That Night We Were Ravenous

AT THE FOOT OF A WALLMy hand moves belowin the bright element, turninga page. The deck chair’s bleachedarms, my feet bare on the flagstones: allmute, opaque as at home.Nor are the cypress, the lemon, though trimmed with bookishassociations,eager to break their poses and dance.I thought sun and the island’s beauties would diveinto my eyes, out of my mouth in poems.Nearby, small lizards are skirtingthe foot of the wall: quickgreen marginalia,foreign script.Overhead, the Grand Prix. Burly helmeted flies comewhining down the blue straightaway over the mulberry treeand smack the sun-covered house,drop flat bullets around my feet. Tiny,terrible headaches. Twiddling legs.The lizards scribble, licking them up.Green, independent flames.A Word about the Poem by John StefflerI wrote this poem on the island of Naxos, in Greece, where I’d gone in the hope of returning to writing after a long exhausting year of teaching. There I had the fairly familiar experience of reaching a longed for, idealized destination — expecting in this case that the beauty and history of Naxos would somehow revive my imagination and my sense of being excited by the world — only to discover a place with a surface of factual reality that was no different from home. In a sense I did find strangeness there, but not of the sort I’d anticipated — more a foreign opacity or silencing mystery than the vestigial Arcadia I’d stupidly hoped for. Partly it was as simple as discovering once again that I couldn’t escape from myself. Partly it had to do with needing to come to terms with a place as it really was, not as I’d visualized it beforehand. The disturbing energy stirred up by these collisions was in the end reviving and exciting in unforeseen ways.I wanted the poem to convey and evoke a perplexed, estranged, almost convalescent state of mind.