Greek Unorthodox

 

A fifth excerpt of my hypothetical Crete novel, Reading the Stones, has been published online by Scrawl Place (great name)—"part visitor’s guide, part travelogue, part literary journal.  It’s meant for readers who prefer Bashō to Lonely Planet."

 

This is another segment of Anna's story, called "Greek Orthodox," and follows "Octopus" (Lowestoft Chronicle, Spring 2019), "Blue Monkeys" (Belle Ombre, March 2019), "Naxos" (Mediterranean Poetry, 2019), and a stand-alone segment featuring the novel's other main character, Mar—"Green Flash" (Silver Stork, September 2019).

 

Yet another portion of the novel was rewritten for different characters, with a different focus, as the story "Without Trace," and published by Halfway Down the Stairs (Frontiers issue) in March 2022.

 

"Greek Orthodox" takes place in Chaniá, on the northwestern shore of Crete, mostly in the agora (buying a red mullet and bit of feta; other days fish soup, various types of pite, the time-honored Greek pies), and various churches.  Eighty-year-old Anna loving what's there ("colorful as all get-out, she’d be the first to agree"), and always, achingly, the man who's still vividly with her in memory; but longing for her old, familiar home ("my own small fiefdom") back in Philadelphia, where she becomes resolved to return.

 

"A sunbeam fell through a high, crossed window—meant, charged.  Half the time she wondered whether religion wasn’t all about aesthetics.  Like theatre, it involved putting on a good show, lest your audience quickly lose interest.  Her eye followed the commanding beam of light that cut across the dawdling arches straight and sure, like a theatre spot.  A spotlight was meant to highlight faces, the action at dramatic center stage where the whisper was happening.  But moving into it, she was aware only of gold.  A field of gold.  A sown field and a battlefield.  (She would have to start incorporating gold into her paintings, it had such a dazzling effect.)  The dizzy gold of bees of saints of all the wisdom of antiquity passed down through scholars’ hands, hushed and guarded as religion, forbidden as passion."

 

 

 

image:  View of Agia Aikaterini church, Chania old town, Wikimedia Commons

 

 

September Picnic at DeLaveaga

 

September Picnic at DeLaveaga

 

Observing our unendingly exhausted souls,

I'm grateful all the same to have our sink unclogged

(the plumber like a Scotsman we have come to know

who plants a kindergarten of baby redwoods, 

builds things, voice like a dram of finest single malt, 

Laphroig once shared beside the river 

all awash with city lights).  Grateful to have one more 

(if only one—an ache of absence at the other end) 

incredible rendition of that metamorphic play, after 

another evening's consultation with the trees

and cloths narrating light on the table of sturdy, 

reassuring wood.  Lustrous cotton woven in France, 

underlying our summer salads, generously layered cake.  

And maybe as I write owls are gathering there,

above the stilling town, the stone blue ocean 

a marginal note with maybe a little sailboat or two, 

guileless as children's drawings (a few peaky pencil lines, 

a daub of white), as nothing else is anymore.  

Making a grocery list before we go:  "something like

twenty shrimp," fresh mint (which I somehow forget), 

feta, tomatoes still holding summer in them—

tasting of Greece, of the island we visited

where a long ago favorite book was set, about 

a kind of Prospero manipulating love and loss.  

Things we're all facing now, so I have my heart set

on that shrimp with summer tomatoes and oregano, 

another hour or two there among the watching trees, 

before the summer and the rest of it comes to an end.

image:  Christie Cochrell

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Santa Fe