Night is a cold feast, time

demands we fly. I

remember myself, taken to a high hill country.

ravens among cliffs.

caught between the earth and storm, close:

(I heard the wind bristle

through the single feathers of their wings)

close, almost to my reaching arms,

they fell like damp ashes,

the progeny of lightning bolts and pines.

That day I broke

and cooked an egg in a rusting cup;

spread my little life like a mattress on the ground.

an iron cross in a cairn was a summit, beneath this

olympus, thessalian plains eastward

and the sea, litokoron.

saint dionysos, earlier refuge was

half a millenium dead:

no longer monks and jackasses

fighting up out of the sea, out of thorns

into hazelwood.

Night again. Druglike.

I hear the ravens rattle in their deep throats,

sorry, lustful birds. Mawkish hops from

rock to rock. Awake in the talus,

I lie and curse.