“Bringing It All Back Home”

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Et in Arcadia ego”

Poussin—
I remember

It must have been
Way back then

One spring it was poetic
I was sprightly

Dallying a way behind
Dilapidated swayback nag when

She sent my way a waft
Of her reeking

Slow ancient hind-
Quarters from what seemed half,

Nay, a whole classic pastoral
Country mile away—

I must tell you

I was genuinely
Swept away.

MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—3/15/10—We all remember good old Nicolas Poussin, right? No? Need a gentle nudge? Well, he was the guy who immortalized three Greek shepherds and one shepherdess from classical antiquity by painting them gathered round a tomb somewhere in idyllic pastoral Arcadia, a prefect bordering Messinias and only a scant 10 kilometers NE of Meligalas.

Two of the shepherds are perusing a tombstone, one of them ostensibly trying to figure out what the phrase on it means, while the other is pointing to his companion’s shadow on the tombstone and looking at the shepherdess behind him, who has her hand placed rather invitingly on his shoulder. Well, what does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine, but perhaps a hint lies in the Latin phrase which is usually interpreted to mean “Even in Arcadia I exist”—the “I” being a personification of Death.

So much for Poussin and his painting, the curious shepherds, and Death personified hard at work in idyllic Arcadia. Back to Messinias and our swayback nag, whose rank hindquarters served as catalyst for this poem but who sadly no longer smells at all, having been worked and worked and worked and finally driven to a rendezvous with—whoa, you guessed it—Death, along with so many other horses and donkeys who used to neigh and bray the length and breadth of this bucolic Messinian countryside.

Aye, I remember them well—but it wasn’t always like that. For some inexplicable reason, I have absolutely no memories of the four childhood years I spent in Greece before being taken in 1948 to the small, coastal lumbering and fishing town of Raymond, Washington—nothing. When I first returned to Meligalas in 1959 for a year before heading back to the US to finish high school, the only childhood memories I had were olfactory and gustatory ones, with the exception of a single visual one which I hope to deal with in a later poem, together with any commentary that might decide to rear its head.

But back to the pack animals, for there were literally hundreds of them to be seen every day, descending from the mountains with their peasant riders who needed to buy the supplies that weren’t available in their out-of-the-way villages. Since our house was on the street used as a shortcut for much of this hoofed traffic, and because there was a bridle-maker across the street, I was fortunate in that I saw more horses and donkeys in that one year than most kids my age back in Raymond would see in their lifetimes.

But that was back in idyllic, pastoral Meligalas. Alas, there is no more bridle-maker, very few riders, no more horses and donkeys galore. Of course (or perhaps on course would be a better term), Death is still very much alive and kicking ass, as there are many, many more tombstones, so it doesn’t take much horse sense for anyone—especially for this writer— to figure out why in Zeus’s name fewer and fewer of the Lord’s shepherds are in hot pursuit perusing come what may be written on them, trying to figure it out, trying to bring it all back home before there’s no one left behind to write the score.