Poem

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This poem is titled 'Cyprus,' though that's not exactly what it's about. It was written on the bus from Nicosia to Milessos. Enjoy it while it's here.


How many times must you forget?

Would you stumble through this life like a tourist—
Endless revelation, the new unfolding before you like points on a map;
Bullet holes, clustered little houses, an unexpected museum of Byzantine icons that you cannot resist
Where centuries are lost in faded and stripped wood, faces of saints ghosted to something darker and more profound?

Take Christ’s bulged and paling eyes as they are here; the truth will come not from the contrivance of imitation, the replication of any idol no matter how perfect, but only on the slow and mercurial tides of time that scrape the pristine to dirty fact.

—And from what unannounced depths there does it even yet continue to spring, to surface like the tentacles of lost beasts, suggested, but, in their black fullness, never seen? You must continue to forget before you can remember what it means.

Seek peace not in still tranquility, but the silent knowledge of change.

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