4 poems from GREEK PASSAGES Part 2 NEA KIOS (1) Great curve of bay, great curve of disco bars, with yard depots further back, old tourism clutter in heaps,  separated by a perimeter fence and a bunch of reeds from the remains of the Lake of Lerna. Still water, choked, smoke rising beyond the westward horizon and a bell ringing. An ancestral immunity to malaria (many-headed beast) among fishers and tenders of small water-mills, not shared with passing geographers and exiled dramatists... Last juice of Mycenae trickling down from the hills, oil snake on the water, what form of world leads us out of this, what demography carries the soul westward?        “But if the entire Manifest        of the world is absorbed into gold,        the world will be destroyed.” The disco bars are magnificent architectural fantasies in honour of the young heart bags of cash and great balls of fire.     ** PELEI Low white houses scattered on humps of bare earth, some of them locked, some of them falling down. Among them a new tank, a bright new block with a blue pipe attached. Low white hopes, some of them fallen. 1913, rows of faces at a colonial boys’ school in South Africa. A few of them can speak Xhona but they don’t let it be known. Buried hopes germinate. To know the language, to learn the sayings: Everything is for those who have none of it.      ** MIDEA Hilltop citadels, defended positions for the exploitation of areas of production on lower ground. Foreign stations, exacting “tribute” on pain of punishment or erasure. And accumulating a surplus, of cash, of days, becoming “civilised”, exercising “culture”. Expert horsemanship, expert cruelty, expert appetite. Art, another new block and never gaining anything, living a frustrated anger that burns along the coast and guides kings to their wreck.      ** NEA KIOS (2) Coming down that little road to the sea near Mili, that calm, level, vast pool of light before us. Coming down that little road and later walking the dark shore near the abandoned factory, a few waders in the shallows, perhaps a spoonbill. How the money came and slopped around shouting “new” and was gone. Where did it go? Debris scattered on the shore, and the bright white new apartment blocks, standing in the waste land like refrigerators, like sealed money-boxes. The truth is always just outside the lines or boundaries of the land, the forms of, tales of, melodies, of. That little, final, road. A heron standing knee-deep in the light, carefully studying it.

peterriley’s selected poems, Passing Measures, was published by Carcanet  in 2000, and Alstonefield ( a long poem), in 2003. A book of Transylvanian travel sketches, The Dance at Mociu, has appeared from Shearsman Books, and a book of three poem sequences, A Map of Faring, from Parlor Press in U.S.A. His most recent publications are two retrospecive books of prose and poetry from Shearsman, The Days Final Balance, and The Llyn Writings.   He lives in retirement in Cambridge.