In the yellow field, a straw hat and a red cow.
A white horse switching greenflies with its tail.
I remembered the dead poet’s cornfield, and sunflowers.
I checked my watch: two o’clock. Some skin divers
were coming back from the water, still in their wetsuits.
One of them, carrying his blue fins and a large octopus,
looked at me as if he knew me. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I said back, and felt like I should have said more.
Then a breeze came down off the mountain, the olive trees
shivered, the cicadas stopped. With a feeling of peace,
I stepped forward to stroke the white horse’s mane.
Karlovasi, 7-29-87
Assistant Professor of English, specializes modern and contemporary British, Irish and world literature, with a focus on poetry. Recent articles include “Ulysses Victorianus and the Other Knowledge of Empire” (Ariel); “Classicism and Colonial Retrenchment in Yeats’s ‘No Second Troy’” (Twentieth Century Literature); “Counter-Homericism in Yeats’s ‘The Wandering of Oisin’” (Yeats and Postcolonialism, 2001); and “Looking for the Barbarians” (Poetry of the Mix: Cavafy, Modernity and Transculturalism, 2000). His translations from modern Greek include Late Into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos (Field, 1995) and the novel The Courtyard by Andreas Franghias, which won the 1996 Greek National Book Award for Translation.
