Paros, Paradise

Once I was lost on an island—Paros, paradise—
and I followed a stray dog to the center of town.

Dogs know the way. I don’t. I was with JT,
and we’d been drinking ouzo and laughing

about a lingering handprint on his chest
where Diana’s friend from Athens smacked him.

We didn’t know anything
except that the earth looked just like

the heavens: blue sky, blue ocean, white
clouds, white stucco. And we were friends.

We knew we were lost. We had been lost
for a while. But it didn’t seem like a problem.

What does lost become, then?

Loosened. Cord-cut and floating.
Or so we thought.

The thing about paradise: The garden
is walled. The smooth continuity

of blue-white, white-blue is a cerulean cruelty,
a mirage of endlessness. What endures?

In Paros, there is marble sleeping centuries now
in dark quarries we never saw, never knew to see.

Its carved daughters stand stranded far from home,
headless and limbless in Paris, cold

people longing to touch their flawed, fleeting stone.
In Paros, there are oranges and pomegranates

and pretty women who didn’t look at me
and the off-season hotelier, drinking alone

in our empty hotel, who did, Amy Winehouse
on loop,          I cheated myself…

We all ate the fruit and got older.

If we were there, we are there
forever. We found our way and went home

where we believed ourselves more tethered.
But we weren’t ever as free as we felt, as free

as we remember feeling. Beyond the island, the ocean.
Beyond the ocean, the sky. Blue-white marble,

floating in airless dark. No sympathy. No company
or booze or music. The vast, unknowable

truth of the matter. We are small dogs in it,
barking at nothing in the empty temple.