The City, and: Gentleman Crow, and: Champagne: After Cavafy
- The City, and: Gentleman Crow, and: ChampagneAfter Cavafy
THE CITY
“I want to go to another land. I want to cross the border,” The young man out of Syria said. “I’m tired of being stuck. Sure, Greece is nice enough if you can get a job: good luck. I’m afraid to apply for asylum here. I’ll end up in the street, With no place to go, nowhere to lay my head, nothing to eat. I was working on a degree in English literature in Damascus. And now, what’s to become of us? Nobody ever asks us. No one cares. Europe is dysfunctional disorder.”
But you can’t get to another land, you’re never going on. This is your future, where so many others are unemployed. The smugglers will sell you lies, their faux passports are void. Your Arabic is native-speaker, naturally; you speak Excellent English. But to these skills, best add demotic Greek. Here among this urban squalor, maybe, you’ll grow grey, If they do not deport you back to Turkey, if you stay. Time waiting is time running out, youth spent’s forever gone. [End Page 120]
GENTLEMAN CROW
Pacing to and fro Along the autumn shore Among the wrack and reek
With your arms clasped behind your back And sporting your grey frock-coat Trimmed in black
And your black hat and your lean long-legged stride, Up and down the strand perusing The headlines of the tide:
Casualties and statistics, futures, stocks, The thousand natural shocks, You clear your throat
Inspecting the ink-black seaweed tossed among the rocks Like obsolete typewriter ribbons, rusty widow’s weeds, Scanning the flotsam for
Morsels cast up by the remorseless gossip of the sea’s Éminence grise, How elegant you are, everyone concedes,
Gentleman Crow, With your gimlet gaze, your sardonic beak, How omnivorous, how sleek.
Life is a joke you crack, Wry and amusing, And death a dainty snack. [End Page 121]
CHAMPAGNE
There’s never enough of it. The bottle’s full, The glass is to be filled. Call it a flute, Call the effervescence joy or love Or song. Demi-sec’s sweet, and extra brut Is dry, the ratio of alcohol To sugar posed as paradox: liquid drouth, As rising sparkles have a downward pull That brings the lip of crystal to the mouth. Hold the stem: it bears a brittle flower, Calyx of nectar, clear container of What drains away, the bubble of the hour. The satisfying heft’s deceptive: lift The bottle by its throat and tilt it south, Promise of plenty, though all pleasure’s swift And evanescent, and no heart’s exempt, the Vessel seeming heaviest when empty. [End Page 122]
a. e. stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent poetry collection is Olives, and she has a new verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days forthcoming from Penguin Classics. Stallings’s translations of poems by the great Greek poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) have appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, and Able Muse, among other places.
