this is not a travel blog

But I am in Athens, Greece
for the month, relevant because
you should know that
the pigeons here are light brown,
unlike the blue feathered rats
jollying around Manhattan,
sucking up waste like
anteaters in sand
and the page-white doves jailed
to release at weddings or
swathed in magician's silk.

And because, when I woke up
this morning, the white
of landscape's buildings
against the sun had
yellowed the sky, though
logically we are taught
blue and yellow on canvas
turns green.

I tried my best not to squint.

Today, I've been giggling
about the poet John Ashbery,
who is forever defying
the sheer idea of love
poetry. I have this twinging
frustration with his deflection of
expectation, but it's beginning
to seem emblematic of both
Love and Poetry. For example,
the title of his poem
"If You Said You Would Come With Me"
promises romance, as if
it should logically begin
like, say: "Sand-scorched
on a temporary shore
somewhere inside
the cement jungle,
I hear boot heels click
three times and wonder
if it's you." Instead, he
writes, in prose:
"In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills."
As always, Ash,
thanks for sending us down
an unpredicted road -
blindfolding
us and upside downing us,
ultimately to show us life
more clearly in the end.

Maybe romance is over-
rated, he's telling us, or
maybe he never thought
of the romantic implications
of the title, it's really just about
how connections are like grape-
vines, and are ours to spot.

Or perhaps he's saying, no one can
really read our minds,
what we have in common is what
we see, which is, in turn, what we
experience, which is ourselves.
And then, these interpretations
simply wind the paths of my own
vineyard and, like he suggests
in the poem, you see & think
differently. But all communication
is not miscommunication. Ashbery
is a poet, after all.

Though land remains severed by ocean, the horizon boasts a spectacular shoreline.