☀ Today's Poem: Two Poems by A. E. Stallings

OLIVES

Is love
so evil?
Is Eve? Lo,
love vies,
evolves. I
lose selves,
sylphs of
loose Levi’s,
sieve oil of
vile sloe.
Love sighs,
slives. O
veils of
voile, so
sly, so suave.
O lives,
soil sleeves,
I love so
I solve.

Upon a Line of Foreign Verse

FROM THE GREEK OF GEORGE SEFERIS

to Elli, Christmas 1931

Happy is he who has made the journey of Odysseus. Happy if, as the journey loomed,
he felt the sturdy rigging of a love, stretched taut inside his body like the veins where
the blood boomed.

Of a love with unbroken rhythm, invincible as music and undying,
because it was born when we were born, and whether it dies when we do, we do not
know, and it is no use trying.

God help me to say, in a moment of great joy, what is this love?
I sit sometimes surrounded by an alien land, and I hear its distant roar, like the boom of
the sea mingled with an inexplicable whirlwind from above.

And again and again, the shade of Odysseus appears before me, with eyes red from the
brine of the waves, and from a ripe yearning to see once more
the smoke wafting from the warmth of his house, and the dog grown old waiting
at the door.

There he stands, tall, whispering through his whitened beard words of our tongue, as
it was spoken three thousand years ago.

He holds out a palm calloused from the ropes and the tiller, with skin weathered by the
dry north wind, by the scorching heat and the snow.

It’s as though he wants to banish from our midst the superhuman Cyclops, who watches
with one eye, the Sirens, whose song makes you forget, and Scylla and Charybdis,
who swallow you whole,
so many elaborate monsters that keep us from reflecting how he was a man who strove
in the world, with his body and his soul.

He is the great Odysseus, the one who directed them to build the wooden horse, and
the Achaeans won Troy;
I imagine he is coming to tell me how to build a wooden horse so I may win my own Troy.

Because he speaks humbly and serenely, without effort, he seems to know me like a father,
or like the old mariners, who, leaning on their nets, at the hour of winter and the wind’s
anger,

would sing to me in my childhood the song of Erotokritos, with their eyes full of tears,
and in my sleep, still thinking of the unjust fate of Arete descending the marble staircase,
I was seized with fears.

He tells me how hard the pain is, to feel the sails of your ship belly with memory and your
soul become the helm,
to be alone and rudderless as chaff on the threshing floor, when the shadows overwhelm,

the bitterness of seeing your companions sunk into the elements, scattered, one by one,
and how strange it is to become a man by speaking with the Dead, when the Living who
remain are no longer sufficient unto you—none.

He speaks . . . I still see his hands, that knew how to test if the mermaid on the prow was
well-carven, without splinter,
giving me the unruffled blue sea in the heart of winter.