Thank you.
It's a real treat to be here.
Summer, once again.
It's very cold in New England.
I'd like to start with a poem that
talks about my childhood in the beginning.
I was born and raised in Greece.
Sometimes, as a child, when the Greek sea was exceptionally
calm, the sun not so much a pinnacle
as a perspiration of light, your brow and the sky meeting
on the horizon.
Sometimes you'd dive from the float, the pier, the stone
promontory.
Through water so startled, it held the shape of your plunge.
And there, in the arrested heat of the afternoon,
without thought, effortless as a mantra turning,
you'd turn and the paused wake of your dive.
Enter the suck of the parted waters.
You'd emerge, clean cesarean, flinging,
live rivulets from your hair, your own breath arrested.
Something immaculate.
A chance crucial junction, time, light, water, had occurred.
You could feel your bones glisten, translucent,
as mermaid spines.
In rain, green Oregon now, approaching 30,
sometimes the same rare concert of light and spine
resonates in my bones as glistening starfish
lover your fingers beach up.