Peter
Riley
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GREEK PASSAGES part 2 Again this house on a Greek hillside / Autumn. It is passion, not madness, gets the voices speaking through us / isn’t it, Kelvin? The madness, you remember, Barry, / the revenge / tried to swallow the world and sank all hope. / I think I know this place I / put out my hand in the dark for the door frame / I cut out my heart in the paper it might / be serious. / I welcome myself back. I step out of the back door at night in my pyjamas, looking out over 20km of sea and mountain marked by small lights or none. Some kind of insane moth / flutters at my right ear / Learning the language. • Great curve of bay / great curve of disco bars, with yard depots further back, old tourism clutter in heaps, separated by a perimeter fence and a bunch of reeds from the remains of the Lake of Lerna / Still water, choked, smoke rising beyond the westward horizon, and a bell ringing // An ancestral immunity to malaria (many-headed beast) among fishers and tenders of small water-mills, not shared with passing geographers and exiled dramatists... / Last juice of Mycenae trickling down from the hills, oil snake on the water what / form of world leads us out of this / what demography carries the soul westward / “But if the entire Manifest of the world is absorbed / into gold, the world will be destroyed.” The disco bars are magnificent architectural fantasies in honour of the young heart bags of cash and great balls of fire. • Pelei. Low white houses scattered on humps of bare earth, some of them locked, some of them falling down. Among them a new water tank, a bright new block with a blue pipe attached. Low white hopes, some of them fallen. // 1913, rows of faces at a colonial boys’ school in South Africa. A few of them can speak Xhona but they don’t let it be known. / Buried hopes germinate. / To know the language, to learn the sayings: Everything is for those who have none of it. • Coming down that little road / to the sea near Mili that / calm, level, vast pool of light before us / Coming down that little road / & later walking the dark shore near the abandoned factory / a few waders in the shallows, perhaps a spoonbill. / How the money came and slopped around shouting “new” and was gone. Where did it go? / Debris scattered on the shore, and the bright white new apartment blocks, standing in the waste land like refrigerators, like sealed money-boxes. / The truth is always just outside / the lines or boundaries of the land, / the forms of, tales of, melodies, of / That little, final, road. A white heron standing knee-deep in the light, carefully studying it. >>>Robin Hamilton
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