The weather is always worth remarking on, yet we talk about it
             As if this were not so. Arriving early to a party, needing something
In common with a stranger for a few moments, before the door
             Opens, and another guest bearing other less and more familiar
Topics of conversation walks through, we forget the order of things
             Because we have been to so many parties. But these moods of earth
In their million local shadings are high dramas. Compared to them,
             Our human moods, which never fail to interest us, are a mousetrap,
A play within a play. As creatures, our genius has always been
             For simplification. Even “sensuous particulars” become abstractions
When they are written down and so many of our disagreements
             Are about which fiction we ought to stop calling that. “All is water!”
“All is fire!” The cosmology of the man who went for a summer swim
             Versus that of the one who stayed on the beach, a scowl on his face,
Sensing no refutation in the rivulets of sweat slipping down the ridge
             Of his proud nose into his stubborn eyes. Just so: sunset, sunrise.
Perceptual errors we find too beautiful to stop repeating, 482 years
             After Copernicus. Whereas the illusion of distance is based on
A misreading of air as empty space. Really, the air is “swarming”
             With “metaphysical changes.” On this a poet and a physicist will agree
When Neptune conjoins Mars in the Eleventh House and they are
             The ones who show up to the party first, holding not-actually-empty
Glasses in the living room as a rosé is uncorked in the kitchen. Pop!
             Goes the hypothetical. Refutation is like that. The easiest thing to see,
The hardest thing to see “as” refutation. The wind that blows the ecru
             Curtains back into my cheap hotel room is one, as is the sound
Of an ancient engine struggling up Strefi Hill. The song coming
             From the throat of a bird whose species I cannot identify is another,
As is the song coming from the throat of a woman I can. I shouldn’t
             Leave out light, which is one of three things I came to Athens to see.
Elsewhere it is the fourth of July. It is the fourth of July here, too,
             But it is the fourth of July in the way we say “the moon is shining,”
Or in the way that people take Goethe’s last words (“More light!”)
             To be an affirmation of the man’s unquenched thirst for knowledge,
When they are what anyone would mutter to themselves in Weimar
             In late March. Once I told a photographer, “In your self-portraits I like
The patterns of the shadows on your skin,” when what I meant was:
             “I admire your relationship with light.” Only later did it seem to me
That these statements might be interchangeable. Not because light is
             The “precondition” for shadow, and thus “he who wills the ends wills
The means,” but because shadows are also light, light in its romantic
             Mood, as it were. Believing this, I believe, would require “Negative
Capability,” which Keats defines as the ability to be in “uncertainties,
             Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,”
The way a man on a date who has forgotten the name of the lead actor
             Of La Reglè du jeu reaches into his pocket for his phone. Yet, here, too,
What we’re talking about is the weather. Sometimes you’re in it,
             Sometimes you’re not. Sometimes you lose your umbrella. That’s life.
Maybe you meant to do it, subconsciously, for the joy of getting wet.
             Whether patterns are also light depends less on the pattern in question
(Visual, behavioral, historical, etc.) than on the question of the atomic
             Make-up of the creatures who perceive them plus whatever emergent
Properties emerge from knowing the answer. As the evening star
             Is the morning star plus time, 44 Athenaion Ephebon is M Merkouri
Street 44. That you can take “to the bank.” To get there from the hotel,
             According to the map on my phone, you must semi-circumnavigate
Lycabettus, which means “of the wolves,” “twilight,” or “breast-shaped,”
             According to competing etymological explanations. In other words:
No one really knows why it’s called that. The trip takes 29 minutes.
             The local mood is languor at 32 degrees. Unless you are a citizen
Of the gatocracy, and this is your assembly, the sidewalk is too narrow
             To permit bi-directional foot traffic. And just as to the shoe it seems
To be an incoherence of coarse asphalt and smooth stone, it declines
             And inclines in ways unpredictable to those who aren’t familiar
With the area. It is dotted with dry twigs, prolapsed citrus, rubbish:
             Cigarette butts, plastic lids, wrappers, bottle caps, leaflets, receipts.
A cardboard advertisement for a new luxury apartment building
             Wedged upside-down into an egress window to shade the workers
In the basement from the sun, reads, in part, “Where There Is Life
             There Is Value.” I step into the street to yield to a nun, grocery bag
In each hand, trying to remember, according to the superstition,
             Whether it is bad luck to be passed by an odd or an even number
Of nuns, only to hop right back onto the sidewalk again to avoid
             Being hit by an oncoming truck, attired in the same colors as she,
METAPHORA written on its flank. Tempting as it may be to ascribe
             Significance to this, it’s just an ordinary Greek word that means
“Transport.” Like the lotus and the hyacinth, language becomes
             Exotic when it’s planted in mouths far from the native esophagus.
