Greek Ode

The concierge Panagiotis

And the breakfast hostess Maria Rodite

Moved the table under the olive tree

Where the shade was deep, for the sun was mighty.

A turtle the size of a two euro coin

Drew in its extremities

When a sandaled footfall came down near it

As countless others had and will for centuries.

The ancient reptile lives forever

As it always was since the first seed.

It's the gods who die day in, are born

From sea foam scudding shingles,

From stone walls climbing dingles

Where goats go to be shorn,

Where gulls pluck mussels from the rockweed

Sprouting in the plenitude to ever waver.

The hard combs rolled over the town all winter,

Poor pure chaos that heaves the weather.

The river spewed up all of its garbage―

Paper white like wool on wire clung to the bare twigs.

And the mud banks perspire under a decoupage

That fed a treeful of figs

As the sun made sinter of palm frond and feather.

What do I aim for? That is, why aim?

To say you can do anything else is sheer Buddhistness;

That one can refrain, pie in the ascetic welkin

That can do anything but rain.

Since only turtles make all manner of thing happen

And only gods can take away your pain,

This must be my struggle to remember

And my reward when I forget again.

Afric Rain

The yellow Afric rain swept in

Between the market stalls,

Marble worn away where the foot treads.

The trace of his itinerary written in the divots  

Translates to the venerable tourist’s

Delight in the unreadable opening of a grave.

His manes went to hell and Carnival

Masks the meaning of his book.

Sheets of runoff wet the leather

Slapping at the alluvium,

Coming down on dust when the sun dries,

The old Sahara taking refuge in the stoa,

Pausanias half understanding all he sees.

Scimitars harangue the flights of better minds---

Clear blue thoughts that crack the goblet of the skull.

Take me out of Athens, Allah,

Further from the rubble of my home

And the stubble of our garden and

The burden of these bones.

To the new Europe and the clean rain,

The old religion. Take me to the simple pain.

Ship tops down harbor, all that roam

Come last to Rhodes,

The beating of an impossible sea,

The sharpest line east of the level eye.

Not a spec in all that blue

To speak of what we know

Will lap the mole of three windmills

And wash us when we dream,

When we ride the night horses,

Forgetful of the temple doors

Who break their hinges on the sky.

The Cave of the Dragon

Walk with me

Where the apple and the plane tree

Issue from the dragon’s skull,

In which the fallen bones of bear turned stone

Before the tongue could lap across the lakeshore road.

Here are serpents in Pelasgian walls

Where Elias prophesied Olympus

And Komnenos built his church to the black Madonna.

Regrettably, the road is clogged with careworn

Pilgrims seeking to out-distance dissolution,

Mindless that two steps allure the end-times,

Which flake like frescos of the old religion,

The eyes put out by the rising damp,

Contemporaneous with the Seljuk wars.

Cease; and say

The only peace to find

Is in the shifting faults of vision,

The cymbals clanging in my ears,

The knotted brows, the faces, each

Averted from the specter,

Clay-foot, at last, ye mighty,

Amid your works, in the all-common grave.