Meeting at Monemvassia

Inside your house a leafy court
where songbirds plucked their final frenzy
from withdrawing light, a darkened hall,
and silence like a great invasion from the sea,
peace that infiltrated, took you utterly.

You were wearing it that afternoon of heat
when cats stirred only for necessity,
as in the stillness it enfolded me.

Sitting on the wall you told me how a snake
lay coiled beside the church, how snakes
have always guarded treasure.
But in that atmosphere it seemed
that fighting dragons was some queer disease
born out of restlessness, born out of need
for anything that's absent, that is not now.

Was what shared the treasure? That lack
of striving, that the entire abandonment
to everything that is. So singular,
that even as I write I'm losing it
by wanting Monemvassia.

Heather Buck in Sixty Woman Poets