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                             for Alan Shapiro

Along a quiet steep rough-cobbled road,
Newly cut weeds and torn green pages
Sweetened the moving air and the light
     Drawn slowly into sunrise
By benevolence, by all that was good, even by gods
     And goddesses.
Early, I hiked uphill to stand in view
Of the seen, silent world and see it.
     Island and ocean.

Then hiking down again, I passed three goats
Tearing silver leaves and a man who had cut
The roadside thistles with a scythe,
     Swinging it, singing, sweaty
     And resting now in shade.
     He greeted me.
     A wary trust, sometimes
Given by a hillside or a person,
Can be accepted, then attempted, too—
     Taken and given in return, by man or woman.

     At the peak,
     Stark-edged against the lifeless soft blue sky,
A walled-in whitewashed island-top belief
Has kept its doors and courtyards, flagstones, roofs enclosed
For ages against town life,
Wild flowers, ruined pagan temples, mule roads, boats,
     And down the slope
On every side, the inky sea of stories:

***

Symbols of what we still have not thought through.
Whenever I remember that place
I go not to the celibate
     Top of Patmos but
Inside that reach of slow-proceeding pagan time
     Where even nothing
Happens as though it were some thing, and where
The moment is as open as
     The sea between

The islands, where slow-or fast-streaming thought,
For which somehow I am made, makes its way
In currents so a slant-sailed boat
     Can trace the star-marked routes
     Across the sea and through time,
     Through calms and gales,
     And navigate ideas
While the many hands of what is dreamed or real,
Benevolent sometimes, steady this old
     Adventurous far-trading human identity.

     In the light
     Of memory, these floating images
(Rough road, wild ivy, mortal weeds, sea cliffs,
Words with eyes, and torn sweet-scented title pages,
A man in his changing moment)
Become the icons of some green impossible
     Creed requiring
Human capacity to be benign.

***

In an ancient cave nearby, a hard hallowed man
     Wrote the phantastic revelations
Of the dark beliefs in which I once put trust.
Prophecies and fiats issue still
     From stone-hard flags, stock markets and armed altars
With both hard hands the plowman shoves the share
     Down through the dry thin dirt
As his mule strains and jerks when the plow catches
On stones and roots. The red-brown undercolor

Of old earth fades in the sun. On my slow walk
Passing behind his field I look back at him a while.
I went to school with hard believers who were always
     Looking back.

***

The restless captain of our late Olympic flight,
     Chatting with me in the narrow aisle
As his copilot flew us out of darkness,
Said he'd like to destroy the Parthenon,
     Get rid of all the damn antiquities—
These were the reason Greece was still so backward.
     Greeks live in the past, he said,
Cutting his eyes at me as he sized me up.
He kept the latest Playboy in the cockpit.

In spring light, delicate wild poppies bloom
Bright red around the trunks of gray-green olive trees,
Beyond the golden planted barley, and everywhere
The plow can't reach.

***

Buildings always know when they
     Are empty: they fade, they seem
Tired, then the inheritors of those
     Who built them unbuild them—
      In some old places,
To pull hard marble down or take it from where it lies
Toppled by earthquakes—not
     To carve again but to chock
It in low new walls or even burn it
     For lime to make whitewash
     Or television fame.

Mythological Kadmos—godlike
Warrior yet still a mortal man,
And himself a fantasy of those
     Who told his story—married
An immortal woman, Harmonia.
     He said that to lie with her
Was a bliss on earth for which there were
No words. And yet however chastely
Men might still wish their goddesses to act,
Doesn't describing their naked beauty already
     Trouble sacred fantasies!
     Something tumbles down.

     On some demolished but still gleaming
     Acropolis of thought,
Language is our Parthenon:
Always in ruins—but unlike stone,
Always rebuilding itself already.
               And not far from it
               In spring light,
               Delicate red
     Poppies bloom at the unnamed foot
Of each gnarled growing gray-green column
And everywhere a poem can't reach.

REGINALD GIBBONS is the author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and translation, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems and the novel Sweetbitter, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.  For his verse he has received the Carl Sandburg Award, the John Masefield Award, and the Balcones Poetry Prize.  His work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Pequod, Literary Imagination and elsewhere. A native of Texas, Gibbons was editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997.  He lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is professor of English at Northwestern University.

"Mortal Men" originally appeared in  A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry

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