True to Life

It was August and it was hot
And they buried him quickly;

Just as he was being lowered,
She left to water the livestock.

A Poem for Joe Hutchison

who said so

naturally that sweet shiver of rightness
in response to a poem

I'd written about my wife,
then went on with

that keeps poets writing
and their readers reading--

this one's for him
who read what I wrote,

then put it so

sweet and right,
just like my wife.

Killer Instinct

Insane, the insane fly

Which, over the city
Is the bright light of shipwreck

--George Oppen,
"Of Being Numerous"


Something keeps
Telling me

I have to put an end
To this fly which is

Driving me mad--

Like some still unfinished business,
Perhaps a poem--

The mere thought
Of executing

It excites me
To no end.

A Somewhat Prosaic Love Poem

My wife's forever after me
To tell her what I'm writing

Day-after-day; when I look at her
And tell her I have nothing to say,

I see the way she looks at me
Has everything, everything to do

With what I have to say.

(First published in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem, #5.)

Recently and not-so-recently received: Tulpen in India by Peter Goedhart in Dutch, English and Hindi editions: Apart from the author, I must be the only proud owner of all three signed versions though I have no way of being certain--but does it really matter? Of course not. What does matter is that more people are made aware of this beautiful little book. Which reminds me. . . . . . . .

In 1997 Eleni and I had been living in our half-completed, two-story stone house for about a year; at that time she had a tiny sandwich shop in Meligalas's lower square. This had previously been the town's first and only gift shop, which she ran from 1987 to 1996 and which had managed to run in the black long enough for other shop owners to get wind of a good thing and start stocking their own stores with what they hoped would be equally "nifty" gifts. Why not? The more the presents, the merrier the present. It finally got so bad that at one point one woman who lived a block away from the shop started selling gifts out of her living room. It was at this point that we decided to do our store over into a combo sandwich shop-ouzeri. Eleni ran this culinary oasis by herself until 2003, and it quickly became a hang-out for people who loved good food. Since I had an extensive collection of authentic rembetika (Greek urban blues) songs and I also played at "playing" the tzoura, it soon attracted those few denizens of upper Messenias who were hooked on this kind of music. In no time at all, people who could play bouzouki, tzoura and baglama began dropping by the place and it soon became the only watering hole in the vicinity where you could eat great food, drink good homemade wine, and listen to live though harshly-played rembetika--that is until the police started receiving complaints about the loud music being played after hours and told us we had to stop disturbing the peace. We never found out who had lodged the complaints but Eleni and I suspected a taverna owner farther up the street who had no good food, no good wine, and no live music.

Late one summer night that year, Eleni and I were about to close up and go home when I saw a couple on heavily loaded bicycles hesitate in front of the shop--clearly tourists and clearly confused as to their whereabouts. They had mistakenly assumed there was a hotel in Meligalas (long since razed but still mentioned in some hopelessly outdated guide books) and had stopped in the upper square to ask its location. "No, no hotel here but you can camp behind church in lower square--no problem!" No problem? Well, at that time the area behind the church was a Rom ghetto where the local gypsies had been squatting in deplorable conditions for the last twenty years, waiting for the central government to find them a piece of land where they could live decently. I told the cyclists so and asked them to park their bicycles and have something to drink on us. After they had finished, Eleni suggested we invite them to stay the night at our house; they slept in their sleeping bags on the bare, concrete floor of our unfinished second-storey bedroom and had breakfast with us before continuing on their way to Ancient Messene. This chance meeting more than ten years ago with Peter Goedhart and Ans Brouwer of Wageningen, Holland morphed into a lasting friendship marked with visits to our house whenever they come to Greece. It was during one of these visits that Peter told me the organization he worked for--ICCO--was planning to publish a book of his short stories based on his field experiences in Nepal, India and Pakistan. The Dutch version came out in 2003, and when Peter and Ans visited us again, I suggested Peter try persuading ICCO to publish an English version of Tulpen in India--after all, how many people have access to Dutch and how many to English? ICCO was receptive to the proposal and the English version came out in 2005; the Hindi was published in 2008 by an independent Indian publisher who came across the English version and thought it would be a wonderful book for those Hindus who do not know English. So there you have it--Tulpen in India in Dutch, English, Hindi--and as an introduction, here is something taken from the blurb on the back cover of the English version: In twenty-four vignettes, Peter Goedhart has recorded his penetrating observations. He paints a surprising yet recognizable picture of people who are trying to improve their lives. Or hang onto their privileged position. And what we Westerners are doing there. Required reading for those who'd like to find out, written in a sparse prose punctuated by a wry, inimitable sense of humor by someone who definitely knows what he's talking about.