These 21 poems take their names from the monasteries in Greece at Mount Athos.

Athos

Christmas Day, flocks of mergansers, a man with a black-
and-white shepherd on the snowy beach
at dusk. Remember last Succoth--the barefoot
Hasidic wedding pair with wineglasses,
with Four Quartets on their breath,
with rockweed music between their toes?
Today the sky is not addressed
to Coleridge, not to Paul Muldoon,
but irrupts the earth without volcanic ash,
a gathering of tidepool phrasings
for the state of Man, his graces, his gratifications.
I've scribbled more than half an hour
without so much as glancing up once
at how the blue suffuses into orange,
at how the moon supplants a languished sun.
Men walk dogs, they've finished
their shoppings and delivery, a baby is born
into wedlock where fields of cholla bloom,
out of the clouds above Socorro and here
the inventions of my mind clasp for its culture,
for the coming of the boy's first song.

Vatopedi

On the lee shore of the wide world I stand,
crowded by faery terns feeding on menhaden
where an isthmus mouth makes baby gurgles
and empties ions into a river choked by sea.
For as far as the window of the soul can see
are crows, sliding down snow dunes,
sidling back up like warm tobogganers.
The marshland is as flat as the moors
of Helgoland, where my words first
come from, Saxony in the streets
of this city-East Frisian geese honking
me back to a pier's parking lot, where a Datsun
coughs, signals a U and scores the road,
where a red fox pees and wades into waves.
A destroyer pays out line to sink its anchor,
a house on fire from ashes in a kitchen cannister
is sputtered out by firemen in blue hip boots.
Breakers curl into red rockweed where a President
stood last week to talk about the purity of water.
Now he's gone and lost his heart to private sorrows,
now three kings are gathering on a snowy road in Palestine.


Iveron

A stream of refugees from Christmas, our bodies hunched
like wolves in winter coats, we take to the generous shore
where snow is white above high tide water line,
where the sun is making a mirror of the sea.
Seals crook their ears to hear me say at least
three times that my pilgrimage is not quite done.
Time shapes each wave that pulls against the hold
of a moon already sunk below the South China Sea.
It's full noon-whatever faith there is can be seen
in the twos and threes that walk dogs in shadow
of a Gothic church spire, tolling breakfast, makeshift,
improvise, they walk to find an opening to go in to God
without ushers or incense. Up the hill at St. George's,
a congregation lips Brahmslied; at Second Beach
we walk to where a right whale jawbone was,
a second coming, seen in the moon jellies, crabs,
cuttlebones and curlicues of towering granite.
Crows in murders perch at Purgatory Chasm,
spasms of words come from a toddler who kicks
sea foam and champs down blossomings of ice:
he cries let sand, spray, surf and soak today suffice.


Chelandari

We've driven down the inlet to Watch Hill, our Galilee,
where fishermen lob skeins of flounder onto
pinewood decks in the grip of a cold only
the Maid of Orleans could've predicted. The skies,
red sailor's delight, portend only the gloom
of a gale backed by lashings from the moons
which oval Jupiter. Our own revolutions
are caught in the beak of a black-backed gull
who teeters on the edge of a continent, on an old jetty
cracked and buoyed up by the years of whale oil
fishery, rum running, slave trade to a land
of sugar cane, palmetto bugs and cocodrillos.
Three oil freighters have just succumbed
to the horizon, to the fury winds offshore
which bend into lifting clouds, to the height
of the Colossus of Rhodes. My own legs
are aching after making love, the hand I hold
is the warmth I feel in an undiscovered country
which gives me quick glimpses of an irreal world,
where flickers vanish into tree trunks and the slippages
of time whorl out on scrolls of Hebrew dogsong.

About the Artist

Email Address

News