A Stand Alone RIP Memo Memorializing My Dear Friend - Peter Liotta.

Right click on link, then click on "Search google" to listen to Gaia's poignant self-produced video about her wonderful father, my dear friend, Peter Liotta:  https://youtube/PRjXezg2cQ8

Gaia Liotta taken in Greece when her dad, Peter, and mother, Donna, were posted at The American Embassy in Athens.
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Life takes many strange twists and turns and this memo if one of the most unusual I have ever written. 

 I will explain.  

I had the good fortune to be selected to serve as a member of Bush '41's: "President's Commission on White House Fellowships."  In the capacity as aboard  member, I had the unusual experience to meet and select from among some of the finest young persons/candidates,  in our nation, who were seeking to become White House Fellows.  Former White House Fellows are Colin Powell, George Will, Paul Gigot, etc.

One of the most outstanding candidates was a graduate of The Air Force Academy by the name of Captain Peter Liotta. I voted for Peter but he failed to make the cut.  He was stationed at Maxwell Field in Montgomery and we happened to fly back on the plane together to Atlanta, where I was then living, and he went on to Montgomery.  This memo is devoted to Peter Liotta's memory.

After meeting Peter, we stayed in touch and when I turned 65, I threw a birthday party for myself in Santa Fe.  I was then on The Board of  Visitors of St John's College and I arranged for several close couples to join me in celebration. We spent the entire weekend discussing, in a seminar format, "What It Meant To Be  A Good Citizen." Our readings were drawn from The Bible, The Federalist Paper's, Washington's Farewell Address, among others.

Peter Liotta came as one of my guests.  He brought  me a first edition copy of Hemingway's: "Death In The Afternoon" knowing that I loved "Papa's " writings etc. It was a delightful weekend and I believe all had a good time , most particularly because they had never been to Santa Fe.  Other attendees were:  Steve Bush, Dr. and Ms. James Kiley, Stuart and Eva Rudikoff, Harvey and Kita Coleman and their daughter Kelly, Drs' Blanca and Manuel Anton, Dr's. Morty and Ellen Gruber, Bill Eiland, Bob and Sandra Barker, Ferry and Wendy Fingerhut and Roger Kirby.

Over the years, I kept in touch with Peter as he moved along his career path which took him to Greece as the American  air attache in our Embassy in Athens. He then became a professor at The Naval War College.  I also believe he subsequently  was involved with The CIA in Columbia and upon his resignation from The Air Force, I urgd him to apply as a tutor at St John's College and introduced him to Eva Brann, the dean of the Annapolis Campus. bFor whatever reason  Peter was either  not offered a position or chose not to join the faculty.  He eventually wound up as Director of The Pell Institute on The Campus of Salvae Regina University in New Port, Rhode Island and Lynn and I visited him and his wife, Donna,  and their daughter, Gaia,  while I attended some courses at The Naval War College. 

We continued to stay in touch. Peter was a devoted reader of my memos but more liberal  and then one day I was shocked to learn he had died in an auto crash. I did my best to stay in touch with his wife Donna and daughter, Gaia and in fact have a picture of her in my bookcase when she was in Greece with her folks (see above.)

I learned from Donna, who had subsequently moved to North Carolina, that Gaia had some health issues and when I returned home from dinner this evening  (we took Dagny to dinner to meet her favorite "Aunt Hara' - the wife of a dear departed local  friend) I had a forwarded e mail from Adam Solender, Director of The local Jewish Alliance with the comment "it was obviously meant for me."  

This is the e mail Adam forwarded:

Dear Mr. Berkowitz, 

My name is Gaia Liotta, daughter of Dr.Peter H.Liotta. 

My father spoke of you highly of your many talks (and musings on life and poetry)  Going through my father's effects I came across your information and felt I should reach out.

. 

I know you knew my father well - his avid love of poetry, art, culture, and the world. He was a true Renaissance man. 

After years of saving (working in Production in Los Angeles) I am, you could say, following in my father's footsteps and pursuing a degree in Central European University in Budapest, Hungary (one-year master's degree in  Political Science at CEU).

Based on your rich life in education and consultation  (White House Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Foundation) I wanted to ask your further insights and advice you have about pursuing an educational degree overseas. 

Additionally, it would be wonderful to just hear someone's voice who was a close and trusted colleague of my father.

