Feeling the heatScene from a newspaper office, Athens
The sports reporter scoffs French friesas if his life depends on it, and sated,falls asleep on his computer.
The music expert spends the nightsin lonely bars, disconsolate;the women almost work themselves to death.
The pagemakers wear masksof chronic weariness, and stubbled cheeks:stoics conditioned by a heartless press.
The ringmaster, once leonine,a lean and mean and hungry beastwhose twitching tail is feared morethan the lash, bares yellowed teeth.
Smoke rises from untidy desksas from a ship that's sinking fast,taking all hands on its burning deck ...
On LikavittosAthens 18/10/11
Attenuated spires of cypress,spiky octopus of aloes,cyclamen the earth hoardsfor the autumn,precious golden crocus;old woman who tends St George's,stringing beans contentedly;friendly tortoise, amblingto meet me on the dusty crest;cicadas chanting their vibratoto the noonday sun,as for millennia their kind has done;streets leading to Syntagma Squarechoked with banners, protesters;graffiti on a wall in Ambelokipi:silence is violence.
Early cyclists
Any moment now, I'll glimpsethe skimming Cyclops eyes;they'll hurtle pastin cohorts riding three abreast,bug-headed creatures of the dawnand twilight,black with neon stripes,leg-pistons pumping whirring wheels,words snatched by slipstream'sripping soundalong the cusp of dark,unzipping daybreak.
Surgeon
Each time I glimpse the surgeonthere seems less of him:thin as a whippet's shadow,wafer-passenger in lifts,between sightings he seems to wane;only his eyes and lipsbear intimations of vitality,as if those liveshe wrests back from the brinkhave sapped his strength.
Yet I sense he will not ceaseto grapple with those toxic seeds.Emaciated to the bone,quietly he carries on,and life keeps taking from himfor its needs.
Spitfire Girls*
Suddenly the sky became their space,the air their gauge,rushing past the Spitfire cockpit'sbubble and the fuselage;the lives they had been groomed forsloughed off like constricting, outgrown skinas chrysalis gave way to wings,strictures sank in slipstream.
Powder puffs and lacquered nailswere not anomalous to this:glamour helped to steel the nerves,the better to remain aloftin aircraft you had never flownin practice tests — fledgelingsin control of Blenheims,Wellingtons and Tiger Moths —antiquated rigs; new modelsfresh from the assembly line;pristine manual tucked intoboot-top fleece for reference:no aviation charts or navigators,just the naked eyealert for landmarks far below,hills camouflaged by cloud ahead.
Then came vicissitudes of peacewhen Spitfire women dreamed of flight,never to regain the skies:shackled to the earth by red tape,gender, dearth of openings,caught between the thermalsof intense desire and irony —birds of diverse