In the distant mountains there is lightning, and when it goes, the clouds coming over those mountains resemble prehistoric beasts. But mostly the lightning is silent, and above me the sky has been wiped clean by the zephyr coming off the sea. The stars make their indecipherable maps. I once told a lover of mine that the freckles on her back were like maps of a forgotten world, like a secret language waiting to be understood. She squirmed and laughed beneath me. We were drunk, probably, young, not yet in love, somewhere in the midst of passion, which I think she was mistaking for love, which is a much more moderate thing, and a difficult thing, a struggle that passion cannot prepare you for. Like the summers here, with their unrelenting heat.

On the wind a few roosters are prematurely rehearsing dawn. On the wind is something sweet, a passionate ambrosia, and I remember the words of a poet I once loved: what separates us from the beasts is that our hearts, alone, know when spring is coming.

~

“Do you think you would like a bath?” Sabina asks after my first visit.

“With you?”

“No, by yourself. Of course with me!” she says, appearing in the doorway, lithe and naked and much older than me.

“Sure. I’d like that.”

While she runs the water I make coffee. The house is a foreign thing to me, and very familiar to her. She watches and directs me, maybe appreciating what it’s like for someone to see her life from the outside, with fresh eyes. The stonework in the kitchen is immaculate. Sun comes through a skylight.

“Who did your stonework?” I ask.

“Deaf and dumb Nakos,” she says. “Have you met him?”

“He lives around the corner from me.”

“Have you seen him work yet?”

“I haven’t.”

She smiles. She’s peeling an orange, legs crossed at the knees. She has the wide hips I like, solid legs, an unkempt bush. Her face reminds me of weathered stone, all smoothed lines and soft glints. Her chin is weak, but she has lovely, jocund eyes, eyes that like to laugh.

“He’s really a genius. It’s incredible. The man can’t speak or hear. And he’s too dumb to read. He truly is retarded. And yet his work. My God, it’s incredible to watch.”

The coffee and bath are ready. She takes hers black, with sugar. I tentatively get into the tub, and then she bravely slides in, nestling her body into mine. It’s a strange arrangement because she’s taller than me by almost a head. Her knees are bent, sticking out of the water like small volcanic islands. Her graying hair floats on the surface and sticks to the nape of my chest. She takes my arms, lopes them across her small, deflated breasts. Her hair tickles my chest, and I remember taking a bath with the girl of the freckle constellations: how uncomfortable and brittle her hair was against my chest, how resplendent she looked sprawled out beneath me, marble white. For a half second I want to cry. Sabina seems to sense this.

“Does it bother you being homeless?” she asks.

“No. Not anymore. There are worse things than not having a home, I think. Like your home being spoiled by staying too long. Like your home becoming a place that’s only full of memories, and nothing in the future.”

“I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m a village girl. All I am is memories and no future.” She arches her neck back to see if I’m watching her; I am.

“Sometimes you can be surprised by things, I guess.”

“I guess.” She starts to cry, and I don’t know why and I don’t ask: why she’s crying, whether this is the first time she’s done this. I kiss her on the top of her head, which is such an intimate gesture for someone who is mostly a stranger.

Later we dry off separately.

“Would you like to come again?” she asks. “I’d like you to come again.”

“I’d like to come again.”

“Tuesday. Come down the back alley, like you did. If there is a towel draped over the wall, come in. If there’s not a towel, keep going and come back Thursday and look for the towel.”

~

I meet El Presidente once, during my first week, when I am still mostly a curiosity. He’s sitting at Jimmy’s bar with an oxygen tank, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and gigantic wrap around sunglasses even though it’s raining out. A crowd of old men sits around him, listening to his story. He’s just come from the clinic where they gave him a steroid nebulizer. They told him he has pneumonia and should go right to the hospital.

“Eh, I feel great,” he says. “First, I need a metaxa.”

“During the summer,” Alan tells me, “El Presidente holds court down at Mike’s bar, in Haraki. He sits out front, shirtless and fat and smelling like a stuck pig, but there are tourists that come just to see him, just to drink with him and talk with him and smoke cigars with him. He lets people sleep on his floor, or wherever they feel like sleeping, no questions asked. Backpackers have stayed with him for weeks on end.”

El Presidente doesn’t look good. The steroids wear off quickly, and his breathing becomes labored. He is prodigiously fat, with at least three chins and swollen hands the size of platters. He reaches for his chest and slumps forward onto his cane. One of his friends takes El Presidente by the arm.

“Well now,” El Presidente says, “why don’t we see about that hospital, shall we?”

