1
Okay, Koufonissi, our island, we’re back
in your silk-robe quiet, and water, and wind.
2
Not bad, Koufonissi, you’re back
in our faces with your softness.
3
Alright, Koufonissi, we’ve spent the night
with your stillness, your heat, your tedium.
4
Your sea, Koufonissi, like turquoise crayons
from the box with violets and darker blues.
5
Scorpena, sand-smelt, bogue, and bream
swim within Koufonissi’s dream.
6
Keros, island-door to the world below,
silent across the bay from this heaven.
7
Taxí isn’t a taxi, in Greek, it just means “okay.”
There are no taxis on Koufonissi, but all is well.
8
The island throughout which nothing is heard.
Only the wind in the shell of the word.
9
A birthmark in the Aegean
is all you are, Koufonissi.
10
Night after night and the boats putter out,
then hover – spirits over the water.
11
What’s with those smashed figurines, O Keros –
Cycladic anger four thousand years old?
12
What dreams, Koufonissi, you prompt –
nightmares in Atlantis. How strange.
13
Orion is plugged, Koufonissi,
into your blackening moonless sky.
14
It’s true, Koufonissi, this idyll
isn’t life – it’s vacation. And yet ...
15
Ah, Koufonissi, the mysteries
of getting those schools into your nets.
American poet Peter Cole’s most recent volume of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled; a new collection, The Invention of Influence, is forthcoming (both from New Directions). His translations include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale). Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.