RECOLLECTIONS AND OTHER LIES

 

Ein fiebriger Moment - A feverish Moment 50 x 70 cm c/o Karin Goeppert

RECOLLECTIONS AND OTHER LIES

It ain’t fine but it does have a certain

rustic poise, the wine, a voluptuous

body and there are the cherry tomatoes,

goat cheese, sardines in oil, the Mediterranean

religion, pleasure in a word,

yes and again yes, date palms like hula skirts

fired up in the hot sun, and as a bonus we’re making love

in our six-star boudoir. Pure fantasy, I’m afraid, a lie.

What I’d really like to recollect, if it were possible—

because to re-collect properly you must first have “collected” something—

is the cloistered white-washed silence

of hundreds of miniscule churches—

one tiny space each, stuffed with dust-furred icons—and

more or less surrounded by cooing dove-cotes

on Myconos and Tinos

neither of which we can afford to visit, and never will

ditto Lesbos

where the head of Orpheus is still said

to chatter away on the beach at Molyvos

urging hungry, somewhat surprised tourists

to drop in at Uncle Kosta’s tavern, just behind the port,

   for fish with very special sauce.  

You told me a few years ago that only the

irreducible mattered, the delectably

inaccessible, is how you put it, an awkward phrase

but pretty impressive for a junior college drop-out. I was hooked.

I recall

we were eating gyros and pita bread in the city and

I asked you to abandon your husband and child

and “run away” with me—and how

you couldn’t stop laughing at the “very thought.”

I’ll never forget that.

And your legs. And your bottom 

as you walked over to feed the juke box, how

it seemed, beneath the polka dots, to have a rubbery life all its own.

 And, yes, the mole you might have had right between your eyes—

or was that some other dream?