Temple of Poseidon, Sounion by Aria Aber

Temple of Poseidon, Sounion

 

My father drives the boat back to the cape.

The wind is cold as we hike up the cliff

to the wilderness around the temple.

My father comes here every year, and sometimes

he invites me. He captures all on film: leafless fig trees,

then the marble column engraved with Byron’s name.

Graffiti from 1810! he exclaims, as if it is the first time.

Elegant, he says. How can something destroyed be so elegant?

My father is the descendant of a nomadic tribe.

First his ancestor settled, then he became Muslim.

Being oppressed is our type of fun, he told me when

I was a child, and then: Never ask me about that again.

Now I’m an adult, restraining the impulse

to elegize what is still alive. And yet this is what

I will remember him as, I decide: the black camera steadying his hands,

the exacting way the lens detains the distant isles,

and what the frame omits, the other country, that other light.

We eat baked cod with pickled onions and speak about politics

in a formal way, as if none of it concerns our lives.

There are things I never tell him, and things he cannot

ask me, careful not to disturb the air around us.

Here, the sun takes hours to set. We study the raw marble

of the ruins, then turn our faces toward a reddish sky.

No, let me be precise: the light over the Aegean Sea turns tawny,

then apricot, then the color of apricots burning very slowly.