All the best,

With the gratitude, Gaia

I still have several copies of Peter's writings, most particularly an inscribed copy of his first novel; "Diamond's Compass" and  first edition of his poetry. " Rules of Engagement."

Obviously, when I read Gaia's e mail I choked and went immediately to find her dad's writings and her picture which I continue to openly display.  Before the weekend, I will do my best to respond to her and re-establish contact. Ironically our Grandson Henry (he left The Bill Maher Show in June) remains in Los Angeles and I  hope they will get in touch as well because Gaia obviously shares his interests.

Peter was, as Gaia says a true Edwardian.  I was unaware of his self-tortured life but knew he was passionate about everything he undertook and he was absolutely brilliant, so brilliant that I often was unable to fully ply the depth of his thoughts.  As I noted above our politics were different .

I have been blessed to have met some unbelievable people in my life.  It has been rich with people of unique talent and Peter will always be among the top of the list.

I do not believe Peter would be happy to see the divisive political turn America has taken.  Me

 Peter's various submissions:

P.H. Liotta

10 Buchanan Court

Newport, Rhode Island 02840

E-mail:  phl@wsii.com

Box 1040

York Beach, Maine 03910

Dear Richard,

Here are this year's submissions for the CHELSEA award.  The total line count is 493.

I'm delighted that your book has been picked up by BOA (a perfect press, I think, for your work) and that CHELSEA has doubled in subscription size.

Though I'm not sure if it's a topic I should continue to pursue, I notice that the Academy of American Poets is now sponsoring the Sonia Raiziss Award for translation from modern Italian.  We still plan to pursue our Tuscany project on Dante this summer and I have applied for a Bellagio grant to help things along.  If you hear of any interest in sponsorship or support for this project, I'd be happy (no surprise) to make an application.

I wish you the best for year's end and beginning and that the season is kind.

Please keep the extra as a CHELSEA contribution. 

All best,

Peter

1.  "My Daughter's Name is Poetry"

2.  "The Ruins of Athens"

3.  "Wild Mushrooms"

3.  "Dinner at the Writers' Club"

4.  "A Balkan Odyssey"

5.  "Resurrection of the Christ Figure"

6.  "Blind Minotaur Guided by a Young Girl in the Night"

7.  "An Ornithology, of Sorts"

8.  "The Black Chateau"

My Daughter's Name Is Poetry

We must take something from the dark.

Holding her now, in the dark,

her head pressed to my chest, she hears

the roar of blood from my heart.

From our balcony we look to a far peak,

the residue of city air a thin shadow

cast by a clouded sun.  I know

there is no escape.  What rises before us

is a field of black birds, the ruins of Athens.

A stunned silence and their wings in the air. 

Two days gone, another one, like me, who

loved his daughter, shot in the street.

He lay on that sidewalk ten full

minutes and no one moved. 

Bled to death. They are looking for you...

I hear it whispered.  Out there,

the clouds boil in fire.  A man's fate,

claimed Heraklitos, is in his character.

All I see are the flaws.

                                                                       Politeia, Athinai

The Ruins of Athens

                              Do not love cities:  cities soon become ruins.

                                                     Do not love people:  people soon perish.

                                                                                                                --Czeslaw Milosz

In Beethoven's choral, The Ruins of Athens, the ruse of history

seems trued by the vague iambs of chance.  There is no peace.

And here, centuries later, those dark, roiling tones are witness

to all the ruin this city's become, a world where the shape of all loss

comes as a stranger mounting a hilltop and you must run out of love

or fear, never knowing the choice.  Traveller, my name is Despair.

Traveller, this is the wind that carries despair

to the dark Balkan heart.  This is the place where we turn into history,

searching for something worth holding on to.  All that I love

once came alive here:  friends full of words, days full of peace.

Now, what I am ready to die for?  How much loss

can you bear and believe how little guilt spares the survivor, the witness?

On Patmos, outside the Cave of the Apocalypse, they kneel and bear witness:

The Furies descend.  A chorus of song, ringed with despair,

heads for the stars and eternity.  The story of loss

lives in these stones, in the saint whose vision encompassed all history.

In the stars' final gasp the sky is opening, like a horrible mouth.  No peace

for Saint John, who was buried alive--as he wished.  His true love

for one god meant his own private agony.  Orestes, too, found out of love

a path from the Furies.  Their voices were stilled.  And today, witness

a world where "diplomacy" means:  We will bomb you into peace.

What we bring to the table is a Balkan feast for despair.

