Symadia

I

You were given signs,

you took them.

The naked woman

behind the glass wall

spread her cunt open

with her fingers.

When you saw the tiny diamond

piercing the skin of her sex,

lust split open like an atom

in your hands, the woman

touched herself for your pleasure,

you took it, the woman

leaned against the white horse,

looked back over her shoulder

at the lens of your camera,

her back arched to show you

the bronze curve of her ass,

you took her

in your house, in your room,

in your bed,

though she remained standing

behind the glass of herself

just as you lay trapped

in your eyes, your hands

filled with shining naked flesh,

empty, floating away from your heart

like the hands of a spent man

swimming in a nameless sea.

II

Signs. You could do nothing else

but take them.

The beach at Naxos, so difficult

to find that day with your brothers,

searching the burning fields

between white villages, hot skin

of sky and dust on your face,

all around you the Aegean

singing at a distance

but no road to approach her.

An old woman in a black dress told you.

A young woman in a white dress told you.

A woman told you

a path through the fields,

the way to find that water.

The beach at Naxos, mother in white and blue.

The sand dunes rose and fell like

another naked body, many bodies,

you stepped into them, walked through them,

sun glinting off silica, sand under your feet,

in your hair, glass unmade and salt dried white

down the length of your body,

the sign to look back.

When you turned, you saw only footprints,

they belonged to a child, you could not see him

though he called out to you, the voice of wind,

you could not see him.

Later, returned to the city,

among many papers, crucial meetings,

Omonia and her strange women at three

in the morning, money rising up

like the buildings of your name,

there was now a haunting,

not a ghost but the boy,

walking where you walked, a breath distant,

a breath close, what was it, he asked you,

what was it, your name?

How could you learn it there, where was

the wind but over the sea, in the waves, you felt it

before you could speak it,

you glimpsed your name half-invisible

above the gleaming backs of the dolphins,

their fins heaving like ploughs

in blue and silver soil.

Naxos for twenty years. Odysseus

searching for home in his flesh.

III

Signs,

but here there is no taking:

the islands give themselves to you.

You dream of a goddess

washing her hair.

When the drops fall,

diamonds in soil, islands

are born of the sea.

Naxos. Amorgos. Mykonos.

Ios. Santorini. Milos. Water

deep around you

and the dolphins splicing

between the waves

like blade-shaped cells,

the first shining sons

and daughters.

You see them from the dunes

above the beach,

you see them from the shore.

At dawn you hear a woman singing

on a stone at the water’s edge.

She looks down at the child

near her wet feet, that boy

looks back at you.

You walk toward him, finally,

you can do nothing else.

You reach out your hands

and touch his face.