“After a Greek Proverb” is an emotionally infiltrating villanelle. Beneath its overt rendering of the ordinary, it seems to portray, through a soft mosaic of allusions, what may be our lovely and sadly evanescent passing-through. Even at a first reading, one senses the layered melodies of sad and dear reality as well as the fretted acceptance buoyant in the simple language that carries the poem. The poem is weighted in its artful, caring, subtly sorry, inevitability. Throughout and by its end, it feels like sadness – perhaps it is poignant wistfulness – acceptance, and appreciation intertwine in its musical weave as intention defers to the ineluctable.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

This is such simple language, yet it seems to achieve the firmness and assertion of a well-earned mantra where our intentions – our desired direction – accept the reality of the gathering ties and limits that bind us. The poem elaborates from this reflection into a visitation of past moments and small aspects of those moments that sing – practically literally – of what has been. As it proceeds, we incur the old-fashioned feel of paging, without particular purpose, through a black-and-white photograph album.

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.

We’ve taped the broken windowpane. TV’s still out of whack.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry.

But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

A sense of nostalgia – but collecting as well as recollecting – is the vehicle of the poem, piecing aspects of this life together. Its basis is likely biographical, describing Stallings’s and her husband’s decision to transplant from the U.S. to Athens, Greece in 1999 where they have remained. The biographical elements of the poem – whether literal or creative – refract against and resonantly intertwine with, a Greek Proverb: “Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.” The proverb is used as one of the repeating lines of the villanelle’s structure and, as intended, its repetition duns the reader with both the cost and tainted beauty of being temporary: a truth we regularly tuck away, though it lurks and intrudes.

But Stallings seems not to allow this, our impermanence, to eclipse the experience of living, reminding us in the villanelle’s other repeating line: “we’re here for the time being, we answer to the query.” And perhaps the emphasis is on “being”. Indeed, this tenacious commitment and the piecing together of small reflections from the past sung in satisfying meter and rhyme confer a kind of calm acceptance in the face of what sounds like a small, marital rebuke:

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:

Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

It seems this commitment to the “time being” must be subtle and brave in the face of this cutting, pragmatic criticism, and, more occluding, the dark crevices and untidy terminations to which we are all naturally subject. We persist, but there is a price as we accrue unresolved pains and disappointments as well an encroaching, effacing clutter:

We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,

Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

We do “stash bones in the closet” since life is repeatedly, often intimately, unreconcilable and complacently imperfect. And, despite the rebuke, the speaker in the poem is determined in revisiting the ever-expanding “time being” even in its false shades of remembering (remembering is always qualitatively false) because it is one of our necessary, artificial pleasures and assurances – not unlike this poem – whether or not it has an acrid smack.

Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:

We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.

We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,

But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

The poem concludes in perhaps reflective acceptance with certain veins of worry in a world, a life, where we apply only modest control. We are always “eating off the ordinary” in our time being here – through the trip of minutes and trackless daily rubrics – and we fear any number of our basic supports might “crack” – simply because they frequently do. While we are here, however, we can only attend to, and occasionally rest on, the ledge of our time being. And A. E. Stallings helps us stay on with this bittersweet song of considered and composed temporariness. Gracefully rendered and tenderly colloquial, Stallings’s villanelle works precisely because it of its songlike qualities, with the magic of recurrent rhyme which rings constantly and chemically throughout. In her 2009 article “Presto Manifesto” she writes, “Rhyme is an irrational, sensual link between two words.” And in alerting us to the tension between these two worlds and linking them for us, “After a Greek Proverb” also helps us maintain what Richard Wilbur calls our “difficult balance.”