Wind scorches the dirty-blond earth
receiving the Temple
of Dionysus, whose columns shored up
by cement are marble
twenty centuries have weathered a cross
between the ashen trunks
of the still-standing olive trees
& their quicksilver leaves, as Teos returns
to dust surrounded by an endless grove
of mandarin oranges. When I dusted
myself off in the lime-green sea
opposite a beach gold
in name only, the water was so cold
it scalded me, the way I burned my tongue
licking a freezing monkey bar the color
of lead forty years ago in the park
below where my mother grew up
in the City of Lakes. I learned
to hold my tongue & listened to her stories
of the figures she’d cut as a girl skating
into the early dark, scratching the surface
of snow-dusted ice marked
like these moon-white rectangles underfoot
I’ve zigzagged seeking the shadowy traces
of cryptic letters set
in stone, the black magic
that keeps souls alive when the sky caves in.
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