Author: Anders Dahlgren

 
kalispera

In the dusk around the corner by the butcher shop
a few white-haired men look up from their circled chairs,

cigarettes, pipes, their leather shoes, clean
and shiny where I muse

every time I round the corner to this
opening at the end of this long alleyway, the stillness, the white-capped sea, the spring

blossoms, where they listen
in the pure and familiar silence

that is home.
When I stop what I’m doing, what appears like nothing really, a walk,

and listen, their kalispera
my kalispera in unison kalispera.

It’s my precise pronunciation, my eyes
invisible behind brown-tinted sunglasses, my always quick

amble, my impossible tranquility
in the dusk’s darkening the alto barks of wandering startled dogs,

their aloneness, my aloneness, every time I’m aware of the fricatives
of the Cretan language and the olives

on their shared table, soaked in brine.

 

 
Diaphanous

Tempered by daybreak my sometimes,
suckled from four directions,
spirit, enjoying particularly in October

                                 my hands, their curvature, along the path of Lasíthi,
                                 and there are almonds, and           delicate
                                                               orange slices, too, and in the distance

the familiar bark of a dog how
              in Kastamonítsa we are caught
              in newness and disobedience of mid-autumn when

even the plants and Sea have little order where
              in this brief undulate              I get                            away

                            with the          g          in goddess.

 
Ceremony: A Kind of Greek Woman

Water is served with coffee.
There’s coffee for me
at Xanthi Hair Lounge
ordered for me from the coffee

and pastry shop next door.
While a new color saturates
my hair. There’s bottled water
placed so gently before me as though

it were in a crystal glass I feel
I will cry. The gestures of the females here
careful, deliberate, like the tilt
of a head, and the mouths

that speak with fullness, tasting
the English language tender
in their mouths as the sounds
savored, are strewn together, so unbearably

sexy as though the lips and tongue
are full of want or romance or with
beating wings as if filled
with blessings that cannot be

contained, and outlined with
shades a bit darker than a lip color.
There’s coffee, and sometimes a glass of water
on the tray, with sugar, and hazelnuts

and sultanas. Some are shaped like
the lower half of a Greek
woman, the waist, hips, buttocks,
the thighs this full shape impossibly

important. Once when I was younger
I was told at the covered market in another location
in Heraklion that I am the shape
and face of a Greek woman. The one in black

with a Byzantine crucifix
said this. Carry yourself as a Greek woman.
The water flows from springs in the highest mountains.
When drinking Dictamnus tea acknowledge

beauty in the nod of a head, the flair of a hand as
when a belly dancer swirls
her hands in the air. Her mouth, too full to be delicate.
Sometimes with the coffee there are two sugars.

 
Quake

Petals sway in unison
with the boom that raises
the sea waves at the beach, all females

singing static. I pull back
my thinning hair with hairpins—
                                             in case the quakes’ aftermath—
and take pleasure in the moans

of my own Greek ache. After-affects a little
coarse like a salt scrub. It feels risky
to not look below and not look

                                             above everything
extraordinary and bright bright blue.