On the other hand, isn’t that exactly what we want from metaphor—
             To be transported? To experience in language what an electron
Experiences when it leaps from shell to shell, emitting photons,
             What a body experiences when it can no longer tell the difference
Between its heartbeat and the heartbeat in the chest of its lover,
             Or—more to the point—what a soul experiences when it travels
To the land of the dead and back? Isn’t that why, of the 137 units
             On the street once named for the boys of Athens and now named
For Melina Merkouri, I’ve stopped at number 44? The two-story
             House is undistinguished: a pair of rectangular cubes ornamented
By water stains, cables intubating the “blonde-washed concrete.”
             Yet for twenty winters, it was the lone crevice in this hemisphere
Where “voices from the other world” could deposit their messages,
             One letter at a time, into the blue-and-white teacup that traversed
The homemade Ouija board of JM and DJ, their favored scribes.
             No one is home. I know because I emailed the current owner
Asking to be allowed inside for an hour. He didn’t understand
             What I hoped to see. A different person’s dishes, drying linens,
Family photos? His copy of The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy?
             I didn’t want to “see” anything at all, I tried to explain. I wanted
To place a call, using the Ouija board I inherited from my mother.
             He might have cited “Proust’s Law”; instead, he told me he’d be
Out of town. So, in the end, I did not get to talk with JM and DJ
             About the days of 2025. How they whir by like rotor blades,
And though of each one we say “This is it!” or “Surely this is it!”,
             The machine, confoundingly, does not fly, or explode, or run
Out of gas. How all the laws we stopped calling fiction we can call
             Fiction again, including, but not limited to, and perhaps especially,
“International.” How, of all the novel things in the world, justice
             Is not one: because my child was born in Berlin, he can look up
At the sky and see clouds changing shape, while another, born
             In Rafah, looks up and sees quadcopter drones. How, of the 100
Times I cast my imagination like a line into the flood of events,
             99 times it caught pain, though once, on a Friday, it caught love.
Everything you feared would come to pass is coming to pass,
             I wanted to tell them, only more slowly than you anticipated,
And that’s the good news. The bad news is that the future sounds
             Like a man knocking on the door of an empty house. Onward,
Then: into the formal echo. Past the embassy. Past the hospital.
             Up the funicular, which was under construction in winter 1964,
For the “literally breathtaking views, framed by umbrella pines,
             Of city and sea” recommended by JM. A diligent guide, as the dead
Tend to be. That said, the line is misleading. What literally takes
             The breath away is not the view—of Europe’s most famous ruins,
Its busiest passenger port—but katabatic wind. To the mountain
             Whose marble was quarried to make the Parthenon, the temple
Was always a ruin, the ruin of the mountain, of which these stones
             Are ruins once removed. In the white church, I light two candles,
Ouijing by other means. “If you see Aristotle, tell him we need
             A ‘fifth cause’ for ruins,” for matter in a state of petrified dispersal,
Still so pleasing to behold in this, the third eighteenth century.
             Fifteen years ago, in days of finer estrangement, I saw the Acropolis
From a different angle, from behind the gridded glass of the new
             Air-conditioned museum, built for the nostos of the marbles abducted
By Elgin. A trick worthy of the man of many ways had been played:
             “The museum,” considered as a factory for the mass-production
Of a certain kind of eye, which turns all it surveys to stone, even stone,
             Was invented in London. It is an eye that is not easily spooned out.
It must be unlearned, and on its lens the smudge of the unlearned
             Will still be visible. That’s history. “A sun—a shadow of a magnitude”:
That’s Keats, again. Much of the day remains, though the same cannot
             Be said for humanity. Time enough for cold beers and fried calamari.
At the bar there is talk of pop music, as later there will be talk of God,
             A subject that, unlike these menus, never blows away. The difference
Between one God and none is not so great as is supposed, and those
             Who believe there is one tend to argue like those who believe there isn’t
When confronted by those who believe that there are at least twelve,
             Which, you have to admit, is a better story, and more plausible, given
How many sacred things there are in the universe. One of them, love,
             Is closer to quantum entanglement than it is to heaven—or so it seems
To me, as I head back down the funicular into the purple chaos of dusk.