USA

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Credit: Rick Becker-Leckrone.

THE JUNE MY GREEK GRANDMOTHER
LAY DYING IN A QUEENS HOSPITAL

my brothers, our lovers, and I sat on the terrace on Serifos,
calling out to the owls, calling out Who? Who? Who?

pushing out the air and O of mystery from our throats,
then swallowing potent island wine, slightly sweet

and complex, while the owls called back
from their rocky home, intimate yet distant,

and taught their young to fly from cliff to cliff.
The full moon rose from the mountain's knobby knees,

rocky breasts, sleeping shoulders, and I called to the owls,
a mourning cry, a shriek or moan, a supplication

all the way to Queens-Yiayia, live!
though I knew she prayed for a quick end.

Occasionally an owl might perch on a wire above us,
keeping its body still, except the quizzical watching head.

I remember her bent head as she read or sewed,
her round owl torso, her beak of a nose,

her canny eyes, her kiss as she blessed me
with the sign of the cross and said, my child.

Now the full moon turns our whitewashed walls to glass,
turns the night sea to milk and sends its shimmer

far across the water to light distant islands. This is the warm sea
she loved, where I floated in her arms when I was small,

hypnotized by light writing the dazzled alphabet on water.
Silently an owl alights on our open windowsill.

My husband takes my hand as she looks at us
and our baby sleeping between us. How large she is,

her silhouette against the moon, watching our family
steadfastly and so long I fall asleep with her still there.

She flies away unbeknown to me.
The white heat of the Greek sun wakes her gone.



"My Greek Grandmother" appeared in The Southern Review

INEVITABLE MOVE

When I take my daughter to the Mennonite woman
who cares for her on afternoons, we pass
the old brick Groves mill, winter cornfields,

neat Pennsylvania Dutch farms, red barns
with solid stone foundations and long white louvers,
painted signs next to the mailboxes proclaiming faith:

on the way there, Let us draw nigh unto the Lord,
and All things were created by God; on the way home,
Come follow Jesus Christ and I owe the Lord a morning song.

The road curves like a dreamy explorer around hills,
under amicable sycamores huddled together, abreast the river,
then over it on two bridges, one steel, one stone.

In the back Zoë babbles at what she sees
through the rear windshield: treetops reaching fingertips
toward the colorless sun, tin roofs glinting with winter austerity.

Look, Zoë! I call, See three fat geese in the yard!
See the cows! See so many crows in the corn!
(I can't help thinking of Van Gogh's cornfield.

All this beauty will be buried soon in the dirt
of my memory, most of it for good, and Zoë will see it
not at all or in that distant home of dreaming and learning

where a door might be ajar, letting in a slit of light
but no shapes, nothing with a name.)
I wish I could stand barefoot in spring mud

and mortar stone after stone in a wall forever
and plant a Rose-of-Sharon with faith, and never leave.
If I could be like these farmers with their old brick houses,

their history and their mission, I would sing
the Lord a morning song and bless all creation
and stretch my hands toward the supernatural face.

No such luck. I kiss my baby bye bye,
be back soon. Sue holds out her hands
long-fingered and brown, smiles a lovely gap-tooth smile.

My girl flails in gentle arms and wails out her loss
as I drive away, sending up hundreds of crows,
black angels of protest over the implacable landscape.

"Inevitable Move" appeared in The Southern Review

DAYS OF 1974

As bright Athenian light glanced off vast marble floors,
statues, those stunning bodies of the gods,
and tall glass cases of ceramics,

he furtively told the two American girls
he met in the Archeological Museum
he was writing an underground guide to the erotic antiquities.

One girl was suspicious and intrigued,
the other liked to talk yet gazed in silence at ancient vases
where the dance of sex unveiled the human divine,

perfect men and women athletically copulating
in twos or threes or even fives,
beaming the calm and spiritual smile of the Buddha.

He was a small man, his hair a little long, an intellectual
with nervous arms, poetic eyes, and shabby clothes.
In America shabby was fashionable, but not in Greece,

not in '74 under the colonels when so much was illegal:
old men playing gin rummy in the cafes and talking politics;
throwing plates to the floor to applaud the dancers' passion.

All names but the Christian ones were banned-
Socrates, Aristotle, Athena, Euridice, Aliki.
Those were the days before the tourist trade took off,

so the museum was empty, except the three of them
and bored guards who thought the young man
a fool who wouldn't get far with the American girls.

The girls couldn't tell-was he a hippie? Did he want them?
(Later one would wonder if he liked girls that way.)
In the museum's celebrating light, he spoke of history and myth

and they trusted him and agreed to meet for a parade
honoring Venezelos, a hero in the conflict
between the Greeks and Turks.

