Penelope Says

poetry / katerina anghelaki-rooke Penelope Says Iwasn't weaving, Iwasn't knitting Iwas writing something erasing and being erased under the weight of theword because perfect expression isblocked when the inside ispressured by pain. And while absence is the themeofmy life absence from life tearsand thenatural suffering of thedeprived body appear on the page. I erase, I tearup, I stifle the living cries "Where are you, come, I'm waiting for you thisspring isnot likeother springs" and Ibegin again in the morning with new birds and white sheets drying in the sun. You will never be here towater the flowers theold ceiling dripping under theweight of the rain with my personality dissolving intoyours quietly, autumn-likee Your choice heart - choice because Ihave chosen itwill always be elsewhere and Iwill cut with words the threads thatbind me to theparticularman I long for untilOdysseus becomes thesymbol ofNostalgia sailing the seas of everymind. Each day Ipassionately forgetyou thatyoumay be washed of thesins of fragrance and sweetness and finallyall clean enter immortality. It is a hard and thankless job. My only reward is that Iunderstand in theendwhat human presence is what absence is or how the self functions in such desolation, in somuch time how nothing can stop tomorrow thebody keeps remaking itself rising and fallingon thebed as ifaxed down sometimes sick, sometimes in love hoping that what it loses in touch it gains in essence. Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (b. 1939,Athens) studied foreignlanguagesand literature at the universities of Nice, Athens, and Geneva. In 1962 she was awarded the First Prize for Poetry of the City ofGeneva. She received twograntsfrom theFordFoundation (1972, 1975)aswell as theGreek NationalPrizeforPoetry(1985) and theGreekAcademy'sPoetryPrize(2000). She attendedthe InternationalWriting Program at the University of Iowa in 1974-75 and was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Harvard, Utah, and San Francisco State Universities in 1982 as well as a fellow at the Program in HellenicStudiesat Princetonin 1987. She has publishedfourteen books of poetryaswell as four collected volumes. She isfluent inEnglish, French, and Russian and isan acclaimed translator of Seamus Heaney and Alexander Pushkin, among others. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she was nominated for the 2008 Neustadt International Prize for Literature by Peter Constantine. Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature and Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on modern Greek culture, gender, and translation. Her publications include Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry since 1967 (1998), The Rehearsal ofMisunderstanding: Three Collections by Contemporary Greek Women Poets (1998),and a co-edited bilingual anthology, A Century ofGreekPoetry,1900-2000 (2004). January-February 2009 i 13

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