Two Poems by George Kalogeris

Sailing to Byzantium

That shade who woke me up last night was some crazy
Polemical great uncle     His name was Yiannis
He’d fought in Smyrna     and couldn’t stomach Yeats:

“Such fury and mire as it fulminates in the gyre
Of the overwrought brain        But what did he really know
Of that Christian-torn, that gong-demented sea

No golden smithies were there to break the flood
When the altars of Hagia Sophia were streaming blood
And the golden parrot that clings to its golden bough

Is scared shitless to sing to the Emperor
Of what’s to come     John Páleológos knows
From those heads impaled in rows across the moat

Through flames that cannot singe the poet’s sleeve
A falcon goes     with a note in its frantic beak:
The City fell on Tuesday     Horseman, pass by”

 

The Source of the Styx

From Pheneos, following Helios, it’s only
A day’s journey to reach the source of the Styx.
Stay left of the trees, beyond their beseeching shade,

Till Nónakís, the city where nothing exists,
Not even its ruins. Then, just as Kylléne’s peak
Breaks up what’s left of the light, it dawns on you:

Niagara Falls of Nightfall. Cataracts so
Opaque they could be six feet away, or else
Six hundred. And there you are, in Stygia,

Transfixed by its pitch-black pools. Dark ink of Anagke,
Where everything’s already written. Looming cliffs
That comb the sheer flux of the current’s flow like flax.

By you and your shades, great Styx, the radiant gods
Still swear their redundant oaths, your banks the brackish
Rebuke to all that solemn, Olympian rubbish;

Neck deep, down there, in the marshes, for nine long years
Is the price of their betrayal—the gods, like Oblivion’s
Frogs, immersed in the oozing miasmas they caused.

Assiduous Styx, acid that nothing resists:
It eats through agate and glass, recalcitrant potsherds,
Horn and bone—even iron and bronze and lead.

To it all forms, at the core, are hollow forms.
From Pheneos, following Helios, it’s only
A day’s journey to reach the source of the Styx.

Stay left of the trees, beyond their beseeching shade,
Till Nónakís, the city where nothing exists,
Not even its ruins. Then, just as Kylléne’s peak

Breaks up what’s left of the light, it dawns on you:
Niagara Falls of Nightfall…

 

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About the Author:

George Kalogeris is the author of Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation (Antilever, 2012) and of a book of poems, Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer, 2006).