It's the millennium's close and the end of an era.  It's the end of history,

the history of ruin and sorrow.  The ash drifts through a black river of loss.

Here are the days we can never run out of, days filled with loss.

Ah, it's the sweet earth itself, my daughter says out of love

that seems sure.  She is naming herself, and naming history.

And from my private acropolis in the ruins of Athens, I witness

the bomb--or the one bomb's effect--in the city of Skoplje, despair

riding "shotgun" in the fear of the street.  The man with a vision for peace:

both eyes destroyed in the blast.  One chance for peace

novaed to dust.  Now, with his loss--

he who held my daughter in his arms--nothing is left for the realm of despair.

In the shutters' glare, we had smiled and laughed.  And out of simple love,

she kissed his cheek.  A crayon's portrayal is all that remains to be witness:

To Mr President, with much love from Gaia.  The rest is history.

Traveller,  I speak from the ruins of Athens and the tragic despair

we name history.  We have lived too long with this loss.  Chaos,

bring peace to the witness.  Out of such ruin could follow such love.

                                                                   Xora, the holy isle of Patmos--Metsovo, Epiros

Wild Mushrooms

Those were nights we could never run out of,

in the years when the earth upended

and we ended up with the dark weight of history

tilting at the window nightly, its hollow moan, tearing

down the barren avenue.  Love among the ruins.

And it was love, in the end, we were meaning

to find.  When our voices stilled, and we had turned

from too much wine and talk of god and poetry, only then

you'd speak of the casual delight of just gathering them up

and the infinite ways this god's flesh could be devoured.  There,

in the high peaks of the Íar Planina, where the melting snow

flows down toward spring, you could find them in every shape

and size that imitated us.  This one formed, exactly, in the shape

of a penis, and that, coiled like an adder on cool earth, and another

the perfect shade of summer with the smell of a woman's hair

in your fingers.  And what could touch me now?

Seeing you again, at that table, your eyes lit with that simple pleasure,

and your smile drawn back and growing and your face gone Pan-like. 

Your feet are running, a pair a cloven hooves.

This rivering absence.  Memories of wild mushrooms,

days we could never run out of,

trying to forget what happened in this place, this way.

In the end, the wind keeps saying, you had to suffer terribly.

                                                                                                for Boza, Bogomil, and Liljana

Beograd, Serbia--Nerezi, Makedonija

Dinner at the Writers' Club

Whenever I am in Belgrade, I like to celebrate my birthday at the Writer's Club.  It's never difficult to gather up a will­ing crowd.  Usually, I'll just ring the Writer's Union, which occu­pies three floors of empty space above the restaurant (which is actually the basement, and only really comes alive at night) and ask who might be available.  And who are you?  is the re­sponse I get, as if it mattered.

Inside the Writer's Union, someone is always there, occu­pying an empty room at the end of an empty corridor.  His head will sink deeply in his hands and the smoke from his filterless cigarette will curl through the ab­sence in his black beard.  There will be a Conference on Silence going on somewhere in the building, and no one will be able to find the correct room to present her or his long awaited paper for the sympo­sium.  Each of them will be there in the dark, playing with smoke, awaiting my call.  They are all hacks, of course, and can't dis­tinguish metaphor from metastasis.  But since my Serbian is no longer what it was, the conver­sation is never boring.

We like to arrive by six.  Not to be in and out; no, more likely to forge our­selves for the drunken orgy this almost always be­comes:  a swirl of bodies, black beards and bared breasts, oaths issued at the curse of spilt wine on white linen.  Plus, the maître'd with cobwebs that cover his eyes, who lives in that basement haven and is centuries old, is fond of me.  He guarantees a table nearby something always violent or sig­nifi­cant.

There will be a war going on.  There always is.  Someone will be preparing to bomb the city, or will be bombing it.  The people of Belgrade will be blamed.  And none of this will have the least effect, inside the Writer's Club.  The risotto will have been simmering for at least a day, culminating in a perfect state in just a few moments.  Cellular telephones are checked at the door, since they interfere with food preparation, are the incipient cause of tumors, and distract discus­sions about literature and the final purposes of art.

We begin with drinks.  I prefer a dry martini--gin--with sev­eral black and green olives stuffed with something inde­scrib­able.  The talk is light, issues of fluff:  the subtle differ­ences between failed communists and socialists re­formed; what the hottest item on the black market these days seems to be; what automatic weapons are best suited for use around the house; our opinion on the latest peace plan and why it's bound to fail.

