That town, that time, was full of them.
Skullcapped, gumbooted, flowers & fishtails
sticking up from handlebar baskets of wicker,
a slow-motion stand-up-fall-forward pedalling in one low gear
from houses blue-white like the home-flag
to netsheds whose haloed spill of light
in the soaked dark was ouzo in the glass,
they drifted through the fresh-fish smell
of the streets, they brought the smell
to the streets, grinding it to powder
as their legs revolved. Stamatiou.
Demosten. Polymenakos. In rain
or sun, any season, at all hours,
one was out there, spinning the wheels,
as if there had to be one to keep
the town alive, the river flowing,
the salmon coming home.
Old men,
you failed. That town’s as dead
as your language in the throats
of your daughters’ children. The wheels
of your bikes, wheels in your pilothouses,
searching gazes of love for the past
in your women’s eyes? Underwater,
under grass, under the terrible scales
of the blossoms of the vanished years.
Without your sweat to grease the chain
there’s no going back. I see you coast
again down the slope of the dyke;
the salt air flays the flesh from the spine
till you are nothing but spine, spokes
for the greater wheel that crushes
the laughing shouts you hurled
from your back-alley Attica
and the spittled thread of tradition
so naturally unwound
to lead the hero of your people to safety
as all the rest of the world
creeps like the Aegean
over your bone-rimmed
circles, down the generations
