The man had been posted, for the usual obscure reasons, to a small fishing village in the remote south. The prefect, stepping out of a closet full of women's shoes, greeted him with the customary formalities. We are all in this together, the prefect said, as he removed the man's genitals and tossed them gently to the others who had gathered below in the square, and were howling.
(First published in Sentences, 1976, this overtly "political" piece was written during the brutal seven-year reign of the Greek junta (1967-1974). It was 1973 and I was in the tiny fishing village of Kotronas in the Mani, that once so inaccessible and desolate region made famous by Sir Patrick Leigh-Fermor's book of the same name, asking myself why I had returned to Greece after twenty-five years of living in the US.)
The "Milk and Honey House" in Meligalas has about five salamanders that can usually be seen popping their beady-eyed heads out of the stonework around early evening or so; they spend most of their nocturnal time motionless, glued to the ceiling waiting for moths or flies to come within range of their lightning-smart tongues and bam! no more stupidity till the next one's struck dumb. Somewhat like me when I found out some little red Salamander had one of my poems stuck on its tongue; thank you, anonymous little critter, and may you catch many more before the dawn comes.
My thanks to Samantha Rose for following this blog; she has a blog with a catchy name here and likes words and Magritte, among other things. Check it out.
You never knew Jean Genet had a twin brother, did you? Well, here he is, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a genuine Madras shirt underneath a handmade Milk and Honey sweater knitted in 1964. I forget what brand of cigarettes he was smoking at that time (Luckies?) but I do remember reading somewhere in Genet's memoirs how cool his brother said his head felt.That was before Vietnam toasted a lot of his buddies, while he was lucky enough to sweat out most of his two-year hitch playing the role of Kool Kompany Klerk in Sandia Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
