Elegy for Nikos Kazantzakis

I. What soft words did you conjure, Niko, when my father drove his frog-eyed Citroen along the blood-red path to Antibes, which you made your final home by the sea? Did your head shoot with a Franciscan flame or were you then beginning the fading game? Your spirit, cracked like ravaged travel shoes laden with the lives of wanderers, Jews, Bedouins, prophets and the great Greco's saints, struggled like the master with his stone-ground paints, to stretch a line across "the void" and wed the goat-cry with the cry of joy. And it was only the flesh which you had scorned that failed you. The stones we gathered and stored under our Demosthenic tongues to face the sea, have left us with a bitter taste like an unsolved rhyme. So when the wet snow shrinks my shined black shoes and crimps my toes, I think of you in Florence, joyous and alone--- then terrified that the gods from their thrones, like Poe's angels, would take what had been yours for an instant. But in that instant, more was caught and refracted in your vacuum eyes than a telescope shot of the shifting sky. II. On the mound in Herakleion your grave stands alone. A worn wooden cross, high above the drone of the town's traffic, leans into the thin breeze from the harbour, while two lovers begin their games under a tree and the angry gaze of some poor codger who's seen better days. Even priests sneak to this mound on the darkest nights and pray for forgiveness with today's hindsight, from you who bore the weight of the butterfly's death killed in your youth by an accidental breath. Millions will make their way to this island, Crete--- as my father and Galanis had gone to greet you those last days in Antibes under the sky of a foreign land--- and to say goodbye. But your words, like a stuck record, keep playing and on the cross a purple cloth is fraying, with little to save it from passing time but the landscape's memory, your leaping rhyme.

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