By the time we're seated, though, the conversation has turned hot.  One poet angry at another poet.  She did not de­serve the latest prize awarded by the Prize Committee.  He did not earn enough respect of other mem­bers of the Union to merit selec­tion to attend the festival in the Netherlands.  But then the ap­petizers arrive and everyone gathered about the circular table, laced with crystal and silver, turns ravenous and dives, interested in mass consumption.  And what joys there are!  All the national specialties:  cevap­çiåi and artichoke, fiery red peppers; sour cabbage spiced with seasoning the exact rich color and texture of blood; a good åulbastija or divljaç; borßç.  Nothing like it.  Burek and mus­sels, oysters, pickled fish, jastog or raçiåi, kajmak with ham, a fine Dalmatian cheese.

The wine arrives, and it's the best there ever was.  Blood of the Poet, 1812; the only year it was ever made.  It tastes of dark vel­vet and shadow, the right weight of must, with a bouquet of bone.  It celebrates the self-immola­tion of Stephen Sindjeliå and his 300 Serbian guerrillas at their fortress, just outside of Niß.  The Turkish Paßa had or­dered the skin flayed from their heads, stuffed their skulls with cotton, and built a five-sided tower 14 rows high with 17 skulls on each side.  His in­tent was to deter any further Serbian resistance.  Boy, was he wrong.

This wine is indeed extraordinary and we are fortunate that in 1812 there was an infinite supply.  And by now the night is blurred from bewil­derment and sweat, the shelter of voices.  The fire in the hearth rages, and the air is cut with the menace of oppos­ing views.  A few taut words, peppered with participles, tossed off and things get ugly quickly.  The table across the corridor is overturned.  Knives are drawn.  The gypsies with the violins and the dancing bear arrive.  One of them gets stabbed.

And Vuk, the maître'd--that old wolf--draws on his long, cultivated mus­tache and gives a nod.  He knows just the perfect moment for my dish to arrive.  Emotions have peaked.  The air is tense with possibility.  And there, in the midst of chaos and stark, literary contrasts, appears the plate I have been waiting all the weary moments of exis­tence for.  Nothing less than the prose poet's paella, which I love more dearly than even our standard dessert of vanilla cake with the flaming bomb in the center.  It truly is the perfect meal.  But this is not paella, this is what has become of all the decomposed and broken lines I never used, the wasted concepts, computer failures and hard disks that crash at remem­bering my childhood.  The claw of a dan­gling modifier reaches up to me, snapping like a shellfish bent on  revenge.  You bastard, a white tongue boiled in as­pic shrieks.  You can't do this to us! 

While the others are distracted by the duel ready to com­mence ten paces from our table, I retrieve my steak knife and plunge it dead square in the tongue's heart, flavored with saffron.  I feel it squirm and then go still.  I hear the sad, whimpering mur­mur of defeat.  My best ideas and thoughts devoured.  Delicious!  Sex, love, death and a good wine at the Writer's Club.  Such sublime events are rare.

                                                                                   Struga, Makedonija

A Balkan Odyssey

In The Eye of Odysseus, a film that reels from one immense pretension to the next, the vapid apathy of the wandering hero, played by Harvey Keitel, burns through celluloid as yet another Balkan oddity.  A man with no name, who speaks each line with all the authority and all the dispassion of an an­cient Greek chorus, he must cross the wilderness in search of himself.  

There is a point to this odyssey, of course, but no one, most particularly the director, has a clue as to where it could be found, so why should the audi­ence look, or care?  It's the Balkan disease--to drift with no purpose--and it is a disease that consumes the film's most lyrical moments.  The frozen stillness of Albania and the fields of displaced Greeks staring toward a dis­tant homeland they will never find, the fog shrouding Sarajevo as a small orchestra conducts the mindlessness of war, our hero cruising the Danube on a barge that carries the dismembered remains of a giant statue of Lenin, whose one arm extends in a threatening--now impotent--gesture to the West as thousands of orthodox Romanians kneel and cross themselves at the sight. 

Moments like these, that go on for countless minutes as the camera gropes for every possible angle, are what make the journey matter.  God forbid that our hero should speak, because when he does it is as though the sky has opened and the air is filled with a sudden dead silence.  He means to find the three lost reels of the Manakis brothers, the first Balkan filmmakers, and as he drifts from Tirana to Bitola to Skopje, Sofia, Bucure∂ti, Constanta, Beograd, and, of course, finally confounds the ruined Sarajevo, we know that his odyssey is pointless, that the reels of film that play on the dark wall of the Platonic cave in a Bosnian basement are blank, mere shadows of that other world.