The people lined the street in the April sun,
waved small blue and white Greek flags.
They were dreaming the colors of old embroidery,

gold bangles across a girl's forehead,
the weight of tightly-woven fabric.
They were dreaming of the dance,

the smile running though muscular legs
as they trace a maze of steps on pavement,
as they leap free within form.

A few palace guards marched by in white kilts and leggings,
and then the army and the navy in drab uniforms.
War planes screeched above

while the dreadful tanks climbed the boulevard,
shaking balconies, windows, sidewalks,
the teeth in each skull. No one cheered.

The junta would fall that summer, but today
the young man stood with the two American girls,
thinking what he might whisper as they walked home

past closed shops, tavernas, bakeries, cafés, and smells
of bread and grilling meat, where three old men
sat, legs apart, at sidewalk table, watching the girls go by.

Only a few months ago, the tanks shuddered the same street
and crushed the gates of the Polytechneo, where the students
draped banners painted Eleftheria, freedom,

and draped themselves, arm in arm, intertwined
like figures on an ancient vase,
until tanks ground hundreds of young bodies under their treads.

He would speak clearly, softly so only they would hear,
and he rehearsed his words, and he watched the girls
watch the grim purposefully silent faces of the crowd.

"Days of 1974" will appear in Luna.

BATHING JESUS

If he were a word made flesh I would want to wake him from his godliness
and wash his godliness from him as I bathe his feet in my laughing tears
and dry them with my heat and hair and anoint the topography of his head with
          euphoric oil
and comb his beard with electric fingers and pull his face close to mine
to see the multitudes in the pores in his skin, God's intricate human
          handiwork in his cheek.
Jesus would see the flame in my eye burning in time's skull, deep as the
first breath
          that lighted the Milky Way.
I would pull the shirt from his shoulders and the shirt from mine
until our garments lay on the floor, cloth lungs pulsing with the curtain's
white
             muslin and the little breezes coming in the window, everything
alive,
even the wood floor under our feet warm with the oak's broad and
           branching spirit.
And I would pour warm water on his back and thighs and wake the man in him,
wake his hand reaching for my flushed and water-slicked arm, his palm singeing
          the place below my collarbone,
make him taste each word on my tongue, each complex mix of sweet and bitter
           and sour and salt
and make him sing out from his body, the lips, the tongue, the throat, the
heart,
          the blood, all the traveling heats of flesh. Praise them.

"Bathing Jesus" appeared in The Drunken Boat, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious: Reflecting American Culture Through Literature and Art (Tarcher/Putnam), edited by Mark Waldman, and Voices of Light: Spiritual and Visionary Poems by Women around the World from Ancient Sumeria to Now (Shambhala Publications), edited by Aliki Barnstone.

WILD WITH IT

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
-Walt Whitman

I am your underground river, flowing in the dark
beneath the earth's skin, and I am your blood.

I am the Mississippi, lighted and calm,
and the grassy hills clambering from its waters,

and I am your Mississippi flooding its banks, a volcano
flaming the sky to ash, a tidal wave. Because of you,

I am a Greek island redolent with oregano and thyme,
dry salt air. I am the sea voluptuous against your naked thighs,

the sunlight drying the blond hairs on your legs and arms.
I am your sun burning away all sight except its own light,

a sun throbbing, giving the land color and shape,
the little whitewashed house, the bed below the window full

of mountains breathing deep into the earth, bones of knees,
elbows, flesh of breasts and cocks, cunts and shoulders,

broad chest where the heart beats and makes the capers
and daisies tremble, all the nerves, thistles and sticks,

electric and telephone wires buzzing on your flesh.
I am the moonlight showing you how the sea's body stretches

all the way to New York, to streets whitened by oil and rain,
to shoes scuffing the sidewalks, and windows bright

with pots and pans dangling from the ceiling,
lovers and families, bathrooms-a guy's bent head

as he fills the bowl-I am pens, notebooks, computer screens,
I am your world wide web, I am your easy chair-

you hold a book on your knee-mine is the bare belly
appearing before the shade goes down and mine is

the kiss deepening to a bite on your neck.
I am your witch poking pins into a voodoo doll.

She who comes between us I will burn, bury, break,
shoot off in a rocket to the nothing of space.

I am I am I am. And in you I am, for you erase
and make new our two conjugating shapes.


"Wild With It" appeared in The Drunken Boat.

The poems are all from her latest collection, Wild With It:

© All Copyright, Aliki Barnstone.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.