Potis Psaltiras, What It Means to Be Called a Minor Poet
You woke one day
to discover your body
was a mirror. Stéphane Mallarmé
wanted to marry your voice. Or was it
your sister he wrote letters to
in Kalamata on the Peloponnese
asking after your mustache?
You were considered a minor poet,
Potis. What a moniker! At least minor
could have been capitalized!
Sometimes you woke in the night
with a belly of buckshot
stars burgeoning from beet broth
and bones. They said your poems
were nice visual experiments with words,
Futurist attempts at disturbing
the distance within the generational
pull between airplane and tree,
but no one wanted to publish the rest
of your books at your death. Some said
it was the donkey bray of light falling
in hees and haws from the stars. Others
swore you remained a ghost when you left
your body and begged strangers in various hotels
to play cards with you all night long to quell
the loneliness death exudes. Potis Psaltiras,
you had two left ears and a Van Gogh
mouth. Moths murdered themselves
against your two-way mirror body. Your mother
forgave you, you confided, for staring at her
buttocks one instant when you were a child
and praising the curves of the wet nurse
who lovingly dandled you on her lap
each morning and fed you
sparks of dark Aegean light.
*
Maro Douka and the Habit of Harshness in the Letter H
You were praised by the wind, Sister,
when you wrote the alphabet backwards
so that its reflection in a mirror could read by the oppressed
as secret script, the harshness of the Colonels’ hand
at your throat. But the Colonels read it too, putting
you in that place of dust and mud. You said
your words would survive, each novel
somehow rooted in the trumpet vines
choking out the light. Your fire
ignited the pulse of possum blood
you were forced to drink. So when
the armadillo restless in your gut
exposed its scaly plates as a way for you
to arm yourself against defeat, you
brought it to your home and made a pet
of its journey across the mad Atlantic.
In other words, Maro, you found
the turbulent waves a salving grace.
Yes, you said salve and not save,
for you felt no one could be completely
saved, only made more and more whole
as the flesh wore thin. How a single letter
could change things. Like your novel H,
which landed you in jail. One of the Colonels
most surely cried out for you
in his sleep. Wetting his bed. Releasing
a mixture of pine sap and sparrow secretions
upon the sheets. He knew what you drew
out of him was a fear he thought he’d left behind
in his childhood home before epaulets
and epistrophes ended his sentences,
ended his sentences with an end
to an ending rough and irregular. O Maro!
How a single letter like H could heave
so much heft that even a manly mustache
was coiled around a lip as if protecting
what the men feared you might make
them speak. How that letter stood not only
for the title of your words
but also for how to make the hair
in the harsh and haggard habits of proud
military men hang unkempt from their heads
as their shoulders began to sag from the weight
of the harrowing holes they’d sent riddling
the vests of the unfortunate, progressive,
non-few. Those who had opposed the epistrophes
of their epaulettes, the posture of their chest
ribbons, the insistence of insignia pins.
The overly bold stance of their mustache.
*
The Creation of Menis Koumandareas’s Heroine, Koula
Yes, he invented his heroine,
Koula, on a blistering July
evening. Because he had an unrequited
crush on Irene Papas, who played
famous women like Antigone
and Electra, especially
the Widow in Zorba the Greek.
And he loved Irene Papas—her full
lips, her dark hair and eyes
that seemed to hold the depth of the night—
because he saw his Aunt Chrysoula
once when he was just eight years old
stepping out of a pond among cattails
and canebrake, her thin white cotton dress
wet and dripping, clinging to her
abundant curves. And he adored his Aunt Chrysoula
thereafter, lying awake nights thinking about her,
imagining holding her hand, touching her cheek,
stroking her underarms, eating pastitsio
together, reading one another
the poems of Dionysios Solomos,
because of the way the willows bent
suggestively in wind whenever he played,
alone, down near that pond
or over by the river Kifissos.
The willows bent down and into him
as well. He knew their strength
because of the loyalty of his dog,
Titsou, who followed him everywhere,
even leaving her pups once
when she set out in search of him.
And he loved Titsou more than anything
because she loved him,
almost as much as his mother
who spent afternoons sweating over dusty
loaves she floured and pounded against the counter
for him, her son, calling him sweet things,
tender things, that wisp of red hair falling forth
seductively across her left eye
when she bent to kiss his cheek,
dusting him briefly with the flour
that had clung to her lips.
And he loved, loved his mother, almost as much
as the night sky. Starlight coming
in milky mists some nights as he began to mature,
when—unable to sleep—he went out
among the plane trees
with Titsou, his dog, and thought
over and again about his mother’s sister,
his Aunt Chrysoula, stepping out of that pond
with all the water of the wet world
clinging to her in ways he hoped to one day
touch. And so years later he invented Koula,
his heroine, as well as the young man
who frequented bars. Who flirted with her.
The young man who took her
from her husband and safe life
to hotels because he adored older women.
Their scent. Their drift
of wind. Their widening
hips. Their unmanageable hair
falling forth as if parts of themselves were coming
unstuck. And, yes, Menis Koumandareas
wrote about the sweaty sheets in those hotels,
remembering the way his mother perspired
when pounding the loaves, baking bread for him,
her son. The way his dog, Titsou, panted
hot afternoons when lying next to him
in shade, tongue lolling, placing her mouth
into a perpetual grin, staring up
lovingly at him, among cattails,
in the canebrake. Where he spent boyhood
afternoons by that pond his Aunt Chrysoula
had once stepped from or by the river Kifissos
dreaming of being a man, even a writer, a novelist
perhaps, one day writing the world
the way he wanted the world to be.
*George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016), is the author of twenty-seven books of poetry. His book of poems about Greek poets and his family (three of his four grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Greece), To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me (Dos Madres Press), won the 2024 Indiana Book Award in Poetry. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years.
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