HELEN

M. Panayotopoulos

For me you are the mother, sister, and precious daughter
of that old man of the sea
whose name was Proteus;
I have lived you throughout a thousand nights
as you walked through my sleep like a dove,
singing to the morning star
like an industrious swarm of bees
about the drunken clematis,
the Aegean billows bringing you ashore,
laying you down gently
on a muskrose petal
and then, like the rosemary and the aroma,
planting you in my heart.

You are not one. You are bitter desire
with its myriad faces,
with its myriad names,
with that body which changes form like a garmet,
a ghost of passion, that remains
forbidding and unfriendly;
nevertheless, in whatever skies and in whatever lands,
your never-setting light
envelopes me, Helen!

 

Memory composed of numberless memories
and experience of the ultimate moment:
my fingertips think of you and shudder,
and like the pale waterlily
my thought descends into night amid the wind,
and like a waterdrop
of the hidden stream
hovers, quivering, at the cliff's edge.

White flowers on the slender twig
of the green myrtle,
just as the frolicsome and wandering love
is about to touch you, you vanish.
You are not one. You are bitter desire
with myriad faces.
You are that northern love blossoming like snow
with a sea-blue star in your gaze.
You are love, the warm carnation of the South,
whose breathing leaps like a tall flame.
You are the precious love of the timid maiden,
and you are autumnal love walking slowly,
filled with affection.
You are the first love and the last
and the unkissed, the unwedded, the much-kissed,
but always the one and the unending and the unsleeping-

-the Love that cannot learn
anything else, but only your name, Helen!