THEOLOGOS
For a third year, we are living on AERIA THASSOS, island of marble and pines,
marble the quietest of stones, pines the first tree after a fire.
Marble the stone of the dead, the stone of the sleeping face.
This is an island of exiles and therefore pure,
its sea flocked with boats in the day hours.
In the swells the Evanthoulla rises and falls, a boat alive and awake.
In a clear dawn the islands of Samothraki, Limnos, and Lesvos are visible.
Later in the morning there is too much light.
You may catch birds in nets, the first poet wrote, but you cannot in nets
catch their song.
These fragments of Archilochus were found on a slip of paper used
to wrap a mummy.
He lived here, it was said, on an island that lies in the sea / like the backbone of an ass,
making the first iambs.
He wrote sparks in wheat.
And it seems, from accounts, he fought and fornicated mostly.
Later in the day, Kyrios Stamatis takes the boat
to think with him on open sea, setting his nets.
Sea-wind fills the olives.
A ship crosses the seam of air and sea.
Hillocks and canyons of cloud,
light-strewn, castle-walled, shore and cirrus.
This is where the skinned goat turned on the spit.
This is where we knelt on walnut leaves to be blessed.
MOURNING
A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond
the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea,
blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove.
As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup,
listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead
in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights
hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet,
as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines,
whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces
clear of night, putting the music out with morning
light, and for the breadth of an hour it is possible
to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember
that there was no word for blue among the ancients,
but there was the whirring sound before the oars
of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world,
through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until
they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens,
troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought—
then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts,
the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there:
not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme,
a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those
in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains
scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now
a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look
into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain
with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain,
then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped
into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words
of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears
in the writings of Herodotus:
How the waves of the sea kiss the shore!
For if the earth is a camp and the sea
an ossuary of souls, light your signal fires
wherever you find yourselves.
Come the morning, launch your boats.
TRANSPORT
Oxen-yoked carts go with us, and also bicycle rickshaws,
three-wheeled carts, small trucks, taxis and cooled private cars,
human-yoked carts piled with tea and textiles, and along
the way they toot their horns. To pass on the right,
you toot your horn, also to pass on the left or pull ahead.
Even the loping oxen understand the music.
We are told—is it true?—that if our driver struck
a man on foot, we should run away before the car
is torched by the crowd and its driver killed.
This thought became taxis burning in sleep.
The newness of the car determines our distance from the world.
Behind smoked windows, with the air on,
it is possible to travel at great distance
from all that is about us: bathers by the roadside pouring
cold pails over soaped flesh, smoke rising from long metal
stoves, women stirring pots, sadhus and other holy ones,
with their infinite paths to God. On foot then. Go on foot.
EARLY CONFESSION
If I had never walked the snow fields, heard the iced birch,
leant against wind hard toward distant houses, ever distant,
wind in the coat, snow over the boot tops, supper fires
in windows far across the stubbly farms, none of them
my house until the end, the last, and late, always late, despite how early
I’d set off wearing gloves of glass, a coat standing up by itself.
If I had never reached the house, but instead lain down in the drifts
to finish a dream, if I had finished, would I have
reached the rest of my life, here, now, with you whispering:
must not sleep, not rest, must not take flight, must wake.
TOWARD THE END
In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships to unseen ships, a year
passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone standing in the aftermath