~

I hike by moonlight to the monastery in the hills. It is small and shaped like a coffin, cut methodically from the hillside. It looks down over our three villages, our swath of impossibly blue sea. In the gloam before dawn the lights of these villages remind me of small galaxies clustered amongst the cold black of the empty universe. Daylight comes slowly this time of year. The sky blushes first white, then a warm magenta and vermillion. The clouds streak by like predatory fish. A few stray birds ride the trade winds, basking.

Back home, I know, there is snow. I remember the two winters after college when all my friends were home. We would convene sadly most nights, too blinded by our stasis to realize that this would soon end, and then be irrecoverable. I think it was Kundera who said that all things are made poignant by their singularity, by the impossibility of their return.

During those winters, when it snowed, we would all come together with beer and liquor and cigarettes and dope. We’d dance together, poorly. We’d fight. We’d go outside and wrestle and drag sleds down once-busy streets gone somnolent with snow. We’d stand agape looking up at the tall elms that swayed in the wind, the snow coming down like some primal benediction from the darkness, feeling like ghosts of our childhood selves. We’d come home at four in the morning and make eggs and pancakes over a cast iron stove and we’d laugh and have more beer, and then we’d think impatiently: when will this end? how long can we keep up this coming and going?

The sun is up now. The olive trees are silhouetted on the long mountain ridge below me. The sea dances and dazzles with light. I am reminded of Monet. I am reminded of another winter morning in my last apartment, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I was standing at the sink in our kitchen. The trees were barren (I love dormant trees, the secret vistas their skeletons reveal for a season) and smoke belched from chimneys, as if the houses were exhaling. The horizon burned a cold violet. My lover was in Spain, but her letters sprawled with the passion of first absence. I was writing short, stark poems - poems like rocky streambeds in winter just before the freeze. I stood at my sink and watched the day begin and peeled a mango, slowly, the juice bursting between my fingers like a line from a Williams poem, the knife growing sticky, the sweet meat around the heart.

Dawn, I can report, is the same everywhere. Or, at least it has been the same in my life. Cold, stern, beautiful as a graveyard.

~

For a week I end my nights at Jimmy’s with a coffee and a cigarette and a warm pita dipped in fresh hummus. I read the same book of poems because it’s the only book of poems I have with me and because my mind is too frazzled to handle Dostoevsky or Woolf or Melville. It is ‘Monolithos’ by Jack Gilbert.

One day, while bringing my coffee, Jimmy’s wife, Maria, notices my book.

“Monolithos,” she says. “You’re reading about Monolithos?”

“Yes, sort of. They’re poems. By an American. Who lived much of his life on islands in Greece.”

She smiles at me the way a mother might at a sad, wayward child. She is typically Mediterranean - olive skinned, large boned, almost impossibly affectionate.

That night, after my pita and hummus, she brings me out a piece of cheesecake. With apologies to my Grandmother, it’s the finest dessert I’ve ever had. Before leaving, I poke my head in the kitchen and tell this to Maria. The next two nights she brings out the cheesecake when I’m finished with my humble meal. She sits with me and smokes and watches with a pleased smile on her face while I devour the cake. I think: my poetry will never give someone as much pleasure as she’s getting right now.

Then I think about Jack Gilbert and how he died in a nursing home in California having lost his mind, his lapidary mind. He spent his life on islands and in villages. And in the end he was failed by his mind. The great lion institutionalized. His wife wasn’t there when he died. They’d been living apart for thirty years. Her flight from New York was cancelled and they couldn’t get her on another one. When I read about this in November I went out the field behind my house and I sat down and I cried and I looked at the stars. I didn’t know I would be here in November. I didn’t know here existed. I didn’t know Maria’s cheesecake existed. My lover still called me every night and told me she loved me in November. November seems very long ago.

Maria takes my hand, gives it a firm shake, and smiles.

“Cheer up,” she says. “Doesn’t this already feel like home?”

~

You would think that an island has room for only one ecosystem; you would be wrong. Somewhere west of Lindos - Lindos, that picture perfect town nestled on a saddle between two mountains, its white homes that tumble like a waterfall of snow towards the sea - the olive trees and hard pan of the mountains gives way to conifers and acacia, to gently rumpled fields of tall grass and wild wheat. This side of the island is cooler and rainy than our side. This change is dictated by the wind, that old magician. Alan and I drive down a dirt road between acacias and small oaks that are turning themselves whitely in the wind, that soft photosynthesis that is their from of breathing. I remember the long meridians of northern Wisconsin. The roads that climb and tumble over the ancient glacial hills. I remember my great-grandfather’s white Norwegian church, its lone, simple steeple. I remember his grave in the graveyard that is surrounded by fields of corn. And I remember how those fields undulate in the wind.