Comrade, we have sold ourselves the rope and hang from its sentence.  Lenin was right, and his dismembered arm still points threateningly.  The barge with the modern Odysseus drifts through the gates of Scylla and Charybdis, with Charon as the ferryman.  Nowhere does a film so richly deconstruct itself and show our artifice as it does at midnight, at the dark Balkan border, when the voice of the customs agent intones in rich Serbian, Who is on this ship? and Charon replies, No man...

Our hero misses the point, and he searches the Balkan wasteland trying to find one.  He leaves a carapace of broken love affairs in his wake, each more increasingly absurd.  I cannot love you,  he openly weeps at his first loss.  Not tonight, my dear.  I have a date with Lenin's foot.  Such is the cruel mystery of fate.

Such is the hard failure of art.  When it can compare beauty only to itself with such feeble arrogance.  When the people of Sarajevo deserve far better than anything that ever existed to describe the exquisite nature of loss.  Nothing and certainly no man, he who speaks in the dark cave full of shad­ows, telling Penelope in the film's final reel how he shall be known by the signs of their first love, from ages before, can suffice.  Madness and sor­row, no, not even these words, can approach the rage they must feel.

                                                                       

                                                                        Ano Kypseli, Athinai

Resurrection of the Christ Figure

In time, significance eludes us.  Open a window and a door appears.  The image is dominant, prescient, precise.  The eyes of the ikon mask a face split by difference:  half beneficent and kind; half ready to damn for the least offending.  The hand that begs distinction.  Open a window and a door ap­pears.  A child with a Halloween face not ready to un­mask stands at the corner.  Spiders spin between webs in the unlit lamps, the shadows of tree.  There, spun out of nothing, the crucified Jesus.  Soulful and weeping, bearing his cross.  Somewhere below, grinning and toothless, the skull of Golgotha.  Open a window and a door ap­pears.  The undiscovered country, a dog answering his whistle.  The doubting Thomas deeply probing the wounds and there, in the far cor­ner, a boy lecturing the temple elders.  The infant curled in the Madonna's lap and over her shoulder, a flow­ing river and three hermits on one bank who have wit­nessed a miracle, who will build a temple to the Virgin.  Open a window.  The newborn cradled in straw, the ani­mals asleep nearby.  A door opens and three wise men ap­pear, bearing praise and wonder.  A door closes and three  others, who did not be­lieve, fall blind and dumb, descend­ing.  That look of horror, the arms extended, begging for­giveness.  The gypsy, kneels with the black lamb at the al­tar.  Draws blade to the throat.  A fount of blood jets out, anointing earth.  He catches a few drops, raises his hand to his lips, crosses himself.  Smoke curls from the throat and the carcass steams in morning fog, on a mound of broken glass and cock's heads.  Dominant, prescient, precise.  The Owl of Minerva perched at the Savior's shoul­der.  O, the lashing of tongues tied to the mast, the weeping for joy.

Tirana, Albania

Blind Minotaur guided by a Young Girl in the night

She has the face of a bird; he, the body of a tortured man.  They cross, to­gether, a dimension of mezzotint, trapped in this black method of art.  The only living figures on paper, they move. 

She knows the quality of pain that is his, and she has promised to be his muse.  She was not born with this face with its prominent beak like a gull's and a voice that reminds one of nightingales, the delicate crystal of timbre and pitch.  She is taking him away, away from the others watching their passage.

The tall woman with the high, intelligent forehead, wearing a French sailor's shirt, is the Minotaur's mother, Pasiphaë.  She only appears indif­ferent, bemused by the scene.  She, after all, was forced into union with the beautiful white bull of Poseidon.  It was she who created and rejected her son.

The insignificant man at the far edge of perspective is the cuckolded hus­band himself, King Minos, one of the three judges of Hell.  He is the true human at fault.  This was not meant to happen.

And, finally, the prescient boy--his body luminous with stars--is Pablo Picasso himself, enjoying the joke as he withdraws to the shadows of Pasiphaë's skirt.  He thought he could know how everything would unfold, how the young girl with the birdlike face would lead the blind Minotaur to some sort of salvation, how she would discover the reason why he had gouged out his eyes long before Theseus had entered the labyrinth's dark coil to find him weeping after he had finished devouring that year's sacrifice of seven boys and seven maidens.

