Achilleion, Corfu
A sky calm, deserted, now noon-stunned.
Doves from the fir trees fell or floated down.
A dusthung garden under evergrieve
Evergreen eaves, pine, cedar, cypresses,
Mooched about a dilapidated mansion; leaned
Over a megalithic marble balustrade;
Swung down, oscillant, in stony terraces
By hairpin pauses to a broken quay.
As abandoned habitations mourn, did this.
Turning an eye up empty of message,
The sea grinned. I dwelt on its horizon.
Mine would not meet that mindless retina’s
Cyclopean vacancy: but a Parian image
From under a marble alfresco baldachin
There gazed at its glass-blue, scribbled over
with catspaws and the routes of ocean streams.
The nineteenth century in serene contradiction
Outstared, discountenanced its alteration.
The dovewhite kaiserin stood gently by
The odeon grandeur and the Adriatic bay
The monumental bungalow and the ilexes:
Among bourgeois statuary and heavy leaves,
The Teuton villa and imperial bathroom,
Memorial to more than a period, one would say,
So short a time, it seems, it took for this
Rococo estate to range with the Minoan.
More is emblamed here than Hohenzollern.
One more reminiscence of this littoral!
-Not the Prussian thought or Austrian purpose,
But, comic and admirable as the villa,
The collapsed structure of moral Europe:
Of whatever was fought for on either side
After the Sarajevo pistol shot.
Densely I saw the shadowing cedars crowd
The grievous artifacts and ornamented pride,
On one side sea, on the other olive groves,
The two that carry and survive cultures.
A relic of the latest, alas absurd,
Surprised in the first stages after death,
A dropjawed corpse in the elegiac shroud
The living gardens offer, propped erect,
Surveyed immortal water, flecked
Quicksilver rows of greyer olive trees,
Derelict on a golden coast
By gods vacated, where loiter shards.
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