Yannis Ritsos: The Time Dimension

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Basking shark: photo by Chris Gotschalk, 21 July 2006

Hallway, door, hallway, door; half-light;
afternoon leaning toward dusk. All the doors
open to the far end. People made of plaster, bent over,
are sitting alone, each to a bench. The last,
in the innermost hallway, barely distinguishable
like the head of a pin:
............................."Distance," he was saying, "neutralizes
volume, maybe pain as well." That's what he was saying.
Nobody believed him or even paid attention to him. On the right,
through the dust-covered, barred window,
you could see, passing by under artificial noon sunshine,
a tall, immense bus full of people on an excursion,
plaster boys, plaster girls with spearguns,
with those long plastic flippers,
very blue or yellow, hanging in the windows.

(Was the absence of a conclusion, then, the essence?)

Free-diving with monofin, Cyprus: photo by aquaxel, 26 April 2006

Yannis Ritsos: The Time Dimension, 1971, from The Wall Inside the Mirror, 1974, in Exile and Return: Selected Poems 1967-1974, translated by Edmund Keeley, 1985