Athens Snow

I’m startled as I wake
by the stark silence
of morning. No dogs barking,
no cars starting,
only the whisper of snow
swirling in a March wind,  

From Mt. Penteli
all the way out to the islands,
the radio says, and here,
drifts inching up doorways and sills,
weighing down the mimosas,
the garden’s urns
losing their form, the marble grapes
of a fountain
iced over. It’s easy 

to lie here and remember
in another country, another time,
nuns telling us in school
how each flake is unique,
as we watched them fall, so delicate,
into anonymous mounds. 

Drifts could pile so high
they once kept our family cabin
snowed-in for days. We listened to the radio
till the batteries died, 

then clawed out
to an all-white landscape—
no road, no car, the apple trees
in the orchard below
crowned and glittering,
the whole mountainside
still as our breath
hovering in front of us.  

—till that buck
stepped out from behind the shed,
clumps of ice
hanging from his antlers, ears twitching,
eyes glaring, hungry and cold;
then he bounded up the slope
through chest-high drifts. 

Now I gaze at the marble Athena
on my neighbor’s balcony—
a bas-relief
of the goddess grieving,
pressing her forehead
to her spear, snow on her cheek and breasts,
little ridges on her raised arm,
the tip of her helmet. Soon. 

all of her will be covered
in a formless mound
as my own body
grows heavy with years. Snow builds  

in the quiet wind
just as each
singular moment.
falls to endless
drifts of time, at their core  

a darkness, a pulsing sentience
with the eyes of that buck
determined to go into
the glittering present.

Holiday

Walking a cobbled lane in Trastevere,
we stopped for a drink at a café-bar
with wobbly tables. As usual those days,  

we were fighting, which means
we weren’t talking. I was thinking  

of that Roman prison we’d visited that morning,
of the men our guide had said
were crucified upside down there—
St. Peter and bar Giora— 

while she was watching a beggar
flit, one table to the next. Reaching  

for her purse, she spilled her gin-tonic
on her blouse, her skirt, her brand new Il Gancio
leather jacket. She straddled her chair  

as I knelt beside her trying to wipe off her skirt,
that jacket, while that beggar
leaned in, palm outstretched— 

Can’t you see we have a problem! I snapped. 

No, he replied, in perfect English,
That’s not a problem.

I Didn’t Go to My Father’s Funeral

In the depths of my sleep, the sound of crashing waves.
If there’s a ship in my dream, it must find its way
to southern Spain, or else I’ll wake in a haze, 

thinking of the men carrying my father
on their shoulders. It’s not sadness I’ll feel as they lower him
into the earth, just a dim kind of happiness 

since I know, however hurtful and absent he was,
he’s going to a place where the light is pure and clear,
even as I know, of course, there’s no such place. 

Now a priest fills the air with prayer, just words,
the clash of vowels up against consonants,
like that sea in my dreams, that ship chugging south. 

Some nights there’s a moon above that sea, hovering
like my father’s unshaven face in the mirror.
I want to touch that face again, feel his lips  

coming in close to kiss me. Like he did so long ago.
After that just words, vowels against consonants,
his voice droning on, his face that moon 

getting smaller and smaller. Then crashing waves.
That ship trying to make its way to southern Spain. 

Author’s Biography

 Born in Nevada and raised in California, Don Schofield is a graduate of CSU, Sacramento (MA, 1978) and University of Montana (MFA, 1980). A resident of Greece for many years, he has taught literature and creative writing at American, British and Greek universities, and traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East and farther afield. Fluent in Greek, a citizen of both his homeland and his adopted country, he is the editor of the anthology Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece (Truman State University Press), and has published six books of poetry in the US, the first of which, Approximately Paradise (University Press of Florida), was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, and a more recent collection, In Lands Imagination Favors (Dos Madres Press), reached the final round for the Rubery Book Award (UK). His translations of contemporary Greek poets have been honored by the London Hellenic Society, shortlisted for the Greek National Translation Award and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His latest book, six poems from which have also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, is A Different Heaven: New & Selected Poems (Dos Madres Press). Currently he lives with his companion Aleka in both Athens and Thessaloniki.