*****
Born in Nevada and raised in California, Don Schofield is a graduate of the University of Montana (MFA, 1980). He has lived in Greece for four decades, during which time 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 five books of poetry in the U.S., the first of which, Approximately Paradise (University Press of Florida), was a finalist for the 1985 Walt Whitman Award, and a more recent collection, In Lands Imagination Favors (Dos Madres Press), reached the final round for the 2015 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, A Different Heaven: New and Selected Poems (Dos Madres Press), has just come out. He currently lives in both Athens and Thessaloniki.
*****
Introduction by Don Schofield
I didn’t grow up literary.
Mine was a mixed up, rowdy, anti-intellectual childhood, like that of many in my generation. True, I had texts shoved down my throat from an early age by Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers—Steinbeck and Homer, Whitman and Dickinson, Heart of Darkness and “The Most Dangerous Game.” And true, I won a class competition in my senior year for reading and reporting on the most books, though I garnered that distinction by cribbing from reviews.
The books I read on my own and loved as a child were by Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson. And there’s a YA story I remember to this day (though can’t recall the title) about a teenager who loved playing baseball but could only hit foul balls. No matter what was pitched to him, even the softest of lobs, he’d foul it off. He became a professional and always batted first in the lineup because he wore pitchers down, so much that they would always walk him, intentionally or not.
I sometimes think I’m that boy, grown up now, trying to write poetry. Still hitting mostly fouls.
Another story I liked as a preteen was about a boy who, when he walked, would always look down, taking in what he saw on cracked sidewalks: crushed leaves, rusty hairpins, lines of ants and caterpillars, now and then a shiny coin. I became that boy too.
College got me to reading more, which in turn pushed my gaze outward and inward. So at 25 I took up poetry, and at 30 migrated to Greece and fell in love with traveling.
By now, in my 70s, I’ve traveled far and wide, read and reread tons of books (including many I pushed aside as a schoolboy), even published a few of my own.
And I still read sidewalks.
*****
Don Schofield: Eight Poems
THE PHYSICS OF PARTING
A moment ago I heard the fine
spatter of rain in the field behind me,
water rising, ready to sweep me away. Aristotle
taught wet and dry are absolute
opposites, each on its way
to its natural place. So why
do I see a row of poplars along a wall
when I turn, wind prying dry leaves
up and down the golden trunks,
and still the hiss of rain in my ears? I think of the spider
weaving that last night it was our bedroom,
rising and falling in moonlight,
not like us but Socrates,
who kept standing and sitting those last nights
in his cell, curious about his presence there—
due only to bones and joints
and flexible muscles? the words he uttered
explained just by laws of sound and hearing? I ask
what law for parting lovers,
one wet, one dry? Our wholeness
was never a burden—then it suddenly hardened
in opposite directions. The web snapped in my face
when I finally rose and left, descending
into chaos, but for the mind,
pure and alone, weaving depths
to heights, mind so pure it makes
wings of thick gossamer and lost
love: rise, now rise.
Published in Approximately Paradise
(University Press of Florida, 2002)
BEIRUT PASTORAL
“When a man hath taken a new wife
he shall not go out to war…
but shall remain at home for one year….”
—Deuteronomy, 24:5
All day the guns pound from the Chouf.
When a shell hits, the arbor shakes.
The sandbags fall unless we prop them up.
Here in Besaam’s garden
my new father-in-law talks
of mists in the Bekaa Valley,
deep grass hiding the ruins.
Dust hangs in the failing light. Before eight,
we go home past the searchlights.
And his words go with us through the rubble—
to be a weed in Baalbek, a stone piled
in that Roman library with field and sheep.
The Romans left that valley bitter, defeated,
to shepherds who now sit and smoke and follow
the trails of jets across the dusk sky.
Home is harsh lights, locked doors,
torn shutters, one room looking out
on an alley of burnt cars. My bride and I
leave our clothes behind the door and go into
that empty room. When the spotlights pass,
our bodies shine like toppled statues.
Published in Approximately Paradise
(University Press of Florida, 2002)
EIDOTHOTHEA GRIEVING
“The Ancient of the Salt Sea…
Proteus of Egypt…is, they say, my father.”
—The Odyssey, Book IV
Waves keep rolling
and I keep asking
this vague mound under blankets—
why a lion, why a falcon, why a towering flame?
Why all those years walking the beach,
following your tracks with the urge for you,
Father, your touch, your solidity,
your hand firmly holding mine?
You were grass once. From then on
I treaded fields so carefully,
wondering what shapes I took
in Mother’s womb—or was it your womb,
Father? Did I step from your ear,
a girl already asking questions?
