Weary from travel

I seek a lodging for the night--

Wisteria flowers.

                                 -- Basho

Together after half a year apart

we've come to rest in Athens,

to reopen folded letters,

to smooth edges of worn journals,

to confess in cafés on afternoons

of retsina. But first we suffer

jet lag. You sleep, I sit

on the windowsill

smoking a cigarette and it begins:

tomorrow, we will get drunk

on cheap red wine and promise to marry,

to settle in these limestone cottages,

paint views of the Aegean,

trip over children and roosters,

grow fat on feta, cucumbers, tomatoes.

Isn't this the place, you ask, where

Lord Byron drew graffiti?

Toasting our sedentary future,

while Greek women

dressed in mourning pass us,

you call them bitter-black olives.

We laugh. Then I remember

my grandmother's hands, what she could not

forgive, gnarled olive trunks.

Hung over, the day after

we will remember we are homesick

tourists who cannot marry.

But before all this happens,

I lean out the window beside where you sleep

and almost see it unravel,

the vagabond yearning

for permanence, like Basho on the road

in worn-out straw sandals 

so tired he sees into beauty.

Traveling does that: reduces us,

Why else would we travel?

Not for the sights,

or the coming home, or these

passionate reunions, but pilgrims

for one fugitive moment

when we forget our endless

comparisons: this country to our own,

this hotel to the last,

this man to the sleeping others; forget

the weight of memory, shed

to an epiphany of wisteria flowers.