Christopher Bakken
Christopher Bakken's first book of poems, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Award in Poetry for 2001 and was published the same year by Truman State University Press; Lagouderas Editions in Athens is reprinting the book in a bi-lingual (Greek-English) format in 2004. His new poems (from a manuscript of eclogues and elegies) have appeared recently in Raritan, Southwest Review and Lyric, and his essay "Derek Mahon and the Vocational Muse" appeared this past June in The Gettysburg Review.

Aegean: Flight 652

The names of seashore towns run out to sea…
                                                                           Elizabeth Bishop

That could be Paros, I say, though I know
its body only from maps: the blunt head,
two rabbit-ear peninsulas, the port.

You've already recognized Naxos,
its marble gate to the invisible
just beyond the town, all the ragged beads

of western bays where you floated, pregnant,
five whole days the last time we were here.
This year, above the thrum of two loud props,

our daughter babbles her own geography
in a tongue we haven't managed to learn.
A heavy diaper since the airport, Rhodes,

she tantrums in the crowded seat until
you point out the window, islands below.
Mykonos. Tinos. Andros. A dragon's tail.

Delos: discarded pit of an olive.
We taught her how to point and so she points,
translates all we say into her single vowels:

karpouzi     thallasa     petaloudes
Just yesterday we held her high enough
into the shadowed mane of a gum tree

to fill her infant gaze with butterflies:
a hundred thousand crowded to a tree
in a valley of a hundred thousand trees.

Below us now, the Aegean churns
like a sea of wings, waves bucking skyward.
There's no place for her eyes to land, or ours.

Would we know home from here if we saw it?
Is it the water that makes us forget?
Yet the names of islands gestate in us

long after the Atlantic has replaced
this region where the glasses are always full
and the world is all whitewash, whitewash.

It is possible to believe in this.
We have supposed it lucky to be born,
as Whitman says we must. No ordinary faith

but an open-winged longing for more
love, deeper than our island solitudes.
So we announce for her everything we see:

words are flesh and blood we can devour
since in time they become what we're made of.
Another year we'll climb Thera's gnarled spine,

go where the half-moon of Chios eyes Izmir
and Lesbos opens its ear to the sea.
Spetses. Hydra. Poros. Aegina.

The world is too full, never time enough
or words--we're even out of water now,
Athens coming into view. She gives up

the window for your breast until we land.
So many islands, so much blessed salt,
this feast we could not finish by ourselves.

Back To Contents