YIANNIS STIGAS

PROPHESY THAT ENJOYS ITS FOAM
 
 
You, there, give me my voice
                                even if I have nothing to eat
because the back and forth of bodies is beautiful
(from singular to plural and back)
 
The bridging of breath is beautiful
(shaky or solid --- it is immaterial ---
doubly beautiful in its immateriality)
 
Flowers are a beautiful riddle
 
But a time will come
with astringent seconds
to ruin vision
and turn it into Siberia
 
this applies to those who travel towards summer
the rest of us will blow it in some other way
 
one day
someone will find a loose stitch of heaven
and pull it
and all the bicycles of the angels will fall
 
                    All of them
                     I mean it
 
 
 
BREATHING EXERCISES
 
 
I turned my soul upside down
and I saw how stones grow
(with a little bit of light)
luck hardens and happens
 
So that birds can rise high
and then
the sun unwinds them
 
Try to breathe normally
in blue --- out blue
in one breath everything happens again.
Stones I was saying ---
everything that comes to you is like a razor
and if you want it even deeper
in blue --- out blue
 
Keep it up
 
This world
is the most compassionate form of never
 
Never was sweating
                                so bloody
 
 

 
SIMPLE MATHS
 
Reaching the fourth kilometer of silence
I dropped the nails I had for God and the sun.
Since then I've been going around with the great
                                            zero under my arm.
 
To start with, it was an ordinary sleeping-bag
--- you know, you get in, which means you start dreaming.
Now it is a huge boarding school
for the psychologically inflammable.
 
Since all this has happened with zero
imagine what might occur with One.

 -translated by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

MY BROTHER PAUL
THE DIGGER OF SEINE

"O you dig and I dig,
and I dig my way to you."
Paul Celan

As he was digging
one day he reached
his mother's snowy mouth
his ancestors' long braids
one day he passed
water's root

layers of rock

fire

the hardships he bore

from that time on there was
a burnt cloud in his gaze

difficulty with the winds

Yiskor
Kaddish

a crazed shortness of breath

"The depths," he said
"exhausting depths
and language are
my fatherland."

And then he emerged in a land
filled with trees and rivers and birds

he felt ecstasy

until an army order was heard:
"present yourselves immediately
to the mess"

and the trees left
the rivers
the birds

Only the Seine remained
gazing into his eyes

- translated by Peter Constantine

two poems from the Vagrancy of blood

*

I am impatient
for the Antarctic to become
an epidemic of sight.
For the underground bread to be shared at last
according to each one's faith in the miracle.

Miracle, to be able to laugh
while holding your boredom,
a black swan,
in your arms.

Miracle, simply to laugh.

*

I know I didn't provoke any brutality
of the sort you all adore
I just bared my teeth
at the vertigo that plagues the butterflies
I opened holes in fate
and shoved my sadness in like a piece of clothing.
Memory doesn't know how to use
its scissors
but time won't bleed again
which is why I don't sculpt the dream—
I accept it like a greedy branch in my throat
dumbly drawing away my water

What fucker promised me to the moon
and I've become the gate that opens onto slaughter?
To fight your elements with poetry
—that's what devastation means!
And sight confuses its roots
I see the world as a paralyzed umbrella
and if it opens
it can go to hell
The light can't be faced anymore without gloves
how can I seal my speech
now that it's sprouting genital grass?
Slowly, slowly we resemble stones

The end is already known:
You
Me
and the rose
Beauty an axe to the nape

—translated by Karen Emmerich