Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

who lured me with promises
and sea-foam oaths,
who then abandoned me
for his sailors, for the first
prevailing wind to Greece.
My bottles dash
against the coral reef —
they break too soon,
or fall to the hands
of illiterate fishermen.
Here where this jagged mount
of Naxos scrapes sky,
harping a stone calliope
with fingers of wind, I wait,
far off the route of ships.
Someone below the horizon shall hear it.
Some ship will turn toward me.
Only a hero can avenge me.
Only a god can cancel
the vacancy of Theseus
that pulls inside of me
like an inverted birth.
In my dreams I begin to see him,
the purple sails of his galley,
his laughing eyes, the wreath
of grape leaves in his golden hair.
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