Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lover
On Rhodes, 1972
The rooftops glittered in their Greekish way.
Too bright to watch,
the sunlight
haloed on your honey hair
and blew like wind across the lime-green bay.
The tea was amber and too hot to drink,
the bread like cake, the oranges,
blood oranges,
were sweet as either of our lips
but stained the corners of our mouths like ink.
Our fingers and our lips bled with the juice
that made us look
as frightful as
we felt. We took no pleasure
in the plump, wild produce of the island's soil,
now sullen, lonely in our separate skins,
unable to converge
as lovers, truly,
in our island solitudes
cut off from anything outside ourselves.
The irony of such vermillion splendor
simply wasted, blood-
light on the bay,
bright peaks of bloom,
the sway of sea, our bodies like two swords
that might have slain the armies of the night!
Were you or I to blame?
Viridian,
the salt-crisp air at dawn
was trilled by black-necked cormorants and gulls,
by winds that stitched our lattice with a lilting
knit-and-purl, an empty
quilting.
Hungry hearts brought us
to bed, and then to breakfast in the colonnade
the morning after we had come so close.
In silence, in a swelter
of white sun,
red lips, wet hands, we said
no grace and fed, sweet darlings of the age.
Structure
41 lines · 9 stanzas