Rider

This time we are getting drunk on retsina

in somebody’s Italian backyard. We are a long way

from Georgia

and all of us are lonely. I wave my arms

and caw like Hadrian after his lover drowned himself.

My wife walks by the pond singing a hymn;

I think she is leaving me for good. I say, Imagine

my heart is huge and has

little men

walking around inside. They don’t know each other

but they’re stuck there eternally

and have to get along. One of them starts shouting;

he finds a black horse and rides it around in a circle.

The others laugh at him. He leaps from the horse and

starts to choke the smallest man. Something like a hand

starts pumping the heart

and the men nearly go crazy from the pressure.

—The first olive I picked from a tree

was so bitter I nearly threw up. My wife is strolling

around this strange landscape full of broken pediments

as if she plans to be happy from now on. I think

I have to tense it up, act like I’m in control.

I don’t think I can do that. In a few hours the sun will

rise over my brother’s backyard in south Georgia.

He’ll come out and admire the water jewels

the night has hung in the kumquat bush. He’ll hear his son say,

‘Mama,

it’s too big for me to wear,’ and remember quitting the baseball team

thirty years ago

and wish again he hadn’t.

—I get up and march down to the pond. I start to speak

to my wife

but then I feel a hand

that is about to crush my heart.

Source: Red Roads (Dutton, 1987)