Sport 43: 2015
Brent Kininmont
Brent Kininmont
Giant Gulps
In earlier times, all islands wandered about and had no foundations.
—quoted in ‘A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities’
How diminished
the old gods appear.
But for the crowns
their figures now
submerged, not
utterly forgotten.
Some, naturally,
still steam. This ferry
steers clear of them
and that drowning
sensation in our beds
whenever they
come up for air.
It’s an uncommonly
clear head we crave—
one now at ease in
the underworld. Once
flush with laurel
and myrtle, a crown smoothed
by eons of brooding.
Wrinkled only by that
Bronze Age road
still meandering
above the harbour.
Isthmus
Two thousand years to cut through this mound
in the way. But a 30-minute cruise
beneath the sheer rock walls depends upon
a booking. Poor planning stopped progress on
the canal before. Nero, to the relief
of 6,000 extras, pulled the plug months
into the first excavation. Any
entrails would have shown the huge drain on
the state would not end in his lifetime.
That a living god would never stand in
one sea, like Jose and I, and look down
the blue telescope of the canal at
another. Then drift along a warm gravel
road, collapsing the four miles by foot.