May 2005

Two Poems by Keith Taylor

An Introduction to Modern Greek in South Bend, Indiana, 1967
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for Vassilis Lambropoulos
Artemis Leontis
and Kostalena Michelaki

Quince and pomegranate? Sage? Rosemary?

I didn't know anyone who even knew

what those things were, so at Benner's Market

on Mishawaka Avenue, right next

to our new temple—the Gospel Center

United Missionary Church—I bought

pistachio nuts—A Product of Greece—

and Welch's White Grape Juice. I carried them

like holy food to Potawatomi

Park where at picnic tables below oaks

I read Zorba the Greek. I was fifteen

and there had never been a loneliness

or a longing as exquisite as mine.

I wandered over dusty hills in Crete

slaking my thirst with Welch's. I sauntered

through dark alleys in the medieval town

on Rhodes—built by the Knights Hospitaler

after Saladin conquered Jerusalem—

and smelled souvlaki grilling over fire,

eating pistachios to satisfy

my hunger. When lake effect snow began

to drift down from the sullen skies above

South Bend, I discovered Odysseus

Elytis and learned that in those poems

was some place new. But I walked there

in the sun on a beach sprinkled with white

and black pebbles, with a slightly older

dark-haired olive-skinned woman who whispered

just above the Aegean's gentle wash:

E thalassa, thalassa, thalassa.

Days of 1971, 1972
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Between my nights washing dishes at the restaurant

—one star in the Michelin—where rich folks from Toulouse

ate their quiet country dinners, and my afternoons

on the ledge below the eaves outside my little room

above the private riding club, the ledge that looked south

across green hills to the Pyrennes and where I sat

for eight months and read the expected Europeans

—Celine, of course, Baudelaire, Cavafy in the small prose

fragments of his French translation—and for the first time

understood what it was about the Americans—Poe,

Melville, Whitman, Henry Miller—how they could be sad

and exuberant on the same page and how right

that sounded to me . . . in the mornings between my job

and the reading, she would come back, often just at dawn

when the nightingales still called from the far horse pasture,

before the black mountains had whitened under their warm

Iberian sun . . . she would come back tired and smelling

of her other, more experienced lovers and would wake

me, sometimes gently caressing my beard or bringing

me back to her hard world by quietly ripping pages

from my books and dropping them on me like a blanket.

In his poetry, prose and nonfiction, Keith Taylor is known, as one critic summed up, for "exploring those moments when ordinary life gives way to extraordinary perception."

Author of Everything I Need (March Street Press, 1996), Life Science and Other Stories (Hanging Loose Press, 1995) and other enthusiastically received works, Taylor will publish Guilty at the Rapture (Hanging Loose Press) next year.

"An introduction to Modern Greek in South Bend, Indiana, 1967" appeared first in the Notre Dame Review. "The Days of 1971, 1972" first appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine.

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