Read an Excerpt

AT THE FOOT OF A WALL

My hand moves below
in the bright element, turning
a page. The deck chair’s bleached

arms, my feet bare on the flagstones: all
mute, opaque as at home.

Nor are the cypress, the lemon, though trimmed with bookish
associations,
eager to break their poses and dance.

I thought sun and the island’s beauties would dive
into my eyes, out of my mouth in poems.

Nearby, small lizards are skirting
the foot of the wall: quick
green marginalia,
foreign script.

Overhead, the Grand Prix. Burly helmeted flies come
whining down the blue straightaway over the mulberry tree
and 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 Steffler
I 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.