Ellen Cranitch

Athens  I

Sometime before the revelations: travelling into the city by night, lights high to the left mark the hill of the Acropolis. I’m thumbing through my old copy of Cavafy and now I understand his poetry: how, like a crystal, where the smallest individual unit has an identical structure to the greater whole, the poems are microcosms that evoke a larger, parallel subject; his own sense of decline, and longing as he aged to regain a vibrant, passionate past, a symbol of Alexandria, now in decay but once fabulous, tumultuous, extravagant. Interiors, walls and shadows frame the verse but it’s shot through with lines of transcendent beauty; rhapsodies of tenderness for the bodies of the young killed in war, promises that all the blood and the dust will be washed away, the wounds of battle closed.


*


To Cavafy

Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.
The shadows converge in the low winter light.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.

The lines from Cavafy recur like a prayer
pervading her mind when his anger ignites.
Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.

A comb of pearl straightens the raven-black hair
of Sarpedon, dead; dark, those eyes of jadeite.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.

Let tears of ambrosia temper the air,
sunbursts of tourmaline hold off the night.
Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.

The rooms where you found love were shadow-filled, bare.
Revived in your lines, they are legendary, bright.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.

The terror and hurt, the loss and despair
can be wholly transformed. Words have that might.
Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.


*


Secrets

He tells me he is a drug addict, that he’s been addicted to cocaine for about ten years. This is true but it is also a lie because it is not the whole truth, which is that he is also addicted to crystal methamphetamine. He tells me that he is bisexual and that he had a relationship with a man before we married. He has not mentioned this through the years of our marriage. His face as I look at it is not the face of the person I know. He is receding, a stranger. At the same time, my sense of who I am is disappearing. He tells me he is seeing men for sex regularly and has been for several years. He does not tell me he is HIV positive. Neither of us yet knows.

As I move towards my bike, he tries to kiss me.

Seared onto my retina are sexually explicit images, the feel and smear of them; secrecy’s livid stain, its putrid stench. What has it tasted, the warm inside of his mouth that I have kissed?

I drag my bike upright, steer it away. Metal on metal, the chime of my ring on the frame.

Our rings are the only two of their kind. They are silver, inlaid with thin, diagonal stripes of gold.


*


Hope

Look out at dusk to the west of Bcharre,
from the small basilica with its red-tiled tower.
All is hushed around you. Mist on the vineyards.
Smoke rising from a few houses below.
A dog’s bark rings out across the gorge
and the great hollows of air, slung across,
catch the rebounding sound. The opening hills
are hands that waft you. There is so much hope
in the view. I would wish to be ushered
by the Qadisha valley which the cedars
of Lebanon call home: though it’s the sunset,
the day’s end, you gaze at, to all who are
harboured by this sacred landscape
its breath is refuge, its face is dawn.
 

    9     Bonnard I
    10     Bonnard II
    11     Bonnard III
    12     C10H15N
    13     Words
    14     Strickeen
    15     Actaeon
    16     Metamorphoses
    17     Io
    18     Uplift
    19     Tom
    21     Athens I
    22     Athens II
    23     To Cavafy
    24     Revelations
    25     Secrets
    26     Void
    27     Betrayal
    28     The Wishing Cup
    29     Double Exposure
    30     Heston Services
    31     The Drive West
    32     Kingsley Road
    33     The Stars
    34     Dan
    36     How They Give Back to Me
    37     ‘en las multitudes’
    38     The Dream
    39     Riverside
    40     Fife
    41     ‘lente currite’
    42     ‘Relapse’
    43     Bypass
    44     Trust
    45     Some statistics on relapse
    46     The Undertow
    47     Reactions
    48     Kinship
    49     Praed Street
    50     Prayer
    51     The Beaked Ships
    52     To Forget
    53     Kryos
    54     The Empty Space
    55     Church of St Michael and All Angels
    56     The Colour of Blood
    57     Chez Camille
    58     Degrees of Separation
    59     Panic Attack
    60     Antiphon
    61     Tributary
    62     The Question of Intention
    63     The Parable of the Emerald and Dark Water
    65     Theories of addiction
    66     Crystall
    67     Judgement
    70     Definition of enabling
    71     Living with Uncertainty
    74     Addiction interaction disorder
    75     Dissonance
    76     Addiction and pleasure
    77     ‘Against Hurt’
    78     The Ascent
    80     Beauty
    81     Radical
    82     What Held Me
    83     If Ever
    84     Hope
    85     Maple-serrated
    86    The Dance
    87     Grey
    88     April 1794
    89     Love
    90     December 1574
    92     Minerals Gallery, Natural History Museum, London

    95     Acknowledgements