14. Koufonnisia

My body is
an indolent rubber around noon
unfit even for beach-going,
only for attempting translucence,
I’ll move so slowly I’ll forget
the heat like those metals
that bend but spring back
to life: liquid memory.
If I ride out the day I’ll
be rewarded by the beachside
in late afternoon and grilled
prawns for dinner here
on the coast of this island
that’s entirely coast, manned
by a population of 300 not
pioneers but survivors (the Greeks
have been here forever moving from empire
to empire to a tired populace).
We lose the afternoon
in a cafe listening to
Thievery corporation and staring
at the Mediteranean. It boils
even in the shade save the
brief breezes so timeliness
I’ve run out of metaphors for them.

13. Odyssey

It’s a different kind of heat on Koufonissia,
sea-tempered, those same waves
Odysseus clipped when rolling around
the Mediterranean making a name for himself.
The only colors in our pallette are
blue and white: the sky and salt, blood
before it leaves the body and the color your
skin turns right afterward.

Not that we don’t try to
fight it with suntans
or making each other blush,
we just know what’s hopeless,
that there should be any other way
to live than momentarily and indefinitely,
all else forgotten in the translucent
shallows of a crumbling city by the sea.

12. Self Portrait

Six French girls at the table two down from mine on the back of a ferry from Piraeus are looking at the drawing of tyhe guy sitting next to them, charcoals mostly with the odd colored pencil sketch, and they’re into it and talking to him and one of them is particularly gorgeous, smoking cigarettes and flipping through his sketchbook looking like Athena in gold bracelets and big gold earrings hitting the right notes against the iris-blue Mediterranean and my buddy Ron looks over at me from his magazine and says “get a load of this guy behind me with the sketchbook” and I say I know, I noticed, un-fucking-believable they’re eating it up, and suddenly my envy becomes an inconsolable sadness, not because I am never, ever going to have sex with this beautiful French girl with slight rings beneath her eyes and a carnival of well-proportioned features comprising her equanimous face, but because I’m afraid to talk to strangers, and I never finished learning French and am too shy to practice and when I see beautiful girls on the far side of the room I am filled with an unabating, sharp-hearted sorrow only John Darnielle songs can ameliorate, and so now instead of doing something brave I’m drinking red wine with Ron and trying to forget I’m alive while the June sun, unsympathetic to the young and free, tries to bury itself once and for all beneath the Peloponnesus and leave all of us (me, Ron, six French women, the universe, whoever) in the dark and our own worst enemies.

11. History

My father was in Athens
30 years ago and walked
through a sqaure when someone
flicked a cigarette butt
from a cafe table & it
landed between his heel and
the back of his Birkenstock.
It must have smarted
something fierce, and worse
because of the heat.
Today I stopped at a cafe
outside on the metro on the
way from the Parliament buildibng
back to my pension and wrote
this poem. It’s not in Athens in June
but it’s hotter in California; I’m
thining I should call my father.
I’ve written a poem every day
for the last 9 days, the first of
a 49 day journey. My father turned
58 last month. I’ve been to Athens
twice and neither time with him. At
the Akropolis this morning I saw
the sanctuary of Asclepieion, whose
“use as a Christian site was un-
questionable.” There it was: twenty-
three centuries ago built by
beautiful pagans but, like everything
else, co-opted by the son and the father
and their holy ghost.

10. Swallow

They could be flies over the corpse
of Siena, if not for their
movements: hyperbolic
grace of black bodies in
motion. From the height of
the Museo dell’Opera they
appear as small dark ghosts
in the sunlight,
sweeping closer, further, then
closer in arcs of controlled
joyous abandonment.
One of them could be you,
moving between proximities
as we stand on this city’s peak.
Wings keep the body aloft
in one parabola but a swallow’s
tail splits in two,
two points back to the Duomo,
or Batisterio, or Il Campo
as the tail turns a body
in flight. Those two indicators
might be your fingers pointing
out one sight or the next
but all I see are swallows.
When we enter the church I
still catch their unreal figures
boyne among the rafters
and cathedral ceiling’s stars.

remix Friday #1

9. Sienese Swallows

Arclight
& dashing
strength in numbers:
quiet little voices
on the border of the seen.
The elegant tail two lanes
diverging on the highways of Tuscany.
The parabolic wings flex and sing
to keep the body aloft.
And every one part of the teem:
small ghosts around the duomo’s roof
and sky’s rafters.

8. Gulf

How much?
10,000 barrels,
a millionth of an ounce in a bathtub,
an oceanliner ever four days.
We don’t know.
A four inch hole in the sea floor
someone tipping and losing a drink.
It isn’t the first time.
What do you do with all that oi?
Some say disperse,
some say,
“nothing.”
The earth knows better than we do
the sea will heal its own.

7. Seminario

“Welcome pilgrim and tourist”
- found on a sign in Seminario Vescovile S. Andrea

It could have been a field hospital
in the second World War,
hastily converted to serve as
a waystation for the wounded.
These wide tiled halls flanked
by rooms to the left and right
lined with beds. Even the location
is right: Italian hills that
might have hidden Allies and
Musselini’s forces equally well.
Later it might have been a
sanitorium or psychiatric
facility, that institutional feel
permeating.
But in this seminary priests
have wandered for centuries
undisturbed. Light pours through
the windows at either end
of the hall, 5 meters high,
a few chairs scatted before each.
A fresco adorns the top of
every doorway, here the Virgin,
here St. Ignatius.
Dust collected on most ledges
but the hallway has few.
One priest, the only soul we
see in two days
in this 100-meter-long wing
moves steadily and slowly down
the hall. He is of a
dying breed. We are the only
travelers staying here,
though there are beds for a hundred.
On the way up the steps
a picture of John Paul II hangs above a
plaquered sign: “Welcome
Pilgrim and Tourist”

6. Volterra

I went to an ochre city
in a month of wandering.
I walked: up the cobbled
hill, down alley, down steps.
I sat: in a baptistry
in its eight hundredth year,
round and alabaster white
on its unadorned facade.
In the basin men were dipped
and receive the germ of the
holy spirit. Now the tile
cistern is empty; above it
Christ still raises a hand
and holds his thin cross.
Below him where once was water
are pilgrims’ coins.

When I quit the church I sat
on the city’s steps and
peeled an orange:
the hold spirit. Below
the Tuscan farmland
bore its fruit, and
some ten miles off windmills turned
on their precipice of hope.

4. & 5. Body and Blood

I. Body

For shelter
we stepped into St. Maria’s
and sat on the hard wooden pews.
I’m long overdue for confession,
she said,
but the prists only speak Italian.
Outside the rain flew from sky to slate.
I looked at my hands, brought them together,
then let them fall to my sides.

Christ in glass held tears from us
on the far side of the wall
one heavenly body shielding us
from another.

II. Blood

Walk, pilgrim, on the streets
worn down by your forebearers;
Rome is a city of ashes.
In the transfiguring light of
afternoon any outreaching
carapace might be a crucifix
illuminated; any cafe owner
Gabriel himself.
Stumble on the stones of yearning
catch yourself on the earth,
ashes again.
Drink of Christ,
the grapes and ground,
and on the table witness
the bottled oil separate
into the light of indivisibility:
what is bread,
what is body,
what is blood.