No one knows I’m here, or cares especially,
and if I close my eyes I hear
the distant things Odysseus would have known
if he indeed existed in this place.
The chittering birds,
the muted bonging of the bells
on necks of goats,
like finger-chimes of monks in monasteries.
I smell the wafted perfumes he’d have breathed:
the mix of earth and herbs and warmed-through stone,
the pines and cypresses in this ravine
so high the clouds are stealing softly past.
A giant bowl of human silence,
fecund stadium indifferent to me,
except the cats that track my every move,
their hungry eyes on high alert.
One might just say the silence deafens
when compared to planes that track the Thames
on their descent over my London roof,
assaulting me in morning meditation every working day.
I climb and cannot quite believe
there are no yells or honks
or whoosh of traffic on the bridge,
but just the softest wind.
The bells now nearer through the pines,
the sounds of life on earth for one who watches,
listens, still as he can be,
expecting nothing more.
Exogi, September 2017
I was in Ithaca last week in Stavros!
Loved your book on LA music and Manson mate…
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Thanks, Phil… we were probably drinking coffee together at the Cafe Margarita!
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I was there every morning last week: we called it “the Zak”. What is your email?
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Postscript: you weren’t quite as anonymous as you thought in Exogi. Back in Melbourne I had coffee with my mate Pete the Greek and he told me that he had met “an Irish poet with a motorbike” there the week before I arrived. But his friend Mick the Director scared you off with his camera! So the lesson is: you can’t go anywhere!
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