But Theseus could not understand the carnage before him that day.  He was a warrior and witness to glory, the spoils of blood.  He could never quite grasp why the Minotaur had taken the worthless frame of his body and tossed it against a dark wall, and just as suddenly roared.  Leave me!  I can destroy you in the same way you soon will destroy others.  Leave me...lie, create your own myth!  Take the head of a bull in tribute.

And so Theseus left, taking the false head and surfaced to tell the others that he had destroyed the Minotaur.  He created a lie submerged in the lies of all history.  He fled, taking Ariadne, the Minotaur's half-sister, in hand.  Together, they fled from that place.  And Theseus was bound to betray her, and leave her; and his father, seeing the black sails of defeat sculling the ship's return passage in the wine-dark Aegean, was bound to leap to his death.  In grief.  So done, the act failed to convince his son of his lies, of the power of lies.

The Minotaur wandered for years, blind and suffering, until the young girl led him away.  She understood pain.  She too had changed, long before the morning she woke to discover her voice knew only the language of flight and her shoulders drawn back and pressed closely, together, like wings.

Now they have discovered each other, in Picasso's work, and though the scene is created, the figures are real.  The stars burn with their ruminant light.  A mother considers her son.  A father is lost.

The young girl is smiling, having met someone who finally appreciates what it has cost to be changed from human to beast.  The Minotaur weeps, because he knows what it means to be trapped, why he blinded himself as Oedipus centuries later would do.  He had been perfectly happy once, until the day he ripped the head from a virginal youth and then stopped to con­sider that perhaps what he was doing was wrong.  He was a beast; this was how a beast defined its act.  He knew he was damned.

He knew he would have to turn from his kind, from the realm of myth and unreal creatures.  Even though he had slaughtered hundreds over the years, he knew one day he would have to question his guilt in the form of the sin­gle word, why?

He knew that his life once had a purpose.  That his one hope would be to cross with this maiden the landscape of forever, to reach the plane of con­templation known as the final purposes of art, that this is what the boy named Picasso had meant to betray when he drew himself into the work, to become, in some way, one part of this story, even as they moved and would move eternally, together, and never arrive.

                                                                        for Jo Berryman

                                                            Monemvassia, Peloponnisos, Greece

An Ornithology, of sorts

The woman who lives like refuse in the streets of Athens, her eyes

gone toward the dark, pulls her cart through the perpetual chaos

that is this city, this necropolis that sustains no life.

No life at all.  You can see it in her, though--how close to death

she's grown, no hope for resurrection.

Broken glass, cans, garbage, a few discarded clothes, the only landscape

she will ever know.   The fragile shade of a bird in the landscape

of shadow, she bears down against the walls of the cage, eyes

that brim with absence.  For her, the resurrection

was never Christ's last sorrow; more like the Virgin rising into chaos,

free of the burden of care, fleeing toward the freedom of death,

a better shelter than the prison that became her life.

Under her ragged coat, the wings of a bird spring into life,

some dark salvation to lift her from the barren landscape

where the earth will open and swallow her, to take her from death

and the promise of sorrow luminous in her eyes.

She is going away now, lifting and singing, away from the chaos

of Athens.  Her descent into Hades is a certain resurrection.

Still, this morning, Gaia stands in Syngrou Park, praying for resurrection

--though the idea of prayer, to her, is alien--wishing a bird back to life.

A common swallow, though nothing's common to her, stilled by the chaos

of traffic and noise, the furious motion of hands and of voices, a landscape

of shadow and light, where the sun and the moon bear down like dark eyes

on a child who faces something more foreign than death:

her inability to speak the language of these other children, the death

of her words in the air as they circle the body.  They believe in resurrection.

But even then they comprehend that this is final, the slow chill in their eyes

now convinced that death is just another fact of life.

For Gaia, another terror forms in the landscape.

The dust sleeving the feathers of this lifeless thing is the kind of chaos

that is anything but simple.  It is the chaos

I remember as a child, my tenth year--already fearing death

and whatever else was coming--when my horse broke from the landscape.

Foam on his mouth, eyes darkened, a frightened rider.  The resurrection

of the word will echo on my daughter's lips as the meaning takes on life:

"Péuane," she'll say for weeks.  He died.  Something missing in her eyes.

