Uncle

Or one needs to say the world needs cleaning, so we wait on the arrival of the redhatted cardinal to sing a song. Paruir Sevak, an Armenian poet, works over me. Ma....this is a story about Seferi, and his last work, "Three Secret Poems."

1997 ends. Next year looms, snow but yesterday I was in the driveway washing the car and it was balmy, as I scrubbed a bit on the grey Camry. How o' how, will I get through another year?

To the strange American, I ask," what are you dressed up as?" I analyze their ways which seem different from mine and I hone in on the two traits, their self-absorption and their celerity. They seem worried about themself and always rushing around. That one has no time and cares only about what to stick into various orifices is funny in a way, sad.

I admire the actors they have. The malls I love. Damoulas' supermarket, the funky postoffices I visit in a bunch of local towns. So rich, Americans are so poor in what means the most. A daily life that is measured, sensible, slow. With the time to do poems and stories. TO look around and take a few pictures of cows and store windows. I wish I had someone to do it with. Wallace Stevens speaks of the "hermit of poetry."

Seferi's last big work of the 1960's is in me. He's awaiting there on the shore for someone. It's the Aegean Sea, his own pond. Well, who's he waiting for? An ancient. He is in touch, connected; has paid to see the old ones in a life that has been strong. The old ones, them. This process fuddles him, as he must grab at some old image from classical times and bring it on to modern Europe where he lives. In Greek, "Tora se touto t'akkrogiali perimeno/n'araksi enas anthropos." He waits on some human to boat up, land.

Wallace Stevens says of us who make poems. "This happy creature - It is he that invented the Gods. It is he that put in their mouths the only words they have ever spoken."

Uncle wants deliverance. Some one to talk to. In stanza four of the second poem, "On Stage," he talks with an old god of the sea. The wave was sweet when he was young. When he reached toward his majority seeking rhythms, finding patterns in the pebbles by the shore, he chats up an old man of the sea who represents his country, his culture, his history, Greekness. From that conversation spread the wings of the poet.

"Three Secret Poems" is never out of the library. It just waits on me to get there, a dutiful son and daughter. I can't stand to have it in the house long, so I do the job at hand and it goes back to the library in a day or so, so it will be there for me next time.

The old man is his place, his particular locale. He creates Greece with his poems. "Ego eimai o topos sou." " I'm your place." "Isos na myn eimai kaneis." "Maybe I am nobody." "Alla boro na gino afto pou thelis." " I can be whatever you want."

The words are everyday Greek, nothing special, to state the event. He could be talking at the table with a friend or his mother. He comes to the poetry, to the magic moment, to the meeting with the gods, as if he's taking a drink of water."I'm your place. Maybe I'm no-one. But I can be that which you want."

It is a promise, a thespic guarantee. This section of his poem called "On Stage," is a nod toward actors. De Niro, Scorcese and Jessica Lange. He is an actor's poet, a mad lover. Loves life, loves acting. Loves words. He just makes me less lonely, giving his words over to me in my day.

The uncle is a bloody bloke. His poem is of horrible images I avoid. I only want the nice parts. My life is tough enough, without incorporating his pain. In stanza five he offers, "martires then iparhoun pia, gia tipote." "No witnesses any longer, for anything." He's alone on his cross. He can barely stand it, so he uses words to get relief, like we turn on the talk show on the car radio or go to the frig and get a tangerine. He has waited a decade near the end of a busy life to get it down by leaving behind a phrasing of his feelings. He is a feeling poet, like Wallace Stevens, Donald Justice, Langston Hughes.

In stanza five, someone has disemboweled the woman and the baby. Then disappears. No witnesses. Sounds familiar to the life here that I witness on the tv. But I don't need Seferi to tell me that. I do like the sound of the Greek when he tells me there are no witnesses any more.

He says to me, " When will you speak again? Pote tha ksanamylysys? They are the children of many men, our words are. Inai paidia pollon anthropon ta logia mas."

I love him so. The alphabet is a living form. Like a child just learning the abc's sees the beauty of the letters in a way he or she might never see them again. Seferi is primitive, feral. On words, I quote.

" They are born like a child is born, and they root, sustained, nay nurtured, by the blood, just like the pines keep the shape they have that the wind gives them. Even though the wind has left, isn't there any longer. The same with the words. They keep the shape of the man and the man has left; he isn't there."

Beautiful lines, but I must hurry on, as I am a busy American. Seferi teases now with the line, "maybe they, our words, are clamoring for the stars to speak." He throws us a challenge, to poets and mountebanks. "Where you gonna be when the Light comes to this theatre?" The light is god or goodness. He says if you are not in there pitching, making a movie that matters, raising a child or cooking a handfashioned meal, you are cooked. The poet is the closest to the light as he or she is on stage at all times looking and craning the neck to pick up the messages gods emanate.

He waits on an epiphany, the arrival of the muse to his place, Greece. He is an etherial type, and, rational though the man is, he still believes in fairies and goblins. That is his very charm. That he sees life both in the shadows, as well as in the sun and the sea he loves. When the light comes on, when you approach the other side in death, in passing or in passion, you had best know tograb the light. Like the actor, get the line right.

Seferi is an actress's mouthpiece, an actor's conscience. He describes what any good photographer, painter or sculptor reaches for when inspiration and courage seek expression. Seferi just knows how to put it in brief form. He talks for us all. I listen.

The last poem is "Summer Solstice." Death awaits in the heat of the longest day. View our soul being ground up into stars on the threshing room floor. The milopetra, the millstone, pulverizes us into stars. Horses sweat and groan to move the wheel.

