ALEXIS LYKIARD

 

 EVERYONE THEIR ISLAND

‘upon the sands of ever-crumbling hours’ – Beddoes 

Those islands dreamed of once again
so fleetingly possessed by heart and mind,
places and pleasures that you never will revisit…
Is it the memory alone of islands
waking you from uneasy, restless sleep
most recently, after you sailed back across
the lost years, then away towards a mere
three score and ten? – A reverie of Samos,
the dog-days of that summer, 1979,
longing for the conclusion of a sleepless
Aegean night; confined inside a stifling room,
barely a cubicle as I recall, a bright
white cell that overlooked the darkened
harbour and the somewhat squalid, ill-lit quay… 

Unable to lie close to one another –
with her so near and yet so far from me –
we both awaited the elusive daylight,
dawn keeping an uneasy distance still,
the pair of us most anxious not to miss
the early morning ferry to Piraeus.
Heading for Athens after months abroad we were
exhausted yet reluctant to return,
nostalgic for an England that we never guessed
during our absence had irrevocably
changed, and for so very much the worse,
just as our time together would be changing too,
only a further three years left to run… 

That desperately tormented sleepless night
remained one to remember, spent
somewhere in a limbo neither could invent
nor later joke about, though both might try.
We had been trapped by pipedreams of escape,
and now were transitory guests constrained
unwillingly by cramped twin beds, on threadbare
greying mattresses, within that narrow room,
inside an uninviting, mercifully temporary
refuge – the brief last-minute haven offered
us grudgingly by the misnamed Hotel
 

Morpheus. That fitful, wretched sultry night
of feverish insomnia wrote Finis
to a shining, wondrous episode, remote
survival, part of a shared past, our younger days.
Was it simply those mosquitoes I recall?
How could it have stayed too hot for shelter?
Best make the best of things and brave the glare
of that bare central lightbulb blazing to expose
our sunburnt nakedness, our hedonist fragility,
and better thus to see one’s foes than not.
But always, diving from the outer dark, that whine,
the drone of all those dreadful inescapable
squadrons, kamikazes of relentless insects…
There was no balm, no remedy except
to doze and start and start to curse and then
to slap oneself and then each other and again
to try to drowse or drive them off and stop
their draining of our healthy, over-heated blood.
 

And so we sweltered, sweated, laughed and swore
in order not to scratch an itch or wince with pain;
frustration set in, fear of bites became a curse
on sleep or love in that anticlimactic room
without nets, window-mesh, repellent spray
or ointment, and none to complain to. (Anyhow,
our rueful farewells had been made – the lonely hut
upon the beach turned into anecdote). We vowed
to take a toll of all those bloody little pests
and their incredible persistence, needling us
near to anger, an annoyance close to frenzy.
Scores of blotches, squashed red blobs, marked the white walls
and stained our skin but then exhaustion got
the better of us and we just surrendered
or rather, in an ancient word, succumbed, too hot
and finally too tired to fight, relieved
to have survived our journey to the end of night.
 

The next day did arrive – a sudden dawn,
time for departures. Only later would I ask
myself exactly what had happened to us there:
why the relief, leaving that isle of marvels, home
of Ritsos and Pythagoras? You soon forget
unique experience, fine wines, an earthquake, scenes
with intrusive priests, packs of wild mountain dogs,
the dusty bus whose tyre burst on a corkscrew bend,
those voyeurs, drunken soldiers, many sorts
of factional dispute, fascists and communists,
irrational taverna feuds and stinging insults,
arguments that loomed significant, stray omens
of a strange, unsettling time, when sea and sun
alone could heal our bodies. As for minds,
we learned extremes could never meet, euphoria
cannot be recreated nor repeated and
anguish was to linger, mingled with regret,
while things deemed threatening then, which once disturbed
us, seemed almost farcical in retrospect.
 

Given the peculiar twists and turns of those
romantic travels with their well-kept secrets,
unknown destinations – the whole epic voyage
most lives embark on and must comprehend –
we soon accept them, prize the joyful wanderings
and odd ordeals alike, encounters not
so brief, love and luck lasting only as long
as they were meant to, or you’ve made them. If it seems
each melancholy bout will nonetheless persist
(with unseasonably irritating whispers
in daylight as in darkness), fit to overwhelm
stark clarity and the grey weighty clutter of the mind,
such is old age! When haunted by the past,
stung by a twinge of conscience or regret; in dreams
of other times, faces and islands long since left behind,
so many friends and lovers fading in the mist,
appreciate what words remain to you in praise
of all that was and is. The best and worst of days
you’ve known: why mourn lack of success or misspent
youth? Needless to wither yet into the Single Truth:
that tortuous trail which lies so near and no one can resist.

 

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