The Shepard

(Hale-Bopp Comet 305 B.C. – 1997 A.D.)

He must have been a thousand years old or more
the blue-eyed shepherd
his dark face lit by the bonfire
the night the comet passed      
over the uplands of Trinacria.

It watched him brood in his solitude
like a gargoyle above the slumbering town
just as it had left him centuries before
– tall, his chin resting on his staff
a wolf’s skin covering his shoulders
his flock gathered in the arms
of stones, thorn-bush and prickly pears
and it recognized in the enduring scene
the ever present shepherd, the very same
who has seen all the dawns of the world
stars born and die to an indifferent heaven
and the shadow of every moon glide alongside him
 – the shepherd– unaware of his own immortality
his days mere lima-bean shells heaping
in a bottomless timeworn dossel.

In the interminable nights of the ages
when flitting fires like bright lit eyes
of wolf or owl seem to pierce the soul,
he dreamed the chase of clouds
first driven by Phoenician gusts, by Greek easterlies
then by Arabian siroccos or Bourbon draughts
and Fascist gusts, each with rains
of blood and fire, tears and words
in the name of one and multiple cryptic god
as hard and indifferent as a fisted hand.
And all this is but a single day
seamless, eternal as a serpent.
His always the task of silently skinning
the sheep abandoned by the fleeing wolf
while the bloodied night heralds a cold dawn
with a sun so hard his teeth rattle in his head
and he warms his hands with the warm fresh blood
in the hollow of a cliff that bursts with screeching swifts.

His head swathed in mystified smiles,
a crease of silence wounds his face and only a cold
and bitter sweat between himself and the rising wind
while he spies himself in the bedevilled eye
of the ill-temper goat that has always fed
on malefic and mysterious grass.

He plows the morning fog with his flock
in the same pagan and Christian litany
bound around a hard timeless silence
in the dull stillness of his own calloused thoughts
of memories, lingering as a winter illness
with the muscles of his mind’s eye that have always
merged the elements and the seasons in atavic harmony
to keep the flux of time in a self-contained existence
of transhumance, milking and shepherding.

And so today like every yesterday the sheep flock
to the salt-siren fields that sigh in the wind
sundry melodies until their forms melt
licked clean by glares and rainfalls
and tongued by oxen, goats and rams.

The shepherd’s every instant is but a moment
of ancient times already ravaged, there is no other time.
At night he keeps watch with one eye
and feigns death with the other
while behind his eyelids flits a dream,
a dream of whispers, of hints of screams
wails of the flesh, stifled moans down there
in the narrow lanes of the village, of cries
that rise up the mountain’s narrow gorge.

He dreams ageless fevers of desire, and shy
he suffers jeremiads, a timeless prime knowledge
from Hellenic ancestors and he remains
spellbound with his eyes shut tight
his mouth pressed in emblematic Homeric crease
with gestures charged with mythic tragedy
of timeless savage strength repressed.
He dreams of myths that fly in the night
and he casts glances at the pitiful wenches
coming to bring to him creature comforts
hapless women, venal females, women myth
who appear out of the fog amid bleating sheep
the scent of female, of bird-women
with eager eye and voice of turtledove in love
chanting ancient songs in the dark of night
the horse-women with the smile of a tiger
and of a siren, sparks of lunacy in their eyes
their hair spread over breasts and shoulders
– myths that sleep in the shelter of his cave.

Thus he dreams the woman myth her hands
and face scratched by lustful glances
that have grazed her for centuries
her quick eyes, her mouth slower
than her ears, that’s how the shepherd dreams her
in the shadow of his mind’s eye,
when he brings his flock down to the pit
of the Greek theatre as ever tightly bound
within the ruins of its timeless silence.

He dreams of sharing his meal with her
the woman myth with the face of all the women
never born and to be yet born.
He recalls lighting the fire in the proscenium
and the crackling of twigs and dried dung
echoes from the very last row of the theatre.
He throws mushrooms and sausages on the embers
and with his finger he follows the last ray of sun
tracing the names of patricians carved on the seats
ancient and alien syllables of dead men.

He eats now sitting next to the woman myth
in the perfect acoustics of the age-encrusted bowl
and two hundred pairs of dead ears are cocked
listening to their chewing that reaches intact
each and every seat, and is then echoed in the pit
and it’s as if all those ancestral ghosts
had come back to life
to share his meal.

With wine he puts out the fire
the hissing spreads all round
and together with the conjured dead
he too disappears in the fog of his dream
as one bleat echoes another.