Kelvin Corcoran
This poem was written in response to Milea on the western side of the Taygetos mountains in the Peloponnese. Such villages were typically founded as refuges from pirates and other coastal invaders. Milea was the respite station for travellers passing over the mountain between Sparti and Messenia. It had the same function in more recent times for travellers to and from Mistra, arguably the last capital of the Byzantine empire. I’ve kept my senses open to its very tangible presence whilst hearing the echoes of a continuity from a deep history. My ambition is to respond to the given lyricism of Milea lyrically. Beyond that, for me, explaining the process by which any poem is written is difficult. I think there is a moment when a poem becomes such passing from the unknown into something that asks to be written. Nadezhda Mandelstam explores this in Hope Against Hope; ‘As many poets have said – Akhmatova (in ‘Poem Without a Hero’) and Mandelstam among them – a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing insistently in the ears; at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without words.’ Here my pleasure is the attempt to transform that inchoate music into a form of words as open as the place itself which carries a spatial and temporal inclusiveness in the echo chamber of the mountain air.
Oikumene from Milea
Kelvin Corcoran
Oikumene from Milea
The storm raged through the mountains all night.
*
That summer the garden was full
and the green terraces
ran down to the sea.
I sent you a photograph of the sky
a blue rectangle labelled the sea
corrected it, sent it again.
Four in the morning dogs barking
call and response village to village,
a local music of sorts.
A flash of lightning set them off
and the trees danced down to the sea
to a song rising from the village square.
*
Mountain silence, then echo voices
in the air all around and above
Milea the respite station.
Crossing point for the Taygetos,
the old route for Mistra
absent empire of echoes.
The sea takes its colour
from the sky written over
in a transparent script.
A language unfolding
white words to the opposite shore
the illegible world made present.
Against all that we know
against all that is lost,
the day rises.
They are building
a new road to Mistra,
there can be no new road to Mistra.
Mistra from the stones of Sparti,
on the burning plain below
as if once, there was a city there.
*
Kavadias came through on the radio,
the sea is roaring, over, here’s the poem
of the sea is roaring, over.
There is no safe anchorage
and the stars do not exist
the air is the haunt of static.
I cannot make the final port;
wall of mountain, wall of sea
out here, rolling backwards, I call you.
And the sea, when it roars, tells me a lot.
*
A scatter of birds heading out
along circuits of radiant intelligence
almost visible in the open sky.
The great iconoclast at the window
yellows the spines of poetry
wiping the pages by rote to pretty dust.
Dust piling up for summer to call,
─ Out of the way, the leaping garden said,
read the lines of flight and leave.
*
That afternoon the sound of the bouzouki
from the square of the church of the Panagia,
a dance of quarter tones to dissolve the day
steps forward, wavers, returns hypnotic.
Leo on a stone bench playing to the trees.
‘I not go to school to learn this,
from my father, he from his father.
You are the English in the house there?
‘They told us you write books.’
─ ‘Yes, I’ll write about you and the music,
I know some of these old songs.’
─ ‘Good, good, we have a concert.’
*
Apollo Hylates sang a dark song,
said – Dancing for what? Those trees
scored in black stripes of iron oak gall,
dismembered gods, limbs all a-jig.
Those birds winging it at night
are not there for your entertainment,
bound for the islands of seeing
to leave you standing here.
But look look, there’s light at the roots,
light behind the screen on and on
birds fly those circuits of radiant intelligence
almost visible in the boundless sky.
Open your mouth, see what comes out,
said Dionysus, see what I put it in it,
and beyond all of this something
rises from the earth, a first music.
There is a curtain of night
and you wait for me there
on the other side of the river singing
in darkness at the water’s edge.
Little red horse, little red horse
running through fields of spears,
sparks ignite to light poetry’s way
and we do confer with who are gone.
*
There can be a new road to Mistra
and now the archaeologists are on site.
In the stones, in the ditches
Artemis unearthed.
Aconite, mallow, smoke tree, spurge
pour down terraces of light,
there is a model of time,
there is a garden dancing.
*
In the playground of the taverna at Kariovouni
a boy and two girls take it in turns to fly from a swing
and measure how far they can land from take-off.
Swing and swing higher counting for each other
and then release to land on their feet.
The older, long-limbed girl drove the swing
almost parallel to the top of the frame
and launched herself, feet pointing at the sky,
to fly in a perfect arc and land beyond reach
on the edge of the fenced-off ground in darkness.
In the cool evening air children playing,
families at tables under the giant plane tree,
the spring water rising in the bowl of the fountain,
washing away a mythology not there
of a martyred goddess at its source.
*
That night walking from the hollow of Kariovouni
along the buried path through the soft fabric of the air
I thought ─ let the vines grow over me, that song,
I don’t think I will sing/any more just now, Berryman replied.
And Alan was there calibrating the night and tracing
the shape carved from the trunk for the wooden face
of his deathbed neighbour, veiled with string netting,
staring flat face from the tree hidden until the end.
And above us there were lines of light of starlink pulsing,
a string of wordless hyphens sewn into the night sky
signalling nothing new in the self-adornment of the gods
as we walked the buried path along dark borders.
*
Sounding out the unseen acoustic space
the storm raged through the mountains all night
to fall westward to the sea and the last of the land
As if a series of events barely survived
might stir banks of euphorbia and gorse
along the buried kalderimi and minor roads of day
Igniting splinters of fractured light
around the houses of the living and the dead
and then at a certain point of stillness
Become suspended over the water
the deepest blue of seeing
where everything happens without us.
—-
Samuel Daniel, ‘By you we do confer with who are gone’, Musophilus.
John Berryman, He Resigns from DELUSIONS etc of John Berryman.
Alan Halsey, Naughts & Quandaries, Blackbox Manifold 29.
Nikos Kavadias, Our Fo’c’sle, The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias, translated by Gail Holst-Warhaft, 2006.