Hellas
For Rafael Peñas Cruz
In spring
a god whose name
Olympus had forgotten
chose to fill rocks —
honed to whiteness
by Apollo’s fingernails —
with the dream of a sailor
in the languishing crew
of Ulysses:
a fusillade
of flowers upon the eye
down a gentle hill
in Ithaca,
now soft and dark
like the heart of a fig;
that soft marrow in adamantine bones
is autumn;
more gods
joined the nameless god
in being forgotten
on Olympus;
lost memories
spilled over
the bone of islands
like blue wine
till all the forgotten of time’s demesne
came in pilgrimage
to remember a sea,
and called it Hellas.
A Corinth Impromptu
For Rafael Peñas Cruz
If you can imagine
the god of the sun
sitting with the sunlight on his back
then that morning
he is the god of poetry;
you may wonder
why the sky,
that sees everything, never sees a runnel of sweat
down his back,
why the land
has always felt that a certain set of columns,
marble-like,
are insinuating the god
as he searches
for the lost half of a song
that he had written
and torn
in a rage.
Was it for this that the fane of Apollo
invented
the myth of Hyacinthus? —
the angry discuss of a god’s fingers
tearing through his own poem,
words, epithets strewn across the land,
a tattered body no word can make whole —
and now
witness the millennium of a god’s ruth,
the god of poetry:
words grow like flowers
that shall never die
around the desolate survival
of seven lines of Apollo’s song —
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