A third for the wide sky, a third for hell,
and a third for the sea—that was the deal.
But high on a clifftop along an old track
of red dirt, over the Bay of Salerno,
a rowboat distressed, paddle-shorn
and half-naked in its tunic of brambles
and terra cotta dust sports the name
Poseidon. I come to it moored in yellow
grass, deserted without ceremony
of bull or poured oblation, the old tarped
shrine-bateau inscribed as a mock epic,
no billows breaker, just impotent paint-scraped
engineless hive for bees, great basin bath
for magpies, reeking with the smell of diesel
and ripe goat dung.
A wrinkled woman passes me in green
bombazine, a sleeker-skinned Nereid
once, toting a stiff basket of mulberries
for eating. She stops, offers a spoon taste—
or two Euro for all that fits in my fist.
“Only good for a day,” she says. “Spoil fast.”
Il tempo vola, freneticissimo.
The old sodden deities fermented too,
Dionysus turned vinegar, underworld
pomegranates to acidulous spatter,
barnacled tridents inspiriting cool
resin statuettes at the seashell kiosk
in Hotel Pantheon.
I pay for two fistfuls, plump crimson and
tender, while lemon and lime butterflies,
frantic ephemera, beat their wing-palms
in desperate pilgrimage beneath the fig trees
and green stalagmites of fennel. Fluttering
sylphs, white-spotted farfalle in the stinging
thickets, careen past the stuck boat disdainful,
the far off hounds baying like bombardons
as regal hoopoes undulate past, gulping
Tereus transformed, Upupa epops, oop
oop oop. So much flight.
In sight are the boats to Capri, spreading
turquoise wake behind them, lighter streaks of
blue across the blue Mediterranean.
They flaunt the waves with names celestial,
Antares and Merope, or endearments
like Immortal Honey and Unsinkable,
and they mirror the vapor trails of jets
shooting in the vaulted sky above, flashes
of Zeus. Meanwhile dark mulberry juice stains
my fingers, old trick of Hades turning sweets
to blood, fruit to pulpy flesh. Forgotten is
Poseidon, god of the short straw, his bark
run aground, a tiny ark on Ararat,
a shrouded tarpaulin temple sinking
into dank spoiled earth.