I thought I could have you
with words, Father. While you slept
I’d spread feathers, fur or sand—
whatever was where your ear
should be—and whisper,
Who are you? Who am I?
I’d touch my hair, my chest,
and shiver at the thought
that I’m not me, I’m you. Seals clapped
each time you became a towering flame
for the crowds of locals and travelers
who’d wrestle you to learn the future. You won.
You always won. But still you kept changing—
bull laboring up a hill, boulder
rolling through scrub, flicker of trout, gull
barely touching the waves—
each shape flashing before our eyes
then lost in a sea of shapes,
like these questions I can’t help but ask—surely
if you’re nothing fixed then you’re all things,
Father, a trompe l’oeil
of everything,
right?—except, for me, a father.
When I step outside,
the mountains are waves
against a hard blue sky. Wind
rattles the unsteady boards of our hut,
while inside, your shifting comes slower.
No fire, no tree, you’re almost
solid, curled up at the edge of your bed,
barely breathing. Or is your dying
just another disguise,
that urgent expression
a dolphin caught in nets? I stroke your hair—
your hair—smell the sea
on your fading breath. Let me
be the one who finally pins you,
Father—here, now—
the one who makes you give me
in your dying the answers you never gave me
living. Let me hold your body
to its one, final shape: the un-
recognizable figure of a man.
Published in In Lands Imagination Favors
(Dos Madres Press, 2014)
ANGEL
after a photograph by Donald McCullin
Six boys just turning the corner,
one playing the oud, one firing
his Kalashnikov, one twirling his scarf,
all of them laughing at the woman
face-up in the street. It’s funny
how her arms flung straight out,
the sleeves of her robe trailing
in mud, look like wings.
With each bullet this angel
jumps a little.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxBack in America,
thumbing through a book of photographs,
trying to fathom what impulse leads us to shoot
even angels and corpses, I was listening
to my old neighborhood,
heard nothing that mattered.
Then the garden greyed over
with rain, the hissing of passing cars
pulled me toward sleep, so I lay down
on my childhood bed. Donnie
whistled in my dream—
Come to the schoolyard,
there’s a fight!
That boy’s head
Donnie jerked back
and I slammed with my boot—
I woke wondering
at my own cruelty,
how we laughed and clambered
over a fence, forgetting those eyes
staring up from the blacktop
where we left him. What lack
and illusion turned that to fun?
Last week,
riding to the Beirut airport,
I was astonished to see Howitzers
hidden in a schoolyard—Besaam
grabbed my finger—
Don’t point! They’ll think
you’re shooting. You’re only asking
for trouble. But now, awake,
I can’t stop pointing—
at those guns,
at that boy on the blacktop,
at these ones emptying a rifle
into a dead woman,
toward laughter down the street
I only now barely hear.
Published in In Lands Imagination Favors
(Dos Madres Press, 2014)
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.
Published in A Different Heaven:
New and Selected Poems
LOST PLACE
“We always find an excuse, eh Didi…
to give us the impression we exist.”
—Samuel Beckett
Náousa Bay, Kythnos
Sitting on this porch overlooking the sea,
I want to exist, to know for sure
I exist. When I walk the beach,
waves caress my feet, recede
with a long, slow hiss. I can’t say
what gulls know, or crabs. I only know
this porch, where my chest
rises and falls with each new breath,
each desire. Does that mean I exist?
*
Beyond the beach there’s a garden with pears
and lemons, snakes and scorpions, all night
a chorus of bullfrogs deep within the cistern,
sad hooting from poplars and pines. Do they know
they exist? Each morning
my neighbor tosses lambs
onto the back of his battered pickup
as they cry, I aam, I aam.
*
When I climb the rocky path to the village, goats stare
but don’t really care. Skinny mules with heavy loads
pass by, dropping their rose-shaped turds
without stopping. Cicadas grind away
at the afternoon. I want their sudden wings
after so many years underground, their brilliant trilling,
again and again: I exist.
*
Coming down from Driopída,
I see my neighbors’ whitewashed houses,
blue shutters, red-tiled roofs, and see them again
wholly reflected on the sea’s smooth surface,
but fresher, newer. Now I’m the boy again,
tossing and turning in a dream of soft-legged waves.
Borne by those legs, I glide
to the edge of a drystone wall
with stones tall as doors. I knock
and go in.
*
In the shallows where I swim,
I lie on the ripples of sand, let my body
sway with the current, feel its warmth
wash over me, through me. No matter how deeply
I settle into the sand, how many fish
swirl around me, crabs nudge
my legs, my cheek, I know
no I can hold me for long.
*
Here on my porch,
where existence is determined by nothing
but rhythm, where at dusk I’m lulled
by the fading trill of cicadas, the pulsing necks
of lizards stretching toward the setting sun,
awake, but barely, all the Is of ants
still coming and going,
surely we all exist.