All of this is to say, I feel strangely at home.

We drive along the coast to Monolithos. It is a lone turret of stone that rises from the sea floor. It is possible to reach Monolithos by a narrow causeway of stone that connects it to the mainland. The stairs are treacherous, marble worn smooth and slick from centuries of passage. There are no railings, and every year a few poorly supervised children tumble off this great rock.

At its summit there was once a fortress. It guarded this side of the island from the Turkish fleets. Now, the fortress walls have crumbled, and will only crumble further. The monastery built within its confines is dilapidated; its frescoes are faded and almost illegible. Alan and I stand in front of the monastery, on the precipice of this great cornice of rock. The Aegean spills out beneath us, impeccably azure until it meets the stony, imposing Turkish coast.

“Had you seen this on the internet?” Alan asks me.

“No,” I say. “I had no idea this existed.”

He smiles, pleased that his island’s best secret had been kept from me until now.

Hawthorne, in his travel sketches, wrote about his first trip to Niagara. He spent three days lolling about the falls, witnessing it from all angles, listening to it from near and from far. He wrote about the wonder with which the first Indians must have come upon Niagara - their befuddlement at the growing roar emerging from the forest; their bewilderment and awe when that great cataract was first unveiled beyond the hardwoods. I think of the first travelers to this island, the Minoans, perhaps, or maybe some earlier band of Arabic nomads. I imagine their wonder at first seeing this promontory of rock. I think that I can almost reach out to them and say: I feel the same thing. It is that ineffable something that binds us ineluctably to the past and future: that which is beautiful, that which is stunning, that which feels impossibly true.

And maybe it is disappearing. Maybe that wonder has been commoditized and co-opted by agents of commerce. But I’d like to report that it’s still out there, still looming, still waiting to surprise you with its scale. You already know this, of course, and don’t need me to tell you. But maybe I needed to witness it for myself. Maybe I’d forgotten and you’ve all been the ones reminding me: just wait, and it will surprise you again. Be patient. Open your eyes.

“There is a church I visited in Kiev,” Alan tells me while I’m looking out from the rock. “A medieval church. And its frescoes are perfectly preserved. I went there with a girl, when she and I spent our summer together, our lovely enthralling summer.” I don’t think he can see me smile about this. “We were so infatuated with each other that we would have literally eaten each other’s shit, you know? That kind of passion.”

“I know the kind.”

“Good. I was worried you didn’t.”

We laugh.

“Well she took me to this church one afternoon after we’d been making love in her apartment. And she told me the story of it. Apparently, everyone had forgotten about these frescoes, or thought that they’d faded. But what had actually happened was that, over the years, layers of plaster had been applied over the frescoes. And during the war, when the Nazis were retreating and destroying everything, they’d wired the church to blow. But something had gone wrong with the explosives, and all they did was blast off about three feet of plaster, and this revealed the extraordinary frescoes that had been hidden for centuries.”

“Really?”

“True story.”

“So we only know about this beauty because of the Nazis?”

“Yes.”

I turn and he’s sitting on a decrepit portion of fortress wall, smoking. We carefully descend from the fortress. Soon, we’re back on solid ground. I take one last look at the great rock. I remember Gilbert. “Monolithos,” he wrote, “means single stone. And it gave our home its name.”

~

We are at Jacob’s when we hear the news. The big fire is blazing, and a group of men are loudly playing backgammon. They are roasting sparrows and potatoes over the fire.

“Why sparrows?” I ask Alan. We’re both on our sixth ouzo; we’ve been telling stories about love and sex and drugs and bad behavior that we have, so far, gotten away with.

“Because after the war there was a terrible famine here. Thousands died, I believe. But those that survived became accustomed to eating whatever they could find. Most of those men grew up, as kids, eating sparrows because that’s how their parents survived the famine.”

I don’t know what time it is, but the men are picking the sparrows apart with their fingers, sucking the meat off the bones. Alan is telling me about a drag queen he once loved, a gangster’s son who would perform songs from ‘The Sound of Music.” A Neanderthal of a man comes in and makes straight for the bar and orders a Metaxa. He downs the drink and stands to face everyone.

“It’s El Presidente,” he says. “He’s dead.”

~

His real name was Petro, and his funeral is on a Thursday. It’s a breezy, indecisive day. Storm clouds slip surreptitiously over the mountains, dragging rain with them. But then the wind meets them, and they disperse, and for a few minutes the sun comes out and the world seems fecund, lush.

