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This is not the point where it all begins.

Here the line of movement is not erased now.

I dreamt of a round letter of yours

inside which  I fit entirely

from the empty zero of the center

cyclically in an equal distance around me

reading your endless message.

In the painter’s impenetrable surface

depth is scattered.

Permanent colors, blossoms without

end at the flower of ageless geometry. 

Are your asking why live if we are not

immortal? Oh, do not forget me.

Truth is not oblivion, you should remember.

It is not an error to be amended.

Come close to me, stretch your hand

touch me as you used to

at the triangle of the heart. 

Light  continuously spends itself in light

lending colors and lines

to everything the mirror sees.

Even if it does not look – it is looked at.

Stand, body, do not continue to grow old.

Continue, body, do not stop moving on. 

Everything dies if it lives:

Love, friends.

Unmoving ends of the body.

Whoever beauty does not recall.

Come, line, wrap me in your curves.

Stand straight in front of me.

Up here, movement continuously empties space.

She puts her soul to sleep rocking the body.

Remember as you used to, come close, don’t forget me.

This is not the point where it all begins.

 

 

                                  translated by David Mason and the author

 


"Continuous Painting" by Yiorgos Chouliaras was a “performance poem” for the choreography “Continuous Painting” by Valia Alexandratou with Analysis Dance Company, in a dialogue with the work of the abstract painter Nassos Daphnis cited by the New York Times. In counterpoint to Astor Piazzola’s “Oblivion,” John C. Hunter read the poem during a solo danced by Catherine Cabeen in the premiere on February 9, 1998 at the Kay Playhouse in New York. The second stanza comes from “Omicron,” one of the 24 poems in the sequence called Gramma [Letter], each one of which corresponds to a letter of the Greek alphabet.