Bazouki recordings blasting the air.
Handcrafts by the ladies of the Greek Church;
trays of dolmades, moussaka, sugar-dusted sweets.
Parking lot dust sweeps under the striped canopies
and settles in a fine mist. Every September they come
from both ends of Route 3, Greeks from all over
gathering at this sparse grove. (And the “barbarians”
with a taste for baklava, an ear for bazouki.)
These are my father’s people, whose dance
I learned from a Jewish friend,
but I have no words for their songs.
Not family, it’s the idea of family that brings me,
eavesdropping on soft consonant sounds,
stupidly pointing at foods whose honest names
I can’t pronounce: keftethes, flaounes, …
moving among stalls of worry beads,
Parthenon T-shirts, knits and quilts
made by women serving spinach pie and shish kebab:
Thespinas, Sophias, Fotinis. … Names gather
on my tongue. The men pour Coca Cola,
Budweiser, resin-laced retsina,
that startles the stranger and puckers the friend.
I take some, settle myself on a stone in a thin shade,
a tatter of oak shared with toadstools, wild asters,
and Psyche, abandoned on a White Rock bottlecap.
From here I can watch the dancers circle and
stumble,
the young in their bright colors and sweat-brilliant
skin. I toast them, and Hellas, and this scraggly grove,
then pour out the rest on the earth.
The veins of my hand trail toward the ground
in roots: Thalia, my haunted sister, a lifetime
removed,
smoking and pacing in the cell of her hours;
Lambros, my father, old and alone in the city,
in the ruined temple of his pride.
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