Poems
Bliss Street
From this balcony the sightlines are clear to the rooftop volleyball court
of my son's elementary school
(From its mesh cage the kids at PE class raise a right ruckus)
—I look over; is he up there now? No; his is a different period
I'm squeezing some orange halves on a cheap plastic boat with a dome
like a parliament and teeth at the spout to catch seeds and pulp
Dragging a haul of juicing oranges all the way down-campus in my bag
stitched with the word "Cyprus"
I recall the oranges were mostly on the trees in Cyprus
It was the potato we were about then: The famous Cypriot, grown in
red dirt and baked "in its jacket," fluffy as a buttered cloud...
We would pass the fields of red dirt and then a schoolyard and wonder
what it would be like to be a child raised on an island like this
Squat between sun and sea, never an ice age, abounding with
indigenous flowers evolving freely, without extinctions
But, oh yeah—massacres
Barbed wire slicing Nicosia in a crescent ghetto
My grandmother picked potatoes on a collective farm at the age of
nine, after her father died
But the funny story she told was of having shut herself inadvertently in
the potato cellar while her mother was ill with pneumonia
The eldest child, she knew that if her mother died as well it would all
be on her shoulders—the infant, the other children—
And already terrified to begin with, she began bawling
But you know, someone let her out after a few hours
Her mother survived the pneumonia
She survived the potato farm
Then when she was eighteen and working in a hospital kitchen her
supervisor—Psst!—opened the pantry and gestured toward the
potatoes, pocketing some in her overcoat
She was terrified all over again
If she did help herself, their boss, a kind man, would find out
If she didn't help herself, her supervisor would know she knew
She didn't take the potatoes and she didn't get fired, and decades later
she would return to the scene of demoralization, her version
of: THE STALIN YEARS
The volleyball court has gone silent
The PE teacher, whose name I don't remember, rests his arms against
the ledge and overlooks the street, the campus, my building, in
which I sit, stuck in a thought about potatoes
He stands there a minute or two, in repose, then turns and walks away,
leaving the scene unpopulated as in some sketch or exercise
by a painter removed from the north to a Mediterranean
Arcadia full of ruins and cypresses
Oh it would be an exaggeration to say it's full of ruins here!
More like one of those mythological scenes with youths and gods in a
crowded sky
Bliss Street overflowing with students slowing traffic as they drift
across the road, scooters clustered outside the gate inscribed
with the motto "That life may be lived more abundantly"
Perfect motto for a university. Perfect
As the fig trees were perfect that grew all into one boxy wreath round
the dry fountain the kids on rented bicycles circled madly
That survived the civil war by the looks of their thick trunks, ringed by
apartment blocks and antennae raised into a looming cloud the
color of putty. Putty, not putti
Originally published in the New Yorker, October 2010. All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.