The Village Rooster
“I want to be clear in the matter of roosters. The myth is that they crow early in the morning to wake us up. Nonsense! Roosters crow whenever they feel like it, which can be in the middle of the night (like a persistent rain), or at nine o’clock, or noon; they can startle you during a quiet dinner. Nonetheless, normally the bird does tend to do the majority of his vocal workout just at the cusp of sunrise, for totally his own reasons.” Anita Sullivan
The Highest Cauldron
By Anita Sullivan
EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—10/29/2012—On my first full night of jet-lagged sleep after returning from Greece, I wake at 5:25 to the distant sound of rooster.
Outside the window a gentle, persistent rain fills the air. When I left Oregon just over two weeks ago, we had gone 100 days with no rain, and this spell of gorgeous, cloudless, mild sunny days was beginning to feel uncomfortably abnormal. Not just the light, but the silence.
Then I traveled with my son Tim to the Greek island of Ikaria, where light and silence combine in a totally different way, and my body cells turned out to be so fully prepared for the experience that now—back home again—I find myself preternaturally vulnerable to the body metaphor of weeping that persistent rain can impose. I’ll have to painfully re-activate my well-honed, Western Oregon defenses against the long wet night of winter.
The village rooster has already come to my aid. Everyone needs such a rooster!
I want to be clear in the matter of roosters. The myth is that they crow early in the morning to wake us up. Nonsense! Roosters crow whenever they feel like it, which can be in the middle of the night (like a persistent rain), or at nine o’clock, or noon; they can startle you during a quiet dinner. Nonetheless, normally the bird does tend to do the majority of his vocal workout just at the cusp of sunrise, for totally his own reasons.
In the dear, somewhat-shabby, achingly picturesque, noisy, chaotic village of Evdilos on Ikaria, the rooster seems to have claimed a specific time slot. He makes himself heard throughout the period of first-light that always seems to have nothing to do with the sun, but to come from a secret source. You hadn’t noticed an absence, yet you are suddenly surrounded by a presence, that lingers.
This is the period I refer to as “Greek night.” By which I mean a short silence that interrupts the amazing 24-hour noise and energy machine that seems to prevail in most Mediterranean cultures. For a little while at the very end of darkness, there is a lull. The motorbikes go into parking mode. The last groups of people having conversations outside your window in the street have drifted off to their houses; the whines and hums and drones and screeches of human and machine have run themselves into a stupor of exhaustion. The villagers have succeeded once again in staying up all night, and now are granted a short reprieve.
In Evdilos the spell lasts about two hours. In the larger towns and cities, I think it can be as short as 20 minutes, and you have to be on your toes to catch it at all.
Enter, the village rooster. From my hotel room on a back street near the harbor, I always hear him as a distant voice, which means he probably lives up on the hillside above town. But it sounds like the same rooster I heard eight years ago. The village has changed little since then; the same man serves me coffee in the morning at his kafeneion—he looks not a day older—and Angelliki still makes yemistes and souvlakia day after day at her six-table café on the corner known as “To Stecki” (which translates, roughly, “The Hang-Out”).
I’m half asleep. I’ve been half asleep for hours. My thoughts are roiling darkly, like the chaos at the beginning of the world. All the anxieties and disturbing obsessions of my life have gathered around the bed, baring fangs and claws. Away from home, I keep forgetting who I think I am, and diving into a more primordial version of self. Sleep, in Greece, shall we say, eludes me. In the day it’s replaced by an exhilarating, active dream. But the nights here do not fit me well. I keep opening my eyes to check on the light coming through the gauzy curtains from the street lamps.
Then, the rooster. Out of nowhere. And once again my capsized ship tips back up and steadies itself.
“The Village Rooster”
By Anita Sullivan
This is how the world began—
as an echo orphaned from its source
with no need to remember.
Like one of the early versions of the sun
sketching a cross in the blue air
its street fills with grey pigeons.
All photos by Tim Sullivan.
Anita Sullivan
Born under the sign of Libra, Anita Sullivan cheerfully admits to a life governed by issues of balance and harmony. This likely led to her 25-year career as a piano tuner, as well as her love of birds (Libra is an air sign), and love of gardening, music, and fine literature (beauty). She spent years trying to decide if she was a piano tuner who wrote poetry, or a poet who tuned pianos. She traveled a lot without giving way to a strong urge to become a nomad; taught without becoming a teacher; danced without becoming a dancer; and fell totally in love with the high desert country of the Southwest, and then never managed to stay there. However, Sullivan did firmly settle the writing question—yes, it turns out she is a writer, but not fixed upon any one category. She has published four essay collections, a novel, two chapbooks and one full-length book of poetry, and many short pieces in journals. Most recently, her essay collection The Rhythm Of It: Poetry’s Hidden Dance, indulges her instinct to regard contemporary free-verse poetry as being built upon natural proportional rhythm patterns exhibited in music and geography, and therefore quite ancient and disciplined—not particularly “free” at all. This book was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal from the Eric Hoffer Book Award. More about her books can be found on her website: www.anitasullivan.org. The poet-piano-tuner-etc. also maintains an occasional blog, “The Poet’s Petard,” which may be accessed here here. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)