In memory of Stratis Haviaras

Crossing and Recrossing the River

 

One day we intersected

on a greasy patch of sidewalk

before Bartley’s Burger Cottage.

You asked how my verse lines end,

and I said with the cheery ding

of the typewriter carriage return.

Thus came the prose poem issue

of your journal, Arion’s Dolphin,

which almost made us famous.

Later, on Greek Easter,

in your rental near Fresh Pond,

the suffering of lamb on spit

said more about Jesus and

his ultimate descent into art

than your Orthodox bible did.

Your vacation film of you

and Maggie nude on the beach

thrilled your Harvard colleagues,

but I had to step outside and blush

in the secretive urban dark.

The dinner at which Simic plucked

the best wine from the wine list

at institutional expense remains

Harvard Review’s high-water mark.

I haven’t found a better wine—

even in the taverns of Athens,

where you spoke the same Greek

you polished with post-Classical

aplomb in your earliest poems.

When you read for my students,                                 

my fellow professor called you

“a hunk,” and noted that your wife

must keep you firmly leashed.                                                  

After you returned to Greece

to rake your ancestral bones,

the air thinned between us but

I still see your elegant mustache

twitching as the politics

of Fascist generals you defied

faded in showers of Euros.

We won’t meet again on earth,

but let’s remember those dinners

at the Parthenon Restaurant,

when the cheap retsina drowned us

in laughter the color of stone.