Epidaurus

Le Poéte doit étre capable de tout.

-COCTEAU

I. THE ROAD

The road does not think the road

lifts who walks it out of the valley

shares his exhaustion and blows dry his sweat

contracts his disease and sucks the poison

into the wind and olive roots

it lets him in to what it knows

it knows Epidaurus and it cures

those who relinquish to its grip

as it creases the brown palm a lifeline opens

through the clenched Peloponnesus

telling Greece its own fortune

bees from their wooden hives

still sift savage pollen of Kypris

on all our flowering fields

jugular fissures between cliffs

swallow all travelers the ancient trucks

with whom I hitch rides

shudder to crests which set us free later

in colder air the movie star McQueen

overtakes me his body vibrating from

power he sits astride

we smoke

he banks

into loops of descending road

from deep in my head

against the bridge of my nose Pasiphae at last

braces her feet as she swells to the boneless

murder of the bull's orgasm

its mythical rage now a soft pulse her

hysterical delicacy lost on him

2. THE DISEASE OF IMAGES

There are images made of roads who meet

where legs come together at the body

these put the eyes out they lead eyes

who love the naked mother

to the steel pins of her brooch

Imagination blinds you like your own father it's

capable of anything stops at nothing

it sucks your life into one image let it be

a word from Apollo

or lightning from Zeus

it wipes out

how many? every blessed

modality of your life

and at Colonnus

the loving earth receives you

she is your mother

you hear musical wrath from your own body

filling the whole woman with child

3. ARRIVAL

I walk in the good hands of the road

which let me go in a meadow

the road fleetingly a river

flowing through ruins on the valley floor

I make flames for coffee I fear it I drink it

in the evening sadness of nothing coming on

it is the god of nothingness

who impersonates midnight coffee whose blackness,

annihilates its own stimulants

the patient cup still warms my hands

and rest invites my journey flow

sweetly back through my body and asks me

does this fatigue of walking

lead somewhere images cannot find

if I follow the body

as one follows a road into the mountains?

Without warning I become what I climb

the road and the olive tree

with the mildest encouragement from mist

collecting on my hair and eyelids

my eyes blink open as olives black

wizen-glistening with digestive acid

4. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS

Greeks bring their sickness

from mainland and island to these precincts

sacred to Asklepios student of the natural body

student of herbs

Cheiron the centaur taught him to heal

those to be cured are made pure by a cold sea bath

incense fumes permeate them

they sacrifice to the god cakes gorged with honey

a rigorous fast prepares them to receive

their new selves they dress in white

the dream-inducing color

sleep in long houses lit all night with small lamps

snakes slide through the sleepers

whispering sometimes a cure in their ears

in natural dreams the soul reveals

what will enhance the body

at dawn priests in white gowns circulate

with sacred dogs with ointments

the uncured remain they act in the great theater

run in games at the stadium

if sickness persists or death comes

the patient thereby declares his impiety

incurable failure of confidence

it is not permitted mortal man

to die or be born in these precincts

One paralyzed in the fingers came mocking his chances

dreamed he played dice with a god

who stomped

on guilty fingers which woke flexing

Kleo pregnant five years felt the god's hand

on the child asleep in her sleeping womb

in the morning beyond the precinct

she bore in agony a boy who washed off blood

of his own birth and walked beside his mother

5. SOUND

What in this place

precipitates widsom from dreams

humankindness from gods and beasts

I move in the healing valley

hearing the purity all sound

carries

the theater

immersing its tuned bowl

of stone tiers in a large bowl of hills

wherein all barking wind modulation

the sharp spoken word hold firm ripen

warm mile-off animal breathing

bristles the beard from its soft sleep in my face

the khaki mound on my shoulders slides

under surveillance from the roadside

in Greek crippled by twenty centuries

what some rough shepherd is telling wells into sense

carnivorous menace running through his voice

don't sleep in this valley

wild dogs will awaken you

6. DOGS

I shrugged him off

through sparse darkening ruins

scouting the level terrace where I would sleep

back down in that panorama of sickness and health

of blackening greens of wounded sound growing well

salvation say votive scratches on a wall

is an animal quietly present in dreams

I think of a hard child carried from Thebes

deranged seething who finds himself next morning

looking at the sick in Spartan calm

a gazelle in his arms

I am surrounded by eiderdown

cold

rain

darkness

up to my ears and eyes

Something wild

perseveres toward my smell

my knife is out

invisibly near me a sheepdog edges in

but the imagined menace

ends he curls

into himself an inch from my scalp

limbs which monsters in halfsleep chomp away

are restored

his sleepless fur rubbing me whole

his teeth the tuneless numbness of the rain

the terrible intimacy of the valley removed sleep

to something promised by the next world

The wind was blowing my fear

away toward the bells of sheep

hemmed in to their folds by an unseen power

then all the bells fell silent

across the floor of the Hadean valley

heaving toward me

the breath of sprinting dogs

their barks

hit all around me

the sheepdog woke across my throat

for a second my face buried in fur

he crashed downhill

slowed the arriving dogs

poised their reconnaissance

returned them scrambling to lower terraces

incited again through laurel and olive

they hurl and tangle

in his arrogance

light comes and quiet comes

his jaws pulse from exertion

who is he who gave him to me

I feel for the last waves of my disease

the dregs my cure

7. CURE

All night whatever the valley held washed

into my ears

trucks churning up

pebbles a slow reversal of air going nowhere

the bells the barks singers

seeking the high notes of pleasure

responding to a radio

protective sniffs of the dog

these surfaced in my palms

which were still palms folding my gear

when I look out across it my mind

opens into that valley lives

beyond its own reach

welcomes all who invade it

brings all terrors near

will not tell me a god was in that dog

my sins in those wolves

I leave the valley

with my eiderdown encumbered

by thirty pounds of rain

which the sun grows thirsty for, the while

pouring lightness on my shoulders