Leap Of The Dolphin
So many black islands
my son used to say just after sunset in Hydra
when we sat in the wide stone window
its chalk blue shutters open
on the pebbly road to Mandraki flowing beneath our terrace
Abandoned and fierce
as the woman walking alone, in black, with her baggage
beside the wall of unforgiving rock
while the moon, always wandering and erratic, smiled secretly
on inlet seas.
The time of evening has dwindled.
We turn on a small lamp inside its yellow parchment shade:
The tapestry of a threadbare nineteenth century memory
lies on the floor
beside the wooden chest that held
so many small domestic treasures
it still breathes:
Muskets and locks with their strange gunpowder, blue-gray smoke
continue to circle the left-hand living room corner
and our newly found attik amphora, rescued from the deep, speaks
Encrusted with the throes of dice, once living shells.
Aunt ‘Ellie is busy in her closet kitchen boiling whole fish
with potatoes, wild thyme, carrots, hard yellow onions
whisking oil into the yolk
with its small flecked puncture mark of blood—
A sign of fertility she says:
—“Who will get the head?”
The mangy cats, our late musicians, wail outside for cheek bones
and vertebrae with milk and bread
while the gardenias, swaddled in clay, wax in their own perfume
and become weightless as the night.
Hydra is now a widow to me
though its table is always set
and the strands of morning
wrapping themselves around the caiques
with tattered anchored flag and snake
lap across the flesh of some other sleepy family
that rents our room.
Is it the one we used to stay in, in the studio of afternoon love making
under the bursting geraniums rushing down to greet the sea?
Or is it the tiny one in the main house with the walls so white
one could see the whole Ottoman Empire unfolding concessions
to its mosaic pasts?
A woman wakes before me:
I gather in the drops of her eyes
as she starts the water of tea leaves on the flame:
and everyone pauses, in the compound of Uncle Panayis.
Page(s) 36-37
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