I came with the ship nobody was expecting.

The Grand-Saint-Antoine slowly receded from the ports that were turning it away and timidly drew alongside the next, with the longing of a welcome that would difficult come.

Now
the curse
               would choose the most beautiful cities in the world:
Venice, Livorno, Marseilles.

I was using a fake name. I would be now Marina, then Eloϊse, but never Maria. We had a strange love for each other. It was only us that could wear the accursed cloth; and we would secretly navigate it, with the endurance fitting each condemned one. I would make black tea and hand it over to them in glasses. I was their ‘strong’ one.

And you,
upon my belly
and among its dark blue stains
with your familiar bitter gaze
would softly watch the animals dying
and would not touch me
                                       Not even this time did you touch me.

The smell of bad flesh made the character rough. Whether they were good or bad, you could not tell. We were family by flesh and blood, lost daughters and sons of the same merciless father. Except for those who said a word at the beginning and then kept silence: A blind man that perched on the mice and would not deign to talk but to them, a dumb woman that had a fishing-line around her neck with a cut head.

In your endless sky,
                               so endless and yet not even a feather can rest …
I wanted you a human. To love you as a human,
                                           to mourn you as a human.
                               And not an empty sheet.

What if in this port the waters smell like spring,
what if his city fits in your palm like a fresh, baby cheek,
what if its inhabitants seem from far a veil embroidered with gold …
Our eyes drink in from the ocean the houses that we shall not see, the roads where we shall not stroll.

           I do not know how much the nails hurt,
though I am sure, you still have their marks.
           This was the first thing that startled me when
you appeared before me like a ghost.

I thought I did not deserve another sad story, but it seems my appearance was to blame too, except for my soul … While others root out the mirrors, or even break the glasses when they are threatened by the reflection, I continue wanting to look. Under my bed, I keep a sharp glass; even it does not recognize me any more …

Tell me really,
was it the scent that made you dizzy at one moment
                   and you covered my breasts with the border of your robe
or was it just a dream like many others?

The journey has been going on for months. I wonder if it started centuries ago – I am sure it started centuries ago – and for how long it will continue – through changing forms, it will continue forever.

If it was you that saved me once,
               now I am torn in two and know not
                                   which of my two parts remembers you most
                                               the ugly or the dead one?

Our ship, our own sea, our sails, the fish that swim underneath, the birds that fly over us, our cold summer, our empty lounges, our contaminated toilets, our odourless food, our tasteless mouth, colourful juices that overflow and drown us, grievances that blurred the portholes, pieces of ourselves abandoned in the hallways, the crack of the bone stronger that the crack of the ladder, the captain buried in the engine-room and a sailor nailed on the pole as a flag, our dogs that once loved us and now shrink away growling, the forbidden handshakes and the intimacy secretly seeking a way out …

Is there still hope? Tell me.
Because my mind is almost ruining your sweet absence.
It drains, despite my will, the last tear of your loss.

But no. No to the wrinkled triangle between the eyes, no to the agony which, focused on the inside, always making the external side of the world disappear, no. No to the hand that the other hand is trying to cut and to the soul that becomes tough to the point of rigidity, to the dawn that offers no comfort any more, to the imagination that does not unloosen monsters in the twilight any more. No.

                       The Shell
                       shall not crack.
                       Whatever is alive
                       shall fight on its own.

I-have-seen-many-pearls-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea-trying-to-unlock-their-doors.

Solitude is used to abandoning its most heavy load to the precious.

To resist, living so many different and strange lives, although not few were the times when I was looking for ways to finish them off, was imposed by this illness. And my only expectation, when would I stop getting tired; though cheerful songs continue to find their way from my lips to their ears. I love them with passion, like my rubbish that I am sorry to part from. Like my teeth that fall and their abandonment is unbearable. All the flowers are now faded in our vases. We wanted to collect corals but the sea is still testy. It quails. It denies the complicity of the misfortune that we carry.

Where did you say you were?
               I met many looking like you.
You may be in Province, may be in Florence.
You may be in both.
               And still from all the crosses I came across,
You were missing from all.

Only the outline of the ship is left.
It carries half-heartedly its damaged load and its shadow slowly disappears from the surface of the waves. Exactly as our shadows do, which no longer follow our decayed bodies. But we keep the tempo of confusion and we have the courage not to cry over the new dead body. We dream of its supine position in an imaginary huge picture and, in the air, we paint its sway.

You are waiting for me somewhere.

You
as
any
other
man
who
forgot
his
mistress
in
a
labyrinth
without
having
the
time
to
show
her
the
way
out – twice bare under the mantle of hypocrisy.

