BROOKE
Skyros
..cimetière marin…
One night a few friends row him ashore:
what better than to lie among the olive trees
where goats scatter stones and poppies bloom
and the sea looms Homer’s wine-colour,
dead darkness winking green and red
from the anchored fleet. An archipelago
of stars overhead, a winter gully
shaped with rocks and scrub at his feet,
in time he acquires a marble tomb
with railings and chiselled lettering:
women from the village come to wash the stone
and place flowers, beetles scuttle across,
wheeling gulls keep watch. It adds
far off to reputation: his handsome face,
the philosopher walking leafy lanes,
lover, poet, warrior, no role quite settled
at last, for time was short, and none proved
firm as rock, or sinewy as olive root.
Here in his tomb, he is far from all that talk:
the occasional tourist hikes down the road,
from the naval base contractors driving home
raise dust. Mostly the ancient susurrus
of ocean rises, fades, stretches the shadow
of a dead comrade’s oar-blade, the outmoded
line of beauty, the arrow in Zeno’s paradox -
arcing toward the target it can never reach.
