They say I’m done for
while on every path
a thousand hearts greet me,
shadows and houses laugh.
—Adonis, translated by Khaled Mattawa
Cherry: Kerási. Spoon: Koutáli.
Jeweled kumquats. Figs in syrup.
Cut melon laid at the water’s lip.
Weightless, I drift. Light drips
onto the rind of me as I prepare
to receive the Goddess. She
who scolds me for snapping at
my son, who commands, Indulge him,
who deems me inexhaustible and
demands that I bend, dip, fill his
worthy cup. Am I a coward? I clutch
loneliness, calling it peace. I shut
doors against love. Yet she remains
patient, the Goddess. Her cool breath
steers a wasp toward my hair. She
who will instruct the wasp to sting
if I but raise my hand to test, if I
dare doubt myself a fitting nest,
if I ask to know whether she has
gone or if she was ever there.
*
Was it the Goddess I saw
on the road from Anemomilos,
a woman of 70 stepping out
of white panties, then rising
to unhook a putty-colored bra?
Sun inched toward the horizon.
Two old men leaned against
the seawall, studying the tide.
What pride it gives me to recall
her there, dressing for an early
evening swim while the world
sped past, averting its eyes!
*
I’ve climbed up from the old city,
down a sand-and-gravel path,
through palm groves, olive trees,
past rosemary, pokeweed, oleander,
just to attempt this form of rapture.
I'm not alone. The Goddess attends
to all her children in a manner agreed to
lifetimes ago. Her voice is light across
a distance, a steady beam arriving
from every direction. All are many, each
seeking, each needing distinctly. Succinctly
she instructs when I allow myself to hear:
moth wings, pebbles rasping the shore,
rattle of phlegm in a stranger’s throat,
steep angles of laughter that peak
and peak. All is the Goddess at work.
She says, Your labor is not to know, only
to see. That night, I see a window flooded
with light. She says, Your work is not to see
but to become. Tomorrow, let me become
the open window blasted with stormwater,
breached by voices singing and voices
commanding the singing to cease,
window with neither glass nor lock—
*
The purple bougainvillea
growing against white walls
spends six months singing
Color! Color! shaking its mane
of flowers and leaves, and then,
without suffering, submits
to six months more
of strenuous contemplation.
O Goddess, blossoming
as a thought in the willing heart!
After hunting, the wild terns
stand preening on rocks.
They face into the wind, each
listening to the single mind
of the colony through which
a voice rises to command
Up, up! And the birds
lift instantly into flight.
O ardor, through which all
worthwhile pleasure must pass!
*
In allegiance to the Goddess,
I reject man’s call to battle.
I embrace the soul’s duty to bliss.
War’s crimes are fear, silence,
obedience to lies. This is what kills,
what drives the will to destroy. But
if mercy is liquid, then rapture is vapor.
I know I’ll meet this sea in other form.
Tea water, holy water, birth water
splattered on the kitchen floor.
How many borders must I rupture
on the path to surrender?
I embrace the soul’s duty to bliss.
I reject man’s call to battle
In allegiance to the Goddess.
*
Everywhere in the world there are
women in whom I see the Goddess.
Like a remembered scent stirring up
my soul’s oldest memory. Mothers
of children. Daughters and sisters
of the Goddess herself. Women
who’ve spent lifetimes tending
and leading children. Women
raised by children’s voices. Women
with thick skin on their hands
from hot skillets, whose bodies
remember the bliss of a child rolling
and breeching in the ocean
of their bellies. Even if we don’t
much speak, it comes out in the way
we hang onto the world, the tears
blotting out conversation, the grief
we harbor in the constant unending
midst of war. The way, walking through
any city, we stop to count the children
alive on scooters. Living children hoisted
laughing onto tall shoulders. Children
running. Anyone’s children laughing,
hurrying alive through living streets.
*
The school of devotion is pure questions,
Isn’t it? Whose dead are not our dead?
Who among us is the enemy of water?
*
Azure blue, cobalt blue, cyan, silt.
I climb down a ladder into the water.
Pitch blue of the mossed stones
greeting my feet. Wildflower blue
of the instant everything carried
is lifted away. The face of the water
is crossed by corn blue shadow.
Basalt blue of breeched stone walls.
Corpse blue of broken treaties. Bitter
blueblack false laughter. Bluet blue
desire. Clap of wave against thigh.
Bloodblue the escaping sigh. Bruise-
blue lust. Dusk blue the beloved’s trust.
Twilight blue pride surrendered. Cut
sapphire of self-deception and lapis
of position—all to go. The Goddess
smiles an ice blue bouquet of fog
exalting the mountain’s face. Heaven
blue. Puddle blue. Ineffable infant
blue relief at the nothing weighing
heavily on us anymore.
