
...

Anatomy of an August night:
you are looking with devotion
at the poem as it slowly invents the words
(sea form reflection)
that will narrate you.

You begin to write:
. . . the poet is a little figment of imagination
invented in retrospect . . .
. . . in the realm of the gaze
distortion prevails . . .


You stop.
You look to your side.
She is still lying on the sand
in her hand, a glass of wine.

. . . The silent haughtiness
of every man who has deeply suffered
finds all forms of disguise
necessary
in order to be protected
from the contact
with anything that is not
alike in grief . . .

You have nothing to add.
Maybe one more phrase about distance or rather
about negation after the dots.

Your eyes are welled with tears.
You are telling a lie
(sensuality does not point to the other
but the other's sensuality,
it is the sensuality of sensuality,
the love of the other's love)
You close the notebook


As you are kissing her
the pawn slides down the snake's tail
and returns to the starting-point -
to darkness

(conscience returns to
itself)
...

I


If a man in his forties
is still drawing seas and dovecotes
if in his thought is reflected
a sun more transparent,
more lucid than the sun of reality,
if the word ‘Amorgos' is not just
the mask of a fleeting, adolescent memory,
then between the poem of desire
and the poem of necessity
real loss is panting.


II

Prologues have been consumed.
They cannot always substitute the topic.
He must decide whether he can
hold on to this absolute idea
even if he has ceased to believe in its power.
It is a question of faith from now on.


III

Successive metamorphoses of paradise.
The eye tries to interpret the enigma of beauty
while Delos is slowly emerging on the horizon.
Summer feels like an eternity.
The poem begins to invent itself
at the moment when the man turns his face to the light.

(The moment when imagination
freed from the specific sensation of blazing light
vertically rises in the sky.)

IV


Not one sail on the horizon
tearing the canvas apart.
The image of a tree
with its wind-swept boughs scavenging the ground
is not a part of the scenery today.
Yet, the old lady creeping uphill on her knees
tightly holding Her icon is.


V


The man is walking on the beach alone.
He is still touched by the melodious whisper of the waves,
the way the water is persistently lulling the rock to sleep.
Nature around him
(cedars, rotten fishing boats, shingles)
has a melancholic, unaffected brightness.
If he were to die at this moment
he would want to be here
in this place where he has been.
Even for a while.
For now.
...

only if there are objects
can there be a constant form of the world


(the most beautiful
is the object that does not exist)

the constant
the extant and the object are one


(mark the point
where the object stood
and no longer is

It will be
genuine mourning
for the beautiful absence)


the object is the mutable
the constellation is the immutable

(now you have empty space
more beautiful
than the object
more beautiful
than the forsaken place

a white paradise
of all possibilities)


the constellation of objects
generates the realm of things
(vertical lightning
furrows the barren horizon)
in the realm of things
the objects stand
facing each other
in a certain way
the way is the structure
of the realm of things

(the form is
the potentiality of the structure)

the structure of the event
consists of the structures
of the realms of things

(the entity of the realms
is the world)

the image is the event


(it is the uncreated world
that jostles at
the gates of your canvas)

abide by the intimations
of your inward eye

that which the image represents is its essence
its truth lies in the concurrence
of its essence with reality

(draw away from the contemplation
of the inward eye
the poem -
the object)

place in the empty space (seek the reasons
a square thought for which you name
add to the concept of imagination something beautiful
the concept of order and the peculiar grammar
of the word beautiful
will unconceal itself to you


this object surrounds you
inscribes you
contains you
describe it now)
...

at night
with the full moon of contradictions
shining on the dome of your mind

you are thinking of changing roles
of finally taking the mask of grief off


yesterday
enchanted by the possibilities of your feelings you wrote:

only love as passion has meaning
every profound spirit needs a mask
- thus the subtlety of its embarrassment demands

today
under this predictable sky
you want to think
that the avenue stretching at your feet
ends somewhere -
to a final resolution of the matter
to a synopsis that will allow you to stand in awe of
the predestined unfolding of the story


your story -

in whose dramatic episodes
you seek to recognize the beckoning of affirmation
the assurance of reward


the light is glaring
"the light is always glaring"

it is late though
to leaf through the moment (life is not an argument)

no one feels like reading any more
neither do you (let the texts speak)
who exhausted by the intensity
of the last hours
pick up the phone

"a double espresso"

(as always the best sleeping pill)
...

I

The eye languidly
learns to illumine the invisible,
exerts itself to see things
the moment when their essence flees,
the moment when withdrawn from their temporary form
they lose the (holy) aura of presence.


II

Just before he closed his eyes
he asked his sister
to stitch inside his coat's lining,
(without even looking at it),
the note that contained
the "incontestable proof
of God's existence",
convinced that upon opening it
he would see His merciful,
almighty face.


III

The glacial figure of the philosopher
impressed upon his sister's gaze,
(we can visualize the scene,
the space where it unravels),
and the forsaken - forever now -
content of its last-minute thought.

IV


The night casually spreading
on his lifeless body
has aptly interpreted
his last wish:
not as the need
of a self-centered believer
eager to disclose the truth
that he has just invented
but as the desire
to hand over to the progeny
the void letter
of a dignifying,
profoundly human gesture.


V


The inevitable knowledge of a new reality.
And the mind that now rests
(reconciled with the perpetual music of concepts)
inside its ethereal creations.
The vindication of the thinker that alone,
without the blessings of the specters,
has brought to the world the measures
of his own annihilation.
...

In the storm of roses
the night is lighted by thorns
and the leaves that formerly lay on the ground in peace
are now screaming under their bare skin

screaming to welcome
love that is approaching.

Here,
in this barren land
(the asylum of imagination)
the silent call of nature is vibrating,
the secret gift is ripening.

Her enigmatic self-denial
in the winter's solitude
transforms the bare symbols
(the glaring beauty of gazes)
into an eloquent miracle.

The wind
is agitating the foliage of the mind
with wet promises.

(The truth: two bodies
fighting on the moistened ground.)
...