One by one the sleek bathers will leave.
The fiery autumn sunsets will linger on the sea,
with one sad skiff—and still
we put off the rain, the rampaging winds,
still we put off the inevitable (for how long?).
Already yellow leaves pile up on the garden benches.
Perhaps, uncelebrated on its hill, the chapel to the Holy
Trinity remembers us. Meanwhile, here in the house,
the floor is littered with summer sandals
and little Persephone’s big blue towel.
Karlovasi, 7-16-87
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.