1.

Morning. Stillness. Silence. Silence – and then footsteps. There’s a road – a track really – on the mountainside. No human on it. A snake in the sun. A lizard. A cricket. Shale. 

 

This is not an old road. From time to time ways can be seen, overgrown with grass and flowers, making their way into ancient terraces of olives. Remnants of walls. The ways may connect somewhere.

 

These same trails snake across the waters, throwing their nets over other islands. Interminable islands. Flagged by butterflies. 

 

The footsteps die away. Silence once more. Silence – and then a hammering. Someone is building a house or a boat. A beginning.

 

2.

Here, where the thin-fingered leaves of the gnarled olives give shade to the rocks grappling their roots, the ebullient wild oak and pale thorn beside, among the black spiders big as the palm of your hand – why are we so afraid of them? – and the whiplash snakes with eyes green as cats’, and the wingèd ants, the butterflies consumed by curiosity and the bee burrowing into the honey-suckled bougainvillea, the beetle, oh, and the flies, always the scavenging flies-in-waiting, and there across the water beyond the inaccessible headland, the islands appearing and disappearing like so many colonies won and lost. 

 

Yes, well over there somewhere they say there are fields of asphodel – but, wherever they are, they too are lights across the bay, a teasing enchantment – oh, and I overlooked them, the little birds flitting to and fro and the wide-eyed crickets hopping about, the echoing cicadas and the long-tongued geckos signalling stop and go… 

 

Fiddle away your respective lifetimes, friends. There are no becalmed fields of asphodel. Human invention too the House of Atreus and the like – and the Houses of Healing hidden away under the bleachers can offer no consolation, no catharsis. 

 

Come belovèd, however bad it may be where the rocks grasp the roots of the twisted olives in the realm of all that crawls and creeps, it is all we have, this one – maybe the last – moon-rise.

 

3.

We like to think we know where Odysseus stopped. It was here, we say, and here. Yes, the lady says who is serving papoutsakia. It was here – and over there is Ithaka. But Ithaka is lost in a haze. And a lady on another island perhaps is saying, It was here – and over there… 

 

Odysseus eludes us all – whether or not we sit under the oh-so-old olive trees looking out over the oh-so-blue waters, hearing the hammering of new ships fitted out.  

 

We cannot hope to understand him – cunning, civil, courageous – until, putting the bougainvillea and the rose behind us, we too set sail, scramble onto the rocks of alien shores and scatter across the median seas, risking the waters closing over our heads, only a vague memory of a man they call Odysseus to guide us. 

 

Odysseus, where is he to be found? He is neither fore nor aft. Nor strapped to a mast amidships. 

 

The midday sun burns our thoughts to cinders and it is only when the evening wind comes surfing through the pines to cool the stones, we learn that the moon that is ever rising will collect and resurrect the heat-haze of our dreams.

 

Artwork by: Giuseppe Bottani