Passion passes us by. We age, die. We deny the passing of passion. We deny our step is haulting. We dream so we won't see the reality of age. "Oloi vlepoun oramata." "They all see visions." The humans scurry trying to ignore what waits for them. The death terrifies. They think only they have that fear. The passion in us has always been there, and will always be in us, eternal, The image is that of the rose, that flower of sex and love. He recommends we keep foremost that rose, as we enter the black hole of death.

He finishes stanza two of "Summer Solstice," with another admonition. Greeks are just of warnings to live a certain way. I wish the uncle would cut it out and leave me to think about the rose,sex,love. He says, don't dare waste the gift of life that breathing gives you. He begs that we deny materialism, fame, comfort, conformity. To take the grand leap and do art or love strongly, or something noble. Anything but the pedestrian life we are leading now. He exhorts, huffs and puffs to blow our house down, for us to wake up. What he promises in the last stanzas of "Summer Solstice," is rebirth after death. We can guarantee our survival over there, if we will have faith and believe in the Greek way, the culture that flowered and passed into history. In a glorious burst, it passed and became words in a book. He seeks always to seize the moment of old when a poet stood facing the sea on a Greek isle, composing lines for his mates or lover. He recreates the shepherd on the hill with the sheep bells tinkling. Etc. He is a poet after all and he seeks his own redemption in words. His fellow poets, Kazantsaki, Ritso, Vrettakos do the same.

All this waste, all these seamy suburbs, these endless arguments in the coffee house, these ugly humans and their stupid needs. Seferi goes on and on and one waits for him to stop telling us how awful contemporary society is. Finally he tires out and gives in to us with the line, "the blackbird, though, twitters/ coming as it does to drink/ and you hear on occasion the voice of the ringdove." Stanza seven. He recounts the flowers and shape of his garden and his soul rests a bit. Seferi is troubled. The poet's path has been tortured indeed. Poets suffer to draw lessons. Their best friend is pain after all.

In this stanze he says to accept who you are and stick your being in the soil and come up a rose. Listen to the songbirds; to hear the spirit. He has this leap of faith, takes the plunge. Travels toward the ancient Greece he wants to live in.

He recounts the life cycle in his poem as we go from youth to old age. He admonishes ," if you don't put your faith in this here void," then you haven't got a fighting chance. That is the crux of all religion. Faith in the hereafter. You can't win as in Las Vegas. You run from youth to old age. "Zoe sou einai o, ti ethoses." " Your life is but what you gave." That is how them there gods count.

Death comes on him in the lines, "a black and large wing cuts a deep gash/high across the dome of big blue, the sky/ See it, it'll open." The will creates to open the door to heaven. He will enter the door marked "ancient Greece" and not the one his contemporaries favor. His images are natural, birds, sun, trees of course. Pagan. And not only nature. Lips and bosoms. "ta heilia to haithemeno theras." the lips, the cuddled and petted skin." That thrusting and grappling between sheets. And he is about to get resurrected . The last stanza of his greatest poem and the theme is sex. Birds and flowers.

Finally he will rest. Everything's gotta burn. This very noon day on this longest and the hottest day. The poem and Seferi end. Gather the dear kids to sow the ash. Everything is going to burn today at noon when the sun is nailed to the hundredfold rose. .

He has told us a story as a movie would or a favored tv show. What makes it so special is the Greek and if you can't read the Greek it becomes a matter of trusting me. Our personal epiphanies are something we rehearse all the time. Only Seferi made his public to sit there in the library. Folks rent movies and borrow books to forget what he remembers; that all is temporal and we just die. Maybe a nasty death and that we have to get ready. See it as a bit of magic that may transport us to the other side.

He argues forcefully that light is the source of life and of death. Light follows the dictates of universal deities who govern from afar. Even the sun betta be good or it too will be punished. Nature and humans are tools of this high law. It is a very old idea found in African and native American cultures, in Chinese religion. If any portion of the universe goes out of kilter, it's bad. Seferi witnessed terrible times. He quotes Heraclitus as arguing that if the sun oversteps its bounds it will be punished. Just so a human. All the things of the universe are terribly vulnerable. We may do evil. The punishment is severe. Don't do it. Live in the light, he says. Imagine that the light of the day is the blood in the veins, a holy highway. Any day you live is a day on that highway. Seferi says, "if the light of the day and the blood of the man were one and the same thing," then we'd get it right.

Life on the stage in ancient Ephesus goes on apace. Seferi comes from Asia Minor. He runs against the grain, like the philosophers called Cynics. They would go to the theatre when it was letting out or argue to change the currency. Alter the currency. In his notes of 1950 when he went home to Asia Minor he writes, "The twilight spreads over the sky and the sea the colours of an inexhaustible love. And you are ashamed because you want to howl aloud that it is all a gigantic lie. Because you know that the circle has never closed, and that the Furies, who in this small and remote place were let loose upon the strong and the weak of the earth, have not been laid to rest, and you will not see them , not will your children, 'vanish into the depths of the earth.'"

Seferi believes the gods of old are good guides to the passage in the sky that will deliver the soul. He is ever visiting empty shells of theatres, ruins if you will and seeing mysterious actors coursing across the stage, hair askew, and Seferi asks this actor, will the theatres fill again? Only to hear the form say.... "perhaps at the hour of death."

For me I need have no fear, for uncle is near to make my day better for his whisperings. I may someday too reach the ancient shore as the uncle did.