Alimouda Beach, Santorini by Joyce Hinnefeld


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy Tell Me Everything at Amazon.com
Buy
Tell Me Everything
at Amazon.com

 




He moors his tiny boat-all
painted wood, all blues and reds and
greens-for hours it seems.
With his old wool cap and dungarees
he could be in my dreams, or in my
guidebook. But his fish,
in two torn plastic bags, are real.

I am pinned here on this bluff by rock
and wind, tired and sick from travel
and no sleep. But my fingers are fragrant
with the peel of an orange, and its
sweetness is a real thing, too, as
I watch him step to shore, sure-
footed and sun-weathered as he climbs.

He is ageless, and I know as I watch
him that he saw it, that he felt the
moving earth and fled the lava bath
that left behind these carboned rocks,
the flat-topped mountain there behind my head.
Perhaps he sees it still, these forty-some
years later, as he steers his boat
into this cove and makes it so secure.

All these various devastations, all
these fitful origins-all on shifting
spits of land. Here the sun could darken
and return, and elsewhere, at some time,
some wanderer found a first, mysterious
orange-saw it hot and oddly weighted
on the ground, picked it up and peeled it.
Think of his delight to find that lavish
heart, the perfect sweet that lay below
that sunlight-scented skin.

In Fira, once called Thera, ancient
wall paintings, half real and half
imagined later stand secure behind their glass.
In one two birds romp underneath a blackened
sun. Crudely drawn but sexed, one
floats above the other, legs and wings in
dextrous flight. Their beaks stretch open:
loving, crying, biting for the heart
before they face their ashen end.

 

 


JOYCE HINNEFELD an Assistant Professor of English at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.  Her short story collection, Tell Me Everything, selected by Joanna Scott for the 1997 Breadloaf Writers Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction, was published by the University Press of New England in 1998.  She is now at work on a novel, tentatively titled Pilgrim's Song.

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