The olive groves, the wine-blush of the sea,
the salt air, looking down from ancient cliffs
on the Mediterranean, as if blood
of the old world turned to gold in the bright sun,
gold stones and gold rough grasses underfoot
on the Mediterranean coast in the sixties:
me a gangling teenager with my parents.
We walked towards a cafe with marble floors—
through olive trees, there, then, the plinth of coolness.
The sea like Lacoon’s serpent, was coiled beneath
in compact sheathes, a cobalt blue, blood red.
We sipped wine—no-one knew we were alive.
My Dad said, this is Homer’s wine-dark sea,
as the sun glinted on the crinkled sea,
thousands of feet below, beneath the cliffs,
He could say it without too much irony,
letting it go, past irony, the feeling,
walking uphill with his wife on the small path,
there in late middle age, a happy day;
in sunny southern France, the olive groves
past the dry yellow grass, rough olive trees,
black-clad women going up the cobbled hills,
turning to dusk—the sea, a cobalt jewel,
liquid, coiling like intertwined snakes.
That was his gift, the oddest gift, the feeling,
letting it go, past irony, the feeling
that all experience was real, sea,
both blue and red, deep, indescribable.
This is Homer’s sea, my father said,
a poor Jew from Brooklyn who had made good,
walking under the olive trees,
in the hot sun, fifty years ago;
no-one could say it for me, then, like him,
so happy, self-assured, so full of life;
as I loped behind, in my penny loafers,
and my best checked summer short-sleeve shirt.
We walked on the streets of those medieval towns
sand in the rubber sandals, on our toes,
bitten to death by olive-fat mosquitoes,
laughing or shouting at the souvenirs,
walking towards the hillside cafe, laughing,
to eat a fish lunch in our relatively happy
discomfort and quarreling. See, that was it: feeling;
he had the gift of feeling—making it real
like the man in the play by Camus,
he made a coffee cup real when he touched it.
“Mediterranean” originally appeared in Old Poems, New Translations by Paul Francis Malamud, 2013.