BY Thomas Palaima
Maybe it’s the color
of the sun cut flat
hinting at colors to be
out on the 86 highway
stretching out
and luring me
as you gently do
to your side of our bed
where you and I
are we.
My heart
misses your heart,
pussycat Penelope.
I’m driving this rented car
as far as I can
from Cleveland eastward
towards New York’s Ithaca,
not Odysseus’s hometown,
not Kavafy’s poem town.
Like Lambrakis’s soul [1]
watching his body
borne by train
Thessaloniki to Athens,
my soul in tandem,
hovers and glides
above and along
roadside purpled nature
where wild grasses,
like Van’s
and Bob’s
highland heather,
thrive in springtime joy.
My soul invites me
to go forward
through corridors
of towering long-lived trees –
my soul’s own friends they are –
reaching skyward
sunward
in growth that ends
almost never,
like my love for you.
If not for you,
nature for me
would be
the landscape of the moon,
the real moon,
as we saw it once
in black and white,
when a man touched it,
a big-white-suited man
his head encased
in a fishbowl helmet,
inventing his and our doom,
like a careless mindless
ridiculous child
with a golf club.
The hybristic aspirations
of all mankind
the strong-armed star-sailor
distilled into one giant step,
a leap he called it.
Now a single man,
our Texas neighbor really,
in the grand scheme,
a wanton child really
at home in Hesiod’s
Age of Silver,
builds and propels
his own rockets skyward,
and sends humankind doomsward,
as humanity’s dusk
deepens and deepens.
They call him Musk.
But he’s Icarus to us.
And no good fence
will ever make him
a good neighbor.
Somewhere out here
in the northeast wilderness
a cold coyote calls
with pure instinctive sense
for uneventful morns.
Later we sit in bleachers
put out in the sun
and watch our gifted children
celebrate the quadrennial skills
they will use
in once our,
but now their,
timber-tortured
land-stripped world.
If only we had taken in
what John and Joni sing
and stopped, coyote wise,
at merely paving paradise.
[1] See Vassilis Vassilikos, Z (1966/2017) and Costa-Gavras’s film version (1969). The body of assassinated outspoken socialist politician Gregory Lambrakis travels by train from Thessaloniki in the north to Athens in central Greece. People line the railways along the entire route in small villages, at road crossings and larger towns and in suburban and central Athens to honor the martyred hero. The whole while, Lambrakis’s psyche (modern and ancient Greek for soul) flies above, looks down upon and thinks about the passing scenes, much like the spirit of the assassinated JFK in Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul.” Both were killed in 1963.