Three days have passed because so many people had to make travel plans. The Greeks, I am told, like to bury their dead within twenty four hours. But for El Presidente, exceptions have been made. His coffin is closed, however, because of the stench.

“It’s not like he smelled very good on his best days,” Alan’s father tells me.

A priest has come down from Archangelos.

Although Petro had no family, there are hundreds of people here. Some of them are German, others are English. I see Jorgo and Mona by the coffin; the dug the grave the night before. It is one of the odd jobs they do to survive here. Mona comes over, kisses both my cheeks. Jorgo shakes my hand firmly and we smoke a cigarette together in silence.

The gravesite has been roped off hastily. Some holy water has been brought out in a five gallon plastic jug. The priest delivers his ministrations, and then the procession begins, the long line of people who bow and kiss the closed, wooden coffin. It’s a simple box. I’m told that, in a few years, they’ll dig El Presidente up and clean his bones and bury those again.

It takes two extra men than normal to lower the coffin. The priest douses the grave with holy water. The procession begins again and everyone throws in a handful of soft, damp earth. Then, when we’ve finished, Jorgo gives a nod. A man has been waiting nearby in a backhoe, and he fires the machinery to life. It lurches over. The priest is still going on, and people are still listening, murmuring, while the backhoe begins filling in the grave. Apparently the operator is dissatisfied with his job, because he decides to pound the backhoe’s arm against the earth three times, sending tremors through the crowd.

The mourners still remaining move quickly to surround the gravesite with stone. Then, Jorgo unveils the mausoleum, ordered in Rhodes Town. It’s four marble walls and a plate of glass that will serve as a roof. Jorgo and Mona arrange the four walls. But when they go to put the plate glass on, they find that it’s far too small. Jorgo stares at the glass for a while, quizzically. A few friends come over and they decide to just create a sort of pyramid, instead, and lay the glass down on top of it. Jorgo gestures in disgust. “It will get fixed eventually. For now, he’s dead. He won’t mind.”

Rain is coming. We process down the hill to Jimmy’s to do the one thing El Presidente, I’m told, would have wanted: to drink until we can no longer stand.

~

Alan rolls me a cigarette. We’re sitting on his patio. It’s well after midnight. I’m wrapped in a blanket, bleary eyed, half conscious.

“Can I give you a word of advice?” Alan says, passing me the smoke.

“Of course.”

“Be careful with Greek women. Be very careful with Greek women. They will approach you, and say things about their marriage, but they’re very, very dangerous. Or at least, they can be, if not handled properly.”

“What’s the proper way?”

“With caution. And with distance.”

He gets us two more ouzo’s while I smoke.

“To El Presidente,” he says.

“To the President.”

“It’s a shame you didn’t know him better. A hell of a guy. There are going to be a lot of people this summer who will be devastated by the news.”

“He lived a good life, then.”

“The best any of us can hope for.” He finishes his own cigarette. “How long has it been since you’ve been home?”

“A month, today. The longest I’ve been away.”

“When will you go back?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I suppose I’ll have to figure that out eventually.”

~

The girls go out to the fields once the wildflowers start to blossom. They’re out there in the wind, picking them into baskets. The grasses, the trees, turn over and expose their white bellies, shivering like gracious felines. The girls spend hours like this, laughing and singing amongst themselves, their small fingers worked rough and dirty. Later they’ll sit outside the markets and braid the flowers into bouquets. The flowers come up faster than they could possibly be picked. The earth, from the monastery, is like a tapestry of color. And the girls crawl through this tapestry like little ants, taking their fill.

~

“Do you think I could have been a dancer?” Sabina asks. She’s strolling, or pirouetting, across the room to fetch her cigarettes. She’s still wearing the boots - the ones that come up to just below her knees - but nothing else.

“I think you could have been a lot of things.”

She sits down on the trunk where her cigarettes are, crosses her legs. She’s let her hair down and it falls across her shoulders, the small breasts like unripe fruit

“It’s ok if I smoke in bed?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“But you. You. What are you doing here?”

I light the cigarette and smile and exhale into the ceiling.

“You are young. You are handsome. You are smart, very smart, and kind, too. So why is it you’re here, in my bedroom, far from home. You should be home. You should have a home, a real home, with a beautiful young girl who will be more than just your wife.”

“There was a girl.”

“Of course. There have been many girls, from the looks of it.”

I smile at this. “Not so many. Some.”

“But this one.”

