Athens, 1955
Poor Keats had died again in my mind that day
and it was only right, then, to be climbing
up Hymettus to the famed hives of honey
processioned by the smoked-out stunted cypresses.
On another peak drunk Greeks echoed a chant,
like the shards of voices broken upon mountains.
I mounted, through white and orange-white
and true-red oleander, and at the terraced height
found a fountain where soap stains faded
and the evening air escaped fresh from her blue bath
and there, like a clue, up the stone walls
hung honeysuckle. And the bees in a garden of thyme.
Only, however, at a promontory beyond
before an abandoned Byzantine chapel
where a lizard slunk under the door
and a master cricket leapt upon the facing,
lost in the presence of a life he had left
for lost, only there did I stop, stare out
over the ancient site, Acropolis and all,
jewelled into the sea through electricity,
rise to Salamis, Parnassus in the haze,
discover the western star
rededicating the immensity of the sky,
and I drank, with silent ouzel, health to a dead poet.
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