Several years ago I visited the island of Paros, Greece, just a few hours from the sweltering heat and bustle of Athens by hyrdrofoil boat, and far enough away that it felt like my own paradise. The view from my window in the small Pension/guest house where I stayed was my church:  pink skies over a hushed hillside at the wake of dawn each day; an ancient monastery of white stone rising from the jagged rocks above the port town; a crystalline sea at near reach; deep, pink fuchsia in perennial bloom; a far off field of olive trees. It was a journey of the heart as much as one of writing. I was there to do a study of cross-cultural poetics, in addition to my graduate study at Mills College; the class was taught by the poet Susan Gevirtz in collaboration with a Greek school on the island.

One of the directors of the program struck me as a Henry Miller type–tall, lithe and handsome in a thoughtful, pensive kind of way. He was balding–perhaps part of the act, I thought–and had a deep, island tan. Within an hour of our arriving and his meeting us at the dock, he invited our group (all women, as it turned out), to go swimming. I was the only one who went. He drove us out to the edge of the island where we proceeded to climb out over rocks and down to a small private beach, miles of glimmering ocean before us. He changed into his shorts and dove in; I followed and we swam through the coral reefs each wearing a mask and snorkel looking for shells. He had a girlfriend, he told me. A beautiful European girl with green eyes, a musician who was part gypsy, and evidently the daughter of a colleague. She was at least 40 years his junior we discovered; it was odd and curious but we were in Greece after all. Everything felt mythic, weighted with history, the words of Sappho and myriad others. So why not have a muse? It almost seemed like a good idea.

In Greece I met for the first time cousins from my father’s side of the family–they are Greek Americans, born and raised in Athens and to my surprise we looked so much alike; it was like recognizing yourself in someone you didn’t think you knew, and yet there we were. First cousins, of the same blood. I took a ship from  Paros at first light on the morning of my 38th birthday for an all day travel up the channel to Skiathos, a Greek person’s island where my cousin’s family spends a month each summer, and where I would spend my last days in the Aegean.  It was one of the most memorable boat trips of my life (and the days with them, as equally wonderful), and not because anything memorable happened on that ship–nothing really did (As it was, I was the only English speaking person on the boat), but it was just in doing nothing that the experience registered with me, stirred some great hope, a world of imaginations. As I looked out to sea, Turkey a mere smudge on the horizon, I saw my life in a series of circles, an expanding pool of cool blue water, a life on the mend, swirling to the rhythm of its own song. 

Greece touched me in a way that other places hadn’t–the sway of bird song and melancholy dripped like honey in the sun, everything–the language, the food, the people seemed far from ordinary; the sweet smell of wild sage and thyme that mingled with the salted air; the bootlegged liqueur that we bought in tall plastic jugs then sipped  in old cups while sitting on the roof, the immensity of the starry sky illuminating our shadows; the old men on donkeys, or those in the cafe arguing lovingly over a plate of shared melon–all of this pushed me into an altered reality. Life felt raw and fervent; there was a wildness that was pure and honest. Being there made me long for things I had forgotten or set aside–for love, deep friendship, swimming daily, painting, for a small house on a hill. “To arrive, I am here,” I wrote one afternoon, as if I had been there before, “a myth, as ancient to this body, this sea– a life.”  Greece reminded me of so many things, not unlike Nepenthe, an  island unto itself with the power to heal; an earlier life at sea, a desire to seek something larger than myself, a connection to a culture and a family that I had not known.

While on Paros, I spent my mornings at the same cafe each day (it was an assignment), watching, listening, thinking–scribbling furiously in my notebook for reasons that included making a record of a particular place and time, those notes to be turned into a poem of some length to read at the end of my course, or something, as it happened, to long for this many years, still, after leaving.

Excerpt from AT GREECE, Cafe Notes  Paros, July 2003

Memory is guided by an embrace that draws close all reasoning,

the weight of anchors released.  Pulling up roots with bare hands.

light as opening

return departure from

where I follow

gathering grain and fruit

next to the shop on main street, turning right.