Mediterranean

Zypressen - Cypress Trees

MEDITERRANEAN WOMAN

You stumble out into the garden first thing

only to find a headless mouse

in the lumpy gravel.

Muchos  gracias, senor Gatto.

The Middle Sea ignores all things nocturnal,

lives in and for the light.

Back in the bungalow  (a retired

storage shed, olive oil and wine, cool)  your wife is preparing

her hangover for the other hangovers that she meets,  ie., yours.

The cock’s crowing has the deep throaty insistence

of a drill instructor on the first morning of boot camp.

More comforting and softly intrusive is the sound of Pedro’s  (Mexican

expatriate)  stacking (not even quietly) of branches and other vegetal

debris from the orchard for his once weekly bon fire—is

he raising sweet smoke for the benefit of an Aztec deity?

It’s not only the pungent richly veined cheeses

or deep red vintage aging intricately (aren’t we all,

more or less?)  in the cellars of a monastery, inspiring

someone to say, I was as shitfaced as a Spanish monk.

It’s not just you, in a slow sweat,

eating lamb in mustard sauce beneath the

thick leaves of a plane tree, watching the girls and women

come and go. It is also the stifling night without sleep.

It is also the Mediterranean woman—cutting through

the warm air like a mythic vessel

Cassandra

Medea

Iphigenia In Tauris

Maria Callas at the MET

Dominique Sanda in “1900”

Unreal.

1900

Dominique Sanda and Robert de Niro in a

film by Bernardo Bertolucci