Corfu, and: Displacement, and: Middles

Corfu

To the north and to the west: the dark tips of cypress. Corfu in the slow math of July, and this reservoir of fear running low. The island has two hard-boiled hills—the bus descends one of them, blaring folk ballads. Houses the color of custard, some burnt. A Greek Orthodox monastery where even female cats can't enter. I've never set foot on this island before, but all day a familiar version of myself insists like a plain sweat stain against my back.

Pickpocketed days ago in France, all my dollars and euros gone. Yesterday,I landed in an airport so small I could see from one end to the other.

I've grown lean from only eating the past.

One line through customs,and the plane impossibly close to the sea.No ceremony in any of it.

Displacement

The woman by the soap stand with the low neckline is beside herself. Ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning to stand outside one's self. Estranged. In Kerkyra, beneath chalky sun, I put down coins for ice coffee and a shot of kumquat liqueur. Her crying jags force me into attention.

Pain displaces. Joy to be sloughed, stranger to oneself. These patterns of movement are ancient. This morning, the boat guide told us that long before the debt crisis, fishermen on the island fled into the watery caves to escape their wives.

Crumbled rust on boat metal.In order to dock the boat,the fisherman throws all his weight against the line.

Middles

Water striders in the pond,light as calipers:long sentence for which there are no words.

Indoors, silence travels from west to east.The house I keepno monastery.

Tsvetaeva, open on my bedside table.I feed on a crustof lamplight.

The train tonight is calling and calling.Its whistle thinnerthan any keyhole.

Hard to tunethe last decade of my life.January, few visitors.

Each day mostly like any other.The way you loved me, a cracked wind in the roadhurrying me along.