For Efessos

Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled

Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one

Donkey bolts uphill

for a little cloud

St. Heracleitos’s day and something’s up

That even noses can’t diagnose:

Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem

Of Fate’s nightgown and leaving

Us in the open air of capricorns

exposed

Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind

For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no

chandeliers

Only a gold anemone’s engagement for a diamond

Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon’s half-

shadow needs

You to console even the graves

Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth

Lost even to bloodhounds

With its weeds onions and creeks

Must be restored to its idiom

So what! A word contains you peasant of night’s green

Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth

generation

Inside the orange groves gold words

Sharing the scalpel’s chisel

Tents as yet unpitched

others midair

Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons

Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves

Twin scythes for theater or temple

Fresh valley springs and other curly streams

Of thus and so. If ever wisdom

Planned circles of clover and dog grass

Another world might live just as before

your fingerprint

Letters will exist. People will read and grab

History’s tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky

remain

Unbridled as children want it

With roosters and pinecones and blue kites

flags

On Saint Heracleitos’s day

child’s is the kingdom.

Source: Eros Eros Eros: Selected and Last Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)