At night, large ships sail past
all lit up, furrowing the horizon with deep
presentiments of sorrow. How quiet it is
in the chambers of memory! The cheap hotel,
the iron bed-frame, the cigarette butts on the stairs,
an antique candlestick on the wash-stand.
When you looked out the window to the west,
there were stars in the small sky, and a bicycle
propped against a wall. The next morning,
it poured rain. You hadn’t slept all night.
But still you lingered, hoping that Diotima
would show herself in the depths of the mirror.
Karlovasi, 7-13-87
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.
