Myrtos, Crete
she dawdled her way up mountain a slight mountain
less slight if you began as a fish circling
in the sea below she circles the carefully
assembled & stacked limestone red schist dry mud
& sticks mortared together stones contain presence
watchful it was very hot water spilled from the
cistern 1700 BC a giant
unseen mouth bit into the curve of its cell for
the next 350 years of contained
occupation no one repaired it did the
Minoans think the goddess did it on purpose
a great breast spilling its milk our seeker sings her
way back to her air-conditioned room to assuage
a frightening exhaustion she listens toxxx
a poet ~* via internet & dips into sleep
at the phrase “ under-mothered world ” thinking that’s it –
that’s why I came here – i was hoping to find
a mercurial soup-spoon engorged with condensed
milk rises from the turbulent sea of her
dreaming
mind
/// //
up a limestone step-street down a spilled-grass breeze-way blades
and thorny weeds scratch her calves her shins she makes a turn
into a bite-sized room and thinks very possibly
she could live here wonders if they would let her have a
window she would like a window onto the courtyard
and moreover the sea its blue every-day would calm
the chunky orange stone of reverberative fears she
reflects on the cellar its gypsum walls resemble
Styrofoam blackened from the burn water soluble
slabs waffled scrunched and call to mind wooden columns of
the palace flared hair
1450 BC flames
…. a
small
cistern at the base of a winding staircase a
spiral of bone in the rib of Pyrgos Hill she makes
her way in search of purple light-wells their marbled limestone
discs punctuate corners of a bronze age mother’s home
/// //
waves feel their way up the shoreline at night a
woman in the next-door apartment sings
opera in the mother tongue the guide-
book says there were only a few
Minoans left by 300 BC but
our dawdler-poet sees them everywhere
on-this remnant island their silhou-
ettes their snake goddess features in
the shape of a young man’s head
his ears long tubular
neck as he welds orange flags on
popsicle sticks at a construc-
tion site along the National Road
to Agios Nicholase or in the
curve of nose frescoed build of women ac-
cepting euros for water potatoes eggs
onions and figs in the Monday Myrtos marketplace
/// //
in the Ierapetra museum a statue of Persephone
xxfrom 2AD holds an ear of corn in her left hand
her head crowned by a small altar encircled
by snakes
When I call them they come
she says
to no one in particular.
/// //
sometimes language comes to her she sings
the Minoan site of Pyrgos Myrtos when only
wind brushes the ancient settlement of serpentine
our poet traveled all this way to
touch the ruins of a house fire
dear mother would you please write to
me in as much detail as possible
tell me of your childhood & the
shake-up that so marked you left you
vulnerable to Achilles & that brutal gang
of so-called Superheros
the Minoans are silent
or perhaps they are only shy and
she is listless impatient
even among ruins what grows is
photogenic choreographed a flowering
in hollows of thorny burret fennel &
asphodel lutea wild sprouts
and seeds
if she could find
a sibilant angle to the sea beyond
the villa along the jumble of steps
across the tapestry of – a royal runner
scrolls alabaster and
so often she is tired
all over Crete cicadas
hide in trees a chorus of aggravation
/// //
in the middle of the night when it is cooler
she’ll recall the bees at Mycenae buzzing a-
round a leak in the mouth of a bright green water
hose and the bees will make her think of the bee pen-
dent and the bee pendent will recall the tholos
tombs and the tholos tombs will call to mind the om-
phalos .. .. ..
~*Brenda Hillman
From Her Infinite, New Issues Press, 2016