Testament

The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne,
the snail leaves

a never re-
versing

trail of silver
over the earth’s

repository.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Worm digging

Your way in
To the mind’s eye
In earnest—

No hemming,
No hawing,
Till death—

Do us asunder.

Exiles

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.)

Gone

disappeared—

the derelict walked right on up
the wind-

swept street round
the corner down

to where (he remembered)

the old man’s shoe-
shine stand

ran down.

Goldfinch

caught
red-

handed
branching

yellow
bird-

like
twig

light's
song.

(First published in an untitled slightly different version in Shearsman #1, 1981.)