Toward Cyprus

When I travel from the city

and enter the wilds, I feel the wild 

rise up inside me. I am a simple man,

I envy dogs, have little evidence

for my studies, save for papers. Travel

carries me to landscapes without trees,

new-island types, all grit, cooling.

I reason up the processes. Being 

a person seems possible there. When women 

grace my island with their nudity, I lead

the circling dogs away with bits of fruit

I found in the shallow waters. The fact 

of fruit’s evening return alone 

is enough to keep me from madness. Women 

dress themselves, build individual rafts 

I cannot board. Come evening the shore fruit disappears 

I'll have to hunt the dogs, I know. All of them 

are male. In place of fruit, silver chalices 

wash ashore in fragile paper boxes 

carrying nothing to drink or use. 

From a dryness I begin drafting 

the stone island’s autobiography 

on scraps I tore from the chalice-boxes. 

The island’s narrative is divided 

into three arbitrary periods. 

One: underwater. Two: the young island 

attends arts college in a small city 

on scholarship. There he experiments 

with altitude, discovers a passion 

for early modernist abstraction but 

fails to write insightful criticism. 

He understands the opportunities 

his youth affords as irretrievable.

Three: arrival of trees. I toil in haste

to record the final passage, the third

is proving a challenge to reconcile

with the prior two as night

without the dogs nearby is awful cold 

and my stack of paper scraps is shrinking, 

having been some time since the last chalice.