Tag: Discobolus

The problem with Ithaka

          “Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
          Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
          But don’t hurry the journey at all”
          —C.P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”

All that has ever been told—the war,
the landlocked sea chanting with storms, the right and the wrong
reasons to pause on narrow shores, to postpone the destination
for erroneous turns, the many gods asked to listen to the eternal yearnings,
all—is true. And faithful in the distance, Ithaka—sealed reminiscence, awaits.

Ithaka–my luminous island in the middle of a sea claimed as mine
through blood and birth. There, bare-breasted alabaster goddesses
clasp serpents exquisitely coiled in front of gardens and portals.
Emerald salamanders dart out of the cool shade. Sensuous paintings
enlighten alcoves, and seagulls fly wide-winged shadows
over the rain-peppered sand. There, young girls splash whitewash on the walls
to clean the winter’s soot, fishermen spill nets into the sea, and peasants
cut thick monastic bread, while the opulent dawn spreads its blossom
on the salt-soaked line of the horizon. Everything and everyone is there.

From the dark yeast of my return, I long to be back and settle there,
between my old boundaries of right and wrong.

The road is long, strewn with unknown ports lively with commerce,
and merchants offering mother-of pearl, ebony, seductive perfumes;
and I do take my time, cross an insomniac sea, greedily tasting the life
sprouting avariciously around. I get rich with wisdom on the way
to the place I keep in my mind as my destined ground, while the sky
strides forward with wet birds flying tall arches, restless and weary.

Amid fluorescent foam and the sea’s vociferous slang, Ithaka
remains the only language broad enough to shelter all my longings.
And finally, I disembark. Stranded like the sand between sea and land,
impatient, I search for the usual illusion—friends, houses, people and gardens,
thinking the void is behind me. But all I find is my own ghost—what I would
have become had I stayed in the world that exists only in the mementoes
of those who lived long enough to see me return.

O, Ithaka goes on being Ithaka, all right. It takes me in as its Lazarus
returned from the dead, long after Life has healed his absence
into a scar of myth.

 
Travelogue

To have gone there in search of the Agora
and Zeus’s temple, eager to touch Neolithic ruins 
so large they change one’s understanding of grandeur, 
          only to find the long shadow of the Acropolis 
          over the busy metropolis piercing through
          yet one more new millennium. 

To have gone there in search of the ancient Olympic Stadium, 
too small now for the world it lives in, surrendering 
its twenty-five-hundred-year-old marble statues and shrines
to the silvery olive groves glistening in the Mediterranean sun, 
          only to find its midday stillness suddenly broken 
          by a few preschoolers bursting into a playful race—
          the dust their colored sneakers stirred settling back 
          on the track behind them, like an afterthought.

To have gone there in search of Socrates and Pericles— 
faces chiseled in marble in all their temporal imperfections, 
and of the perfect body of the Discobolus, its flawless 
fluidity of movement seized into bronze, 
          only to find solace among diamondback turtles 
          crisscrossing the Kerameikos between graves
          and mortuary bas-reliefs of fighters, of babies, of mothers 
          long gone from the world, their names kept sacred 
          by the marbled memory of gravestones, their stone eyes 
          endlessly watching the feral cats 
          and the twenty-first-century stray tourists.

To have gone there in search of the Omphalos, the center 
of the world, abandoned among columnar ruins 
and pencil-shaped cypress rivaling the svelte marble pillars 
along steep paths all the way to Pythia’s oracular sanctuary, 
          only to be bewitched by the bees and the ghostly thin cats 
          roaming Parnassus, indifferent to the wisdom in the know thyself 
          maxims, erased now from what’s left of Delphi’s frontispiece. 

To have gone there in search of history’s face
its mythic voices I have been yearning for 
ever since as a child I read about the Greeks, 
          only to be bewitched by the tui tui tui songs of rock nuthatches 
          busily building their mud nests on the jagged slopes of volcanic islands
          above the salty waters of a turquoise sea, just like Pliny described them. 

 
Shopping

In the fashion catalog, the tunic
I’m falling in love with
against my will
is described as being made
of soft silk,
Mediterranean-blue.

Its light turquoise
brings back the quiver
of the hypnotic Ionian Sea.
I close my eyes
to better remember
the bright blue,
the glistening white pebbles
magnified under the lens
of clear water. Fiskardo.
A red boat bobbing not far from shore,
a fisherman—his hands plastered
with fish scales, iridescent
in the morning light—bringing
buckets full of fish
to a quaint restaurant nestled
under a small cliff on the beach,
the smell of salt on sun-heated
limestone.

I order the tunic.
It has already taken me
back to Greece.