How could it end like this?--a horse gone wild, a woman's eyes

stilled by grief, my daughter in the landscape, caught by language.

Chaos seeking resurrection from this life, that death.

                                                                        Zoografou, Athinai

The Black Chateau

In Cocteau's version of the truth, at the least the one we are given to un­derstand, Orpheus is taken by the Princess named Death.  Together they drift, deep in the womb of the limou­sine that heads for the black chateau.  Silence goes faster backwards. 

The radio speaks in cryptic voices and poems burst from the air to transfix the poet--who cares for nothing else, not love, not possession, not inspiration, but only to steal these magic words that lift in the air and fall like snowflakes to his outstretched hands.  A single glass of water lights the world. 

And Death, the Muse of Hell, wants to possess him, to have him as her own, and Orpheus, the people's poet, is more than willing to be had.  She is so elegant, so sublime, with her permanently transformed frown and her long evening gloves, the strand of pearls knotted at her neck.  How differ­ent from the homeliness of Eurydice, who lives only for her poet-spouse, who swallows her pain as her once passionate lover steps in ig­norance on the knit sock of the unknown baby she carries within her.  The mirrors would do well to reflect further.  But she is not alone. 

Aglaonice, temptress of the Bacchic Mænads, who will rip Orpheus limb by limb one day and send his tragic remains and lyre floating down the river of fate, stands by Eurydice.  She loves Eurydice, fling­ing her black mane of silken hair be­hind her in a manner so classi­cally French.  Everyone save blind Orpheus knows of this passion, even the ef­femi­nate Inspector who has never solved a case in his life, who stands by merely to con­sole.

And Heurtebise, the chauffeur, who gassed himself for love as a young student and now remains the only figure of the underworld to under­stand the tragic proportion of each fig­ure, sympa­thetic to all, and loves Eurydice more even the temptations of the damned.  And what of Orpheus?

He wants to destroy everything he has ever done, to forget the idea of cre­ation as he knew it.  He wants to break through the formulas of the known, the baked and re-baked lit­tle turds of ideas, as Céline would say.  Already he sees himself, floating in air, passing through mirrors like quicksilver, into that other world.

And then there are the judges of Hell.  Orpheus will testify before them, King Minos and his minions.  It has to do with blindness, he'll say.  Eurydice is my one true love and even you can see how perfectly willing I am to sell my soul for a good line.  Yet you say you are a poet, they demand.  But the statement claims you are writer.  Well then, what is a poet?  they ask.  He casts a slight look of disdain in his answer:  A writer who tries not to be a writer.

Somehow there is pity.  Escape, of course.  The story doesn't end.  Death must pay.  The judges, bound by confusion, can for­give anything, this once, since it happened for love.  Everyone's pa­roled.  And Orpheus returns, never to gaze again on his wife.  But Eurydice must surface.

There, in the shadows, the Death of Orpheus whispers to him of a god who sleeps and dreams of this other world, the one they are condemned to.  He is the wind of the moun­tains, and the echo of words, she tells him.  None of us know where he is...

It's all too much.  Everything's bound for failure.  Eurydice is con­sumed by Death and Orpheus rescues her only to have disappear in the backseat after he views her face in the mirror.  The radio spins out cryp­tic wonders:  The bird sings with its fingers...Jupiter grants wisdom to those who would see.  Heurtebise becomes the guide and to­gether with Orpheus, they descend into Hell.  The crawl through walls and ascend the precipice, sucked like flimsy dolls sideways down corridors of darkness.  Death and Heurtebise must pay for what they've done.  All's not right with the under­world.

The story doesn't end.  The morning of young brides is brief as a noon­day candle.  Orpheus could never quite stop listen­ing to the radio's voices.  Years from then, the Mænads will wreak their vengeance.  He, who could teach the stone to sing and the tree to dance, turn the rivers to stillness, will drift down the banks of the Evros, his body torn and his cast off arms that constantly reach for the lyre beside his re­mains.  Still, he is singing, watching the wild women of Thrace, dressed in the skin of animals and ivy, brandishing the thyrsus high over their stark ulula­tions, as he drifts from the shore.  And when the earth has lost your name, still whisper to the earth:  I'm flowing.  To the flash­ing waters speak:  I am.  Still, he is singing, as he heads out to sea, drifting toward Lesvos, beyond the view of mere mortals.

                                                            Ydra, the Saronic Gulf, Greece