Traveling Greece
- Traveling Greece
At Ephesus a guide once told us, “The ancients read from left to right and back and saw it as analogous to plowing.” I knelt and took my journal from my pack, let my pen be pulled by oxen mind.
* Who would do what I just read about? — stuff a pine tree’s hollow full of needles, then slip a mirror deep inside the clump for sun to heat the needles, flames to kindle, sputter up and quickly spread — soon all of Attica is burning fiercely.
* I can’t remember — did it really happen? Did I go to Piraeus, board a ship just like Odysseus, that master warrior, man of many ways? He’s gone for good since now we’ve traded glory in for fame.
* A cab on Santorini hit a donkey head-on and kept on going, headlights shattered. The donkey’s knees are broken, neck and spine. That fact — I feel it. I am lost in it. I hear the gasps of locals gathered round, the donkey bellowing in dirt and blood. Eyes flared, we cannot comprehend this fate. [End Page 43]
* On Ithaka, inside the police station, a family, the son and mother shouting, the father, in his fifties, shouting back. He’s clearly angry at his teenage son. The mother can’t defend the boy enough. The one policeman hasn’t said a word. He lets their voices rise with accusations, counter-accusations. The father leans, grabs his son, shakes him hard, boy pushing back, the mother flailing with her tiny fists.
* The chapels of Kastoria have frescoes with eyes gouged out, the chalky white a glare of sorts. The locals blame it on the Turks, their hatred of the Greek religious way, and none believe this one old man who says it brings good luck to seed the upturned soil with the Virgin’s eyes.
* Delphi morning. Olive groves aglow in spreading sunlight. Chill up close to columns. My friend points to a sign in German, translates: “Please don’t wake the statues.” [End Page 44]
Don Schofield’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous American journals, including Partisan Review, New England Review, and Poets and Writers, as well as in journals in Europe and Asia. The recipient of the 2006 Allen Ginsberg Award, he has also received honors from, among others, the State University of New York, Anhinga Press, Southern California Anthology, and Princeton University, where he was a Stanley J. Seeger Writer-in-Residence. His poetry volumes include Of Dust, a chapbook from March Street Press (1991); Approximately Paradise, a book-length collection (University Press of Florida, 2002); the anthology Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece (Truman State University Press, 2004); and a translation of the poems of Nikos Fokas, The Known: Selected Poems, 1981–2000 (Ypsilon Books, 2010). A resident of Greece for over twenty-five years, he is currently the dean of special programs at Perrotis College, a branch of the American Farm School.
