MAKING LOVE IN ATHENS

The wife from the café in the alley beneath
our room at Hotel Acropol
is shouting at her husband again.
Here, where they made lust divine
and worshipped the body, she begins each day arguing.
Perhaps it is strictly business—
receipts low, floor unswept, the hired help
who drinks? Last night
when we sat on their wobbly chairs on the cobbled walk
to order tea and share dessert,
she nodded and smiled from behind the bar.
Is it darkness that calms her the way
it did Clytemnestra?
Maybe her husband, short and balding,
looks too long at the young women
so free with their boyfriends, chatting and eating,
their eyes lowered beneath the moon’s rising?
Here, where cities and dynasties have crumbled
because of love, we lie in bed, listening to our pulses quieting
as the woman’s wrath ignites.
We could shut the window and live just within ourselves
as Persephone learned to do,
but we know a few minutes more will subside her rage
and then the only sound will be
starched sheets wrinkling.

SPLINTER

Mother’s eyes see only the dark hurt
under pink skin. Her lips straight and silent
like the neighborhood just before dawn.
Here is only that thin, black line piercing
finger. No fifth grade arithmetic. No laundry.
No division between mother and son
as she dips sewing needle in alcohol,
holds it steady in finger and thumb
while the left hand’s fingers pinch the flesh
white. Even with the deep pain,
it will not do to cry. I watch the needle
enter where the splinter entered.
The needle opens skin, probes beneath
the straight, dark path, snags it, lifts.
She does not take up tweezers.
She bends as if to kiss my finger,
but closes her teeth on the splinter,
draws it out, swipes it with the ball
of her middle finger. We stare
at the tiny slice of the world that yielded
such distress. I walk away healing
and remember the pain.

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© Copyright, 2011, Gary Metras,
All rights reserved.