Mihalis Katsaros in the Craving Clutch of the Moon

Poets are imprisoned in their cave
and are not coming out
xxxxx—Mihalis Katsaros, translated by Panos Bosnakis

x
Sometimes we wake with a cave in our chest,
a dwelling we call Look here with me and weep.

Sometimes we stumble upon an egg in the street,
a walrus egg, though that barely seems possible.

The great tusk of night calms down around us
with fear-spears and spate. The night wind howls

as if from our own body. Leeches grab hold
of the underside of our dreams, making the dreams

awaken. Making us long to crawl back to the swamp
to feed. These are the things Mihalis Katsaros

thought about and bled when he gaveth of himself back
to the moon burning slow the gate gutters of his throat.

How to fight the black boot of the Nazis and then find
himself twenty-three years later caught by the leather strap

of the colonels who’d taken Greece as their own.
Once, as a child, he ate nothing but blue butterfly wings,

and his mother cried, Mihalis, my son, here, drink this
warm milk and kiss the wind in the belly of a she-goat.

Oh, how we cry when we cannot fly. How we find ourselves
stuck on an ice floe of solitude and strain. Pieces of him

scattered into the cold depths of the stars as he floated,
looking back on all he had wanted to forget.

Theodorakis knew, turning fragments of Katsaros
into quite beautiful flowers. And Katsaros’s wife,

the painter Koula Maragopoulou, thereafter only mixed
the color of darkness whenever she was asked

to replicate her husband’s voice. Mihalis Katsaros,
still present in the way we speak when what we speak

stutter-shoves away. There, in the cold motion
of the stars. In the craving clutch of the moon

going dark. In an egg broken whole and foretold.
As if the poets could leave their cave and crawl

back to the night scrawling into them. As if the world
could be the world forever, once more again.