THE LIFT OPERATOR
The time of death is very slow, long, and wide.
The dead never die anymore.
An eternal germination of endless hours hangs onto
their pale fingers.
Their eyes have the colour of a huge, abandoned castle.
Outside the cemetery
of Saint Anargyroi, buses, and motorcycles flash through
soundlessly, beyond the time of the dead and of the
two shacks used as flower shops, recently painted green,
from one side to the other of the big door, hanging
silently, two meters over the soil, with their clay pots,
the cheap vases with sprayed cyclamens, violets, roses,
with their holy, dislodged green of another time.
A bit closer, in the yards of the poor neighbourhood,
a few different flowers untie their palms and forgive
the world.
The new branches entwine their fingers in a gesture
of blessing, in these yards where the housewives
spread bed sheets and blankets to get rid of the mould
as if taking the viscera of the house out in the open air
and the blankets and the bed sheets warm up, steam
and slowly identify with the garden trees —
the shadow of the bloomed quince tree branch
is reflected, spread, and impressed onto the bed sheet
and it moves, mutates into a Chinese copper
engraving with vertical ideograms and the bed sheet
is but a childish lighted cloth onto which the paper
shadow of a long arm stirs.
Libros Libertad 