I quietly fall asleep, sunk into the invisible swing hanging on the deck. But every now and then, somebody comes and wakes me up to complain. An annoying insect that disturbs him, or he feels his freedom going away forever. I do not pity them. Were we not the ones dreaming of shipwrecks in our sleep? It is time to look the dream bravely in the eye. I suggest another chess game to finally throw the king out of the way. In one of the games, the horse had suddenly climbed on my shoulders and started whispering something in my ear. I lost all my soldiers when I believed in its words that it alone – as directed by its arrogance – could win. And since whatever is lost in the sea, is lost forever, I have no army to fight any more. Two animals that get more and more tired, two castles unable to stay firm on the sand, a prostitute queen whom I fear to touch in case she brings back my memory, and an upright and very sad king, whom everybody wishes ill, pretending to be a statue.

                       Those who step on the earth and know
                       the smell of ground,
                       call you a feast, and eat and drink in your health.
                       But those who balance their step
                       on the wooden shell and smell the salt,
                       have forgotten you, because they too remembered you as a feast
                       and there is nothing left to feast.

                       I admit it, I do not tell them a word about you.
                       Firstly, they would despise me.
                       Secondly, I like thinking of you alone, at last.

We are running out of water, the tins of food are getting less. I sit amongst them, trying to enchant them with parables. They keep their patience to the end, yet they still stare unwillingly at the knife that cuts their food in two.

You did not stay long.
So how to learn about fate and believe in it?
So how to learn about love’s remorse and endure it?
So how to learn about the aged body and get used to it?
From birth to death, thirty-three steps on the tip of your toes,
a light stride to the grave.
This was not one life, this was not even half a life. So do not pretend
to be human. You know nothing of humans.

Some days that come are more difficult than others, when we wake up trying to find the courage to jump. I lurk and secretly make their beds. They are relieved. They think they made them themselves, that they continue living the routine of each day as before.
I become whatever they wish me to. A mermaid that somebody proudly pretends to have seen lying on a rock, a dolphin that someone else looked at for a moment straight in the eye, a bird that stood before a third one and nearly offered him his two wings, a big ship that somebody perceived getting past us one night, while we were asleep.

Oh,
this life is not about pain,
we are both left to know it well.
It is about how teeth will grow
in the place of teeth.
New fluff will appear
in the place of hair.
And the virgin
will be reborn virgin again.
A time will come when
we will be wishing for an end
and the end shall not exist.

Yesterday, an old man put his cigarette between my lips.
‘Have a puff’ he said, ‘sin is beautiful when it is almost forgiven’.
‘May your sins be forgiven from now’ I dared say.
He violently grasped the sin away from me and, swearing, he turned his look elsewhere.
Yesterday, an old woman read my palm. ‘You will avoid this evil. You will always be avoiding it.’ I looked at her in horror; her lips were silently repeating the same words all night long …

                       I no longer have long hair like then. Nor am I that beautiful. No, I have never grown old in the face. But I grew old in the soul, I grew old in my mind, I grew old in your hope,
                       I am haunted by your love.

The more I cast my eyes away, the more the horizons cruelly return the eyes. Countless horizons, countless palaces, moist and deeply dark, deserted thrones, dusty gems, scales on the tongues of the female dancers that keep fragments of the crowns tightly gripped.
As long as our ship glides and discovers unknown seas, as long as the sky and the earth are mixed in the blue, we shall never escape this silent anger that scratches the bowels.
Nobody is standing on the bow, nobody is at the helm.
We listen from afar to the canons booming, and the ports, in their turn, listen to our arrival’s whistle;
I, on my knees, let my prayers freeze,
and they quietly, the stomachs distended, quietly, the blood black, quietly, the brain mashed, guess our next destination. The nowhere.

I CRY OUT, WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME SO ALONE? WHY YOU, IMAGE, DO NOT SWALLOW MY TEAR THE WAY HE DID? IMAGE, I HATE YOU! YOU ARE NOT HIM, YOU ARE NOT HIS WORRY, YOU ARE NOT EVEN HIS NET, IN WHICH THE SALIVA OF MY DESIRE KEPT ME OPEN, YOU ARE NOTHING, GET OUT OF MY SIGHT.

I wish no more
the inevitable harshness, the stern merciless face of the one waiting for
him that will never come.
I wish no more
to see wild beasts in those that lusted for me and were denied.
Get out of my sight, you all.
I want to forget you.
I wish for the land and want you to sink behind me.
It was not me that gave birth to this plague.
You invented it, the despair is all yours.
I am tired of repeating illness–death–resurrection.

I am tired.

Forgive me,

But I too wanted a marble to cover me.
Then perhaps I would find the strength to believe you again,
to love you again and not to ask
for rewards.

(Translated from Greek by Efrosyni Kalogeraki.)