Aegean Blues: Tangent on an Homage

Charlie, draped in cool, loose linens,
leaned on his elbow,
solitary, smoking dreamily
on the port poop deck-
contemplating the Ancients, the Aegean-
riffling through a catalog of colours
in ‘is well worn mental microfiche.

Long ago New York’s
Lake Minnewaska had impressed,
but that wert vastly more violet
than what presently his
much amazed eyes caressed.

Cerulean, he thought, but
quick-rejected it in a logic
most non-Boolean.
Simply, it’d been used to death,
become modish, hip and
like “eclectic” years ago,
such terms he avoided
with every step and breath.

Profligate with what few
shekels he could cobble together,
he laughed to think that
he’d himself strongly chided for
a pilgrimage to a poet’s home
on the ozone-poor Chilean coast,
felt ridiculous viewing the shoes
of that noble Nobel Laureate’s
long dead mistress-cum-wife.
Now he’d extended himself to
an homage once removed-
to sail seas voyaged by a vagrant
Cypriot central character in Alvaro Mutis’
adventurous and mad imagination.

Gulls wheeled overhead and screeched,
Charlie lifted a sweating glass
of iced and milky ouzo,
toasted Maqroll the Gaviero,
his own crazed, peculiar life,
then moseyed on over to where
a crowd had gathered round
a boisterous group playing tavli.

The rowdy enthusiasm,
once near, he noted, contained
a strange, quite ragged edge.
The soldiers’ whoops
betrayed a banal brand
of male dismay/alarm,
as, in their sweaty midst,
an intriguing interloper was
hand’ly defeating them,
all deft, swift decisions,
her hands floating fine and fem’nine
amid the dice, their derision
and the odd forest of
their hairy forearms.

Charlie stayed on
while they played on
and, one after another,
like lemming leapers
they fell before her
bright, British laughter,
her elvin, dev’lish reveling
in their brute, brotherly squirming,
fixed in absurd and ancient sexism.

Turning then, cabin-bound,
to read, reflect, surmise and write,
a common closure to many
a past and future night,
when, sudden as a sneeze,
glimpsed he her green, green eyes.

Away he wobbled,
a jolted clown on jellied knees,
his so-susceptible mind awhirl-
peepers the exquisite emerald
of warm, remembered tropic seas-
a mermaid, unhobbled and wholly free
in the form of a tan-brown
shining, English girl.