Title: Graft

Author: Helen Heath

In: Sport 39: 2011

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2013, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 39: 2011

Graft

page 246

Graft

Kalliope of the golden
tongue speaks:
You want room? I have
very goot room, goot douche.
Goot tourist, Greeks no goot.
You come.
You cook with olive oil?
Goot gal, goot gal.
Kleiste tin porta.
Where are you going?
You no bang door,
you break the plaster.

*

Spyros asks me You believe
God? I’m not sure how
he’ll react, so I look at my hands.
Atheist, I say.
Ah, Atheos! Kommounistikós!
Kalo koritsee—goot gal.
He takes both my hands.
Poleé kaló, my friend!

Kalliope skulks behind us
in the kitchen. She’s boiling up eggs
and spinach, buttered
white bread for dinner.
Mutters, o yeros anoeetos
(old fool).

*

page 247 You still here?
Kalliope says
You see sights, you still here
What you look for?
I say—My mother’s family came
from here. I don’t know
I just wanted to see, I don’t know.
Maybe if I know my past
I’ll know my future.
Spyros yelps Archaeologist!
You come to dig?! I take you
to Georgio at Exoghi.

*

Kalliope gives me
the evil eye
Here, you take,
you keep away matiasma
evil eye. She spits
touh, touh, touh

and signs the cross.
The blue glass eye stares
up at me from my palm.
Efharisto, I say, thank you.
She waits, then, realising
I’m lost, pins it to me
like a name badge on
a child at camp.

*

Georgio wears an American sailor’s hat,
which he takes off frequently and wrings.
He lives in the ruins of his old family
home with only a tarpaulin for a roof.
He says Italians with money and tans
exercise their tongues

page 248 more than their fat arses.
He says he came back from Melbourne
to find a wife but he hasn’t had any luck.
He says you need to go see Tina.
Tina says he has plenty of money,
that he’s mad, that he set fire to the hillside
cleaning up rubbish. They had to bring planes
in from Patras to douse it—
He’s not so popular with the villagers.
Tina says there were plenty of people here
in the old days. Smallpox and Tb killed many.
They dragged the coffins away with a rope
so as not to touch them.
Then there were the earthquakes, of course.

*

Georgio leads me
to the site Tina pointed to
on the map of the Island.
We dig here.
Okay.
It’s early, we have to start
before the heat.
I don’t know how an archaeologist
would dig
I guess the area would be sectioned
with string and sticks
into quadrants.
We just start digging a hole.
By the time the heat stops us
Spyros has to help pull us out.
We lie under the olives
with bread and feta.

*

page 249 I point to the birds.
Spyros, how do you say?
Eagle—Aetós?
He laughs. Who teach you?
They yeepas—vulture, like gypsy.
The birds I had thought to be
noble predators above these slopes
are scavengers from Cairo.
Cleaning up the carrion,
the hillside.

*

I lie under the olive trees
and say to them, to the hill,
to the sea: I am ready.
I press my ear, my cheek,
to the ground. I smell the dry earth.
I say to the island: I am
ready to hear you now.
I wait. After a while
I hear it. There is nothing there
but a hum of silence,
the tension vibrating. The hum
touches my cheek, passes through
to my mouth.
I swallow, turn and look up.

*

At night I am digging.
Georgio is there too
he holds an old fashioned lantern.
It’s cooler now, the earth too.
The spade rings out
against something metal.
Down on my hands and knees
I scrape at the dust, my fingers run
around a square edge, I reveal a ring

page 250 handle, it’s too heavy, Georgio pulls
and heaves, his face red in the lamp light.
A crack! The rusty hinges snap and Georgio
instead drags the cover off.
We look down the manhole.
The lantern barely reveals
a fraction of its depth.
I think you find Hades
says Georgio.
There’s no other choice
I take the lantern and begin the descent
Georgio hesitates then calls
You no go alone! and follows.
At first the earth is dry
but with each step down
the wooden ladder it becomes
damper. With only one hand to hold the ladder I take
each step carefully, placing
one foot on the rung
then the other. The ladder
is ancient, wet and soft
one rung snaps under my first foot
and I slip with a gasp
to the next, my legs stretched
my knuckles white.
The descent seems to take all night
I’m starting to worry about how long
the lantern will last when I notice
a grey light and the opening of the manhole into
a cavern.

*

The truth about Ithaca is
you’ll be drawn back. If you
travel along one latitude, ultimately
you’ll return to your starting point.
The continents will still drift
page 251 even if you stay in one place
and once you’ve been conceived
at some point you’ll die. This we know.
If I dig a hole all the way through
to before, perhaps then I can hold her.

*

I’m trying to recall
my Greek myths. Who
should I expect to meet
down here? Who should I
be prepared to fight?
My feet are in loose gravel, which
squeaks as I make my way forward.
Georgio has a hand
on my shoulder. We are in
a tunnel at the end—a cliché
of light that we make our way
towards. My heart thumps
its fists against my ribcage
four times to each step.
and there we are at the mouth
of a cave on a tiny
beach and coming up over
the sea’s horizon—
the morning sun.