“Window On A World”
VazamBam
by Vassilis Zambaras
“Witness”
The ancient house emptied,
Shuttered against the light;
On the wallpapered wall
Of the study,
The gilt-edged portrait
Of the dutiful young wife;
To the right of the picture,
The old widow’s window,
Framed for life.
MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—6/28/10—The photograph taken in Kastoria, Northern Greece, late summer 1974; the poem written 34 years later.
Some photographs need no commentary, and this is surely one of them, so the comments that follow pertain exclusively to the poem, the poet in the process of writing it, and the readers.
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“Synopsis of an Imaginary Poetic Drama”
Having seen in the past so many derelict buildings in the immutable process of disintegration, the poet now imagines an ancient, shuttered house, abandoned for years, and begins with a brief, subdued description of its exterior. He then remembers going down an incredibly narrow cobblestone alley many years ago and taking a photo of an old woman looking down on him just as he is passing below her window. Her gaze tells him this window might be her entire world. The poet then focuses in on the interior—the study to be exact—and using a language as spare as possible, creates a fantastic scenario which he hopes will do justice to the woman and the photograph.
The lines of the poem are taut, restrained and understated, concealing more than they reveal; in other words, the imagined, fragmented drama of a young woman growing old before a revelatory window has to be reconstructed by the witnesses reading the poem. Without the help of the photograph, how the readers reassemble the old woman’s life depends exclusively on how well the poem is put together, their own interior make-up and the limits of their imagination. And yet, no matter how they fill in the spaces between the lines, no matter what answers they come up with, one fateful question remains unanswered:
Was it a setup job?
Vassilis Zambaras
Vassilis Zambaras According to such reliable inside sources as The Weekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, VazamBam aka Vassilis Zambaras is all of the following, and more, in an order no one can vouchsafe as definitive: a publishing poet who writes every day of his life; a hugely successful father (and a not-so-very-successful local political candidate); a professor of English as a Foreign Language, with portfolio; a Renaissance Man of many skills, useful and not-so; a fount of information about his particular corner of his birth country; an unstable and utterly unique mix of Greek and American, American and Greek; and the man fortunate and wily enough to have made off with Messenia’s loveliest and most talented local daughter as his child bride. Besides being all the aforementioned, other more dubious sources have also reported seeing him hanging out at the corner of vazambam.blogspot.com—in the guise of a “new old kid on the blog, with an occasional old or new poem written off the old writer’s block.” Author Photo: Pericles Boutos