The lambs cry out, I aam, I aam.
Mule turds drop—
nope,
nope.
Published in A Different Heaven:
New and Selected Poems
VOICES, GOOD FRIDAY, HOTEL DIAFANI
Their brochure reads, “Pastoral,”
but what did I get?—
broken window frames
piled on the balcony, lightbulbs dangling
from the ceiling, a rooster’s bland crowing
all afternoon, a lamb tied to the garage
next door. Yianni’s lamb.
Tomorrow, I’m told,
he’ll straddle that lamb, twist tight its neck,
slice through to the back of its throat,
warm blood flowing as Foula, his wife,
extracts intestines for a soup they’ll have
after Midnight Mass, once the priest has lit
all the villagers’ candles and they’ve walked
the flame home, made a cross
of smoke above their doors.
Then they’ll break the fast
with a soup that tastes just like it sounds
(say it),
Magirítsa.
*
Let me visit the other guests:
These with no decisions but manners,
what place, which platter, grapes or pine seeds?
These with gilded faces
dark as that cistern on Chios, no light,
not a ray among the columns, just the knowledge
a thousand women drowned there.
These the ten thousand
hoplites passing in supplication,
the gates closed at Barate Larande, Sardês.
The Satrap at Calper was our pal, would’ve let us stay
forever, all the wine and millet, cattle and barley,
ponies in our gardens, triremes on a lake, the grace of their women
as they served us, as they spread their golden coverlets.
All perfect?
Not quite. No olives.
*
4 am. The village square
quiet. From my balcony I hear
one voice rising from smoldering embers:
I am weary
of the flames, pants and shirt
stuffed with straw, sack with painted eyes
for a face, body dangling
over a pyre of burning logs, the whole village
throwing firecrackers, a whole
year’s anger—
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx I am why
you mingled with the crowd all night,
searching face to face—
not for a part in the ritual,
the easy flow of outrage—
but for a kiss
on your cheek, one word
whispered in your ear,
“Master.”
Published in A Different Heaven:
New and Selected Poems
BLINDS
You can spot us in this tall, rough-wood blind,
binoculars in hand, scanning
the Xirolímni Lagoon, disputing in whispers
the genera of grebes and cormorants, ignoring
the graceless mud hens. You can tell we’re humans
by our short-billed caps,
how excited we get when at last
the last cranes step out.
One’s neck is a sideways S
reflected on the murky ripples. Another preens
with sure, quick motions in a casual,
Sunday-morning way. A third, eyes close to the water,
searches for movement—a tail’s flick,
a surface break. When a fourth lifts its wings,
they’re up and off, gliding across the marsh
toward the open sea. Only the mud hens remain.
Like us, they’re part of late autumn solitude.
*
Every year, before the ice sets in,
thousands of kokanee salmon
fight their way up the Flathead River
to McDonald Creek. Every year
bald eagles, twenty, thirty to a tree,
settle on the oaks along both banks.
And every year dozens of us drive
hundreds of miles to ascend these blinds,
click photos of weary salmon laying eggs
on the creekbed’s gravel. The eagles swoop in,
screeching as they scoop up their half-
dead prey, then perch on the tallest branches,
leisurely tearing the flesh of these that can’t help
but return to this place of birth
and death. Birth and death,
with nothing in between
but feasting raptors and we with our cameras
witnessing the vexed pulsing of instinct,
the gluttonous pleasure of magnificent predators.
Cameras full,
we make our way home.
*
One night in Nepal’s southern jungle, our hotel guide led us along a hard-dirt path, single-file, in stocking-feet, while another group filed past us, on their way back to the vans. In strict silence we entered a narrow concrete blind under layers of creepers and vines, took our places, three to each window, and gazed out at a floodlit clearing: a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo tied to a stake.
Too late, we only caught the end as she tossed a thigh-bone high in the air, rolled in blood and purred as she licked the remaining flesh from her fur.
Five minutes, then we filed out for the next group to file in.
*
As the story goes, Buddha,
in an earlier incarnation,
was walking the jungle one morning
when he came upon a starving tiger
ready to eat her dying cubs.
The Buddha, willing to sacrifice himself
so the tiger wouldn’t devour her own young,
laid down in front of her.
She couldn’t even lift one paw,
so he grabbed a bamboo shaft,
cut his own throat—
not to save humankind,
just to lie there, a man weary of suffering,
even that of a tiger and her cubs,
and before he did, he let out a howl—
a mournful sound to you and me
in our reader’s blind,
but to her, a gentle lure.
Published in A Different Heaven:
New and Selected Poems
The High Window 