“Yes, one. I wanted to marry her. I would have.”

“Did you tell her this?”

I nod.

“And what?”

“She didn’t want to marry me. She was too young. She said she couldn’t give me her life.”

She looks away from me, leaning back so her head falls out the window into the sunshine. We’re in silence now, the silence of the susurrus of the wind through the lemon tree. It smells of the freshness after rain. I can see the flecks of grey in her pubic hair, the scar on her stomach where they pulled out her second child. Beyond her is the green of the lemon tree, the mottled stone of the fence.

“If you ever tell me you love me,” she says. “I’ll kill you. I want you to know that. There are things I can’t handle.”

“Ok.”

“Besides. You won’t be here long enough for that. Then you’ll be gone again, homeless, finding some other woman, some newer one.”

What I want to say is: I’ll remember you, though. I’ll remember you in the window in your boots. I’ll remember you at the bar, laughing with the men who are all half in love with you, the way you find me sometimes in the corner of your eye for a quarter second longer than you should. I’ll remember those quarter seconds, your boots.

“I’d like a home, you know.”

“Isn’t that how it works?” she says. “Those of us with homes yearn for the road, for the newness. Those of us on the road yearn for a bed to call our own.” She finally looks at me again, and smiles with the sadness of this, these weeks leading to nowhere. “You should go. It’s getting late, and I have work.”

“Ok.”

“Come by Thursday? At noon?”

“Ok.”

“Go out the back door and hop the fence, of course. There shouldn’t be anyone in the back alley.”

I get dressed while she sits on the trunk watching me. Her cigarette has gone out the window. She closes her eyes and sighs, maybe listening to the wind.

~

On Wednesday Alan and I drive with his parents south, into the mountains, to the village of Apolakia. It hangs from the side of a cliff like a climber, sprawling, white and blue and pure stone.

We park in the main square. It is a festival day, and the church is letting out. The old women of the village are in black. We follow them to a café, Sylvia’s. Inside, they take a large table at the middle and invite us to sit with them. They offer us cigarettes and coffee. They offer us homemade orange cakes wrapped in napkins. They offer us a salad of wheat grain and cinnamon that they dump into our cupped hands.

They talk to us in broken English. They are smitten, especially, with Alan’s father, a hunched balding man with no teeth. He charms them with his stories about the war and about Gibraltar. I go outside for a cigarette. The morning is cold, here in the valley. When I come inside Alan’s mother takes my hands, one at a time, and holds them in her own until they’re warm. I remember my grandmother doing this one winter in Wisconsin. Eventually the women begin to filter out and we’re left with one, Sylvia, the owner. She and Alan’s father are discussing earthquakes and fire. They swap stories about the Great Fire of 2007, the one that swept out of the mountains like the judgment and scarred the heart of the island for a generation. They talk about the earthquake that rattled them the week after the fire.

“It was so strange,” Sylvia says. “I was coming home from work. We stayed open late during the fire, because the firefighters needed coffee and they needed food. So we stayed open for a week straight, making them whatever they needed. But we worked in shifts, of course, and I had the night shift. I was walking home - it must have been three or four - and I realized that there was this extraordinary commotion. Every single animal in the valley was shouting. The horses were neighing and the goats were bleating. All the cats were yowling. And the birds, my God, the birds! They were singing, every single bird was singing, but it wasn’t a beautiful song, or a good one, it was a song of absolute, sheer terror. It was this tremendous racket, unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life. I walked through this noise and I thought: what is this?” She sips her coffee. She’s a stout, portly woman with small hands and an avian nose. Her English, lilted with a New Zealand accent, is perfect. “Four hours later I woke up and the whole house was shaking. My daughter came running downstairs. ‘Mom! What in the hell is going on?!’ So we stood in the doorway together, holding one another. And right then I thought about the animals. They knew. They knew it was coming. They just knew.”

She smiles and shakes her head at this. We all do. It’s a festival day. Spring is on the way. It rides on the wind at dawn like the birds, wings alar with the pleasure of new, fresh light.

Sylvia turns to me. “And you, young American. You. Where do you call home?”

What I want to say is: I have no home. My home is here and it is nowhere and it’s everywhere. It’s with a beautiful little boy and my struggling brother. It’s with my parents making their way the best they can in this world of earthquakes and great fires. It’s with a girl whose love for me has quieted away. It’s in these sentences, these words, these stories. When I am lost - and I am often lost - I return to these stories, and I find my way home, one sentence at a time.

“Philadelphia,” I say instead, and it rolls off my tongue like a single, smooth stone.