Vasiliki's July poem

Hi Dargie and Claire--
I was in Greece for a few weeks, and just now catching up with everything.
Dargie, will comment on your poem shortly...

Blue Sky with Teeth

It was after dark in Athens, inside the taxi
we moved into a darker night
soon to be early morning after a full moon
skirting the Acropolis and its dark runes
whose workers-in-arms had locked the gates
betrayed by a promise to access Europe’s rooftop
and this latest wave of dear invaders-
Venetians, Ottomans, Germans, Americans-
marble paths glow slick with the tread of a thousand years
gripping the wheel, the toothless driver sighs
people only believe what they see and hear
though born on this Earth
I am 30% from here and 70% from the stars--
we are each tripartite, a compound of body, soul, and mind
the Devil owns the organs
but not the Soul,
from the Soul he can be barred,
exiled through prayer--
My room at home is barely larger than this taxi
I lie awake alone and try to imagine Him
the Christ who came to earth
for a little August vacation, just like you--
He cast no shadow even at noon on the hottest day
because he is Light
Here and Nowhere and Everywhere at once,
had He been weighed then, He would have weighed nothing
being lighter, being Light itself--
Our sleep is a practice death
our sleep makes life possible
just as death does--
and as the Encephalos combines
signals from all organs simultaneously
so does the Greater Power align all and everyone--
seven billion signals of the Universe into one

We sped along a corridor
that had just opened--
was I conversing with my dead father,
with a toothless taxi driver, who was taking me where--
I didn’t know

  

(Encephalos is Greek word for mind)

Dargie's June poem

ALMOST TO TONGANOXIE

The herd on the north side of the highway—

I noticed to my minor shock last week—

has calved.  Where before it consisted

of uniformly-sized brown beasts,

sometimes all facing the same direction,

sometimes chest-deep in the cattle pond

or curving around to stay in the shade,

the herd is now made of unlike elements—

half the grown ladies, and half 

knob-kneed calves who tend to stay close.  

I can’t help but imagine

the ladies are feeling unweighted

and more like themselves. I can’t

stop enjoying the sight of calf and mother,

familiar from Arkansas days—

heaving their heads

into their mothers’ udders just before nursing—

it's like when I see a child close in age

to one of my own children

and certain gestures are from a script I know.

Meanwhile the herd on the south side

of the interstate is still pregnant.

The big ladies lumber, and I can’t help imagining

how their feet must hurt.   Calve, we say,

of a glacier, when pieces break off into the ocean,

and it is like that with the cows, as if

a brown shard of their own flesh

has dropped free to run on its own. 

The still-pregnant herd gets moved, the pasture

is empty, weeks go by. 

Then one day, the herd is back:

mamas and babies,

large and small, all in a lovely,

mutually-resembling shade of brown.