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At the top of the village, at the top of the day,
the caldera below is a cooling skillet in the sinking sun.
In Agios Charalambos a white-robed priest flits
between ikons, lighting the lamps.

Each gutter and flare of candle flame
reveals miracles performed anew:
hollow-eyed and churlish a corpse is raised to a second chance,
a dragon flinches before Agios Georgio’s sword.
Between lectern and ikonostasis,
word and flesh,
the priest chants this joyful mourning of the dying day
eleison…eleison…eleison…

He looks at me, narrow-eyed and questing;
“Catholiki”, I mouth, as if this explains anything
about our shared presence here; we are
priest, chanters and people together.
Call and response have elided, have become one
under the painted gaze of long dead bishops and saints

A single bell chimes, the so und palpable,
a measuring–rod for the space between silences.
My steps echo its rhythm into the yard,
down the cobbled slope to the village;
For the congregation below the day is ending
in bars and tavernas,
in hopes of wonders to be worked
before next day break.

1
Tiresias the seer comes towards me,
stands in sun-faded red flowered dress,
transparent bag stuffed
with gleanings of street and shore.
He holds out a present of driftwood
bleached and salty, entwined like albino snakes.
Tells me what the birds have said today,
in couplets I cannot understand;
reclaiming this temple mound

from saints and sinners,
he dances off.

2
In the Café Caryatids an old man rests,
chair tilted in the doorway.
He sat there yesterday,
will be there tomorrow.
Teeth and pullover holed and brown,
he stares mute at the road,
a drone of tourists passing.
Bacchants and satyrs
they follow the umbrella thyrsos
snake through café chairs
and shop front T-shirts,
short-stepping in rhythm after a guide;
yellow tights, black ankle boots,
she is a queen,
finding honey in the columns and slabs
littering the temple site of Apollo.
The resid ue, a carved henge,
faces westwards, leads nowhere now,
admits to nothing – a lizard’s eye
unblinking red, through which
shutters click and cameras flash;
the moment when light folds
into darkness remains elusive.

3
The kouros at Apollonas reclines obtuse against the hillside,
breathes out asphodels in wave-froth to the edge of the cliff.
Tourists climb and slither in search of the shot
to validate memory’s convivial hyperbole.
Unrealised Dionysus, a marble moraine,
a black smudge against the darker quarry wall,
suffers them; but dreams of standing free of this rock umbilical –
the headland a plinth floating between sea and bluer sky,
arms raised in welcome to sail and oar.

When the gods went, villagers dropped hammers,
stopped chipping against the hard grain
returned to their goats and groves – their piss-poor soil.
Those terraces, tribal scars cut into the mountain-sides,
in turn abandoned for easier fleeces
each Summer boat disgorged;
a new mythology of excess is today’s orthodoxy.
Dionysus, be content to lie,
weeping ferns into the pockmark pools.

You can’t see the looky-looky men;
they are translucent, a slight
disturbance of light at table edge,
through which the bay can still be seen.

Shadow figures on clockwork rounds,
they flip-flop ceaselessly around tourist
cafes and beaches like waves rolling in from
Africa to break against a barren shore.

Wound up in some warehouse, circuited,
set off, staggered; each convinced they will
sell something – blinkered to the one a few
tables on, the one a few tables behind.

Specialists in cheap tat – headband
torches, fake DVDs, plastic souvenirs
that glow malevolently green in the dark –
their black faces take on a grave mien.

These men speak but are not heard;
“good stuff, looky looky, give best price”.
Knock off Prada, Chanel, Vuitton hang off
arms and neck dragging down like shackles.

Thousand yard stares quarantine them; they
learn a thousand ways of saying no. Still,
pour another glass of wine, fork the Caesar
salad, admire the view from the terrace.

© Patrick Lodge
© Santorini Caldera, photo by Josh Trefethen

bio

As Odysseus traveled, the world
got darker
all along the path of his eclipse
evening deepened
left in tatters all the worse
his warrior’s heart was broken.

No longer beating for war
he dreamed of Penelope, Telemachus
his only son
his words unstrung, his ship and crew
destroyed
he wandered the Aegean like a swallow
off its course.

Looking for stars to guide him
his bribed, borrowed and battered crew
cut loose
across the Ionian sea with a new moon
to mark this verse.
Come stay awhile to hear my sorrow.

Except for war Odysseus would be home
no more ambrosia, no more Circe
no more siren-song,or the giant Cyclops
not on the rocks, just a memory
meandering his way home to Ithaca.

The birds no longer sang
their Mixolydian melodies, depressed
at so many ill omens, prophecy
that filled him with dread
a penumbra filled his head
craving,his heart ached.

In this twilight, he waxed and waned
the beard that weighed him down
his hair filled with eels,
eyes always staring ahead
toward a flat-screen horizon.

On a Greek Island floating
in the Saronic gulf
the hydra-headed monster
has been replaced by windmills
and the donkeys bray to us at sunrise.

Tourists swim like sea-turtles,
sunning themselves naked
on the rocks while below
the white walls of Hydra tell us
we have all been lost.

Bouginavillea follows us
flourish of the slipper parade at dusk,
dolphins, lovers of Zeus
sport in the sea, banished
long ago by Hera.

While grey-eyed Pallas Athena still
watches, patron of Athens to keep
us from falling overboard as we ride
on the Flying Dolphin.

I’ve come here wanting to drift
across the Peloponnesus
no does to write, no loom to mend,
so I’m not ready to be found out yet.
Still looking for a few good goddesses.

I sit in my seaweed chair
looking out the window
daydreaming about Circe,
my lost shipmates, the Cyclops.

Since I have slain the suitors
Penelope won’t speak to me,
my loyal dog died of happiness
and Telemachus has gone back to Rodos.

While I sleep deep in my cups
wish only for Lethe or Crete.
I am no longer seasick.
I dream creme-de-menthe.

My clothes tumble dry
in the sunlight. I long for
another journey. With my webbed
hands I close this book.

*

© Michael Magee
Photo ©Stratos Fountoulis “A stadium stroll”, Athens, 2011