Czech návštěva—visit;
and návrat—return.
Surely and strangely, I was drawn
to those ruins of old Pisidian Selge,
riding the crest of its remote mountain,
and there above all to what is left
of a little temple that turned out
to have been a monumental tomb—
a naiskos, a heroon, on a raised podium
on a ridge-ringed green meadow
in the northern acropolis,
outside the once-invincible city walls,
a place to which local village goats
seem pulled just as strongly,
amid scattered olive trees and oaks,
from where you can see higher still
the massifs of the robust Taurus;
as if the flanks of the beast ever
remained tightly gripped
by that Phoenician princess
they called Europa—
indubitably a euphemism
for a goddess and an ancient
nether rite and dauntless passage
between the world mortals
see as common and the other,
altogether different—
And from the tomb and temple
in the middle of the confined valley
hardly more than its foundation
and the bases of well-carved walls
have endured—withstanding the ages:
νᾱός and νόστος for the soul of the dead,
a place of homecoming, a locus of return,
for the immortal that touched on death,
a holy of holies for a divergent paradox.
Just as that naiskos—“a little shrine” and grave—
now without a roof, open widely to the sky,
is a living house—for a “little god”
who escaped us beyond the lids of time.
But if a god, how could she ever be
that little—divine and yet belittled?
And isn’t between immortal and mortal
always a crag, a gap, a wedge, a split,
however waxing now or waning then?
And yet—many paths and bridges,
we trust, come and go—both ways.
Just as νέομαι, its verb behind,
speaks of momentous turning,
of coming or going back,
and therefore of an act
of saving restoration.
As at those perplexing rendezvous
when two meet and suddenly enliven
what had concealed itself
far behind the eyes,
where hearts dwell unseen.
And likewise too
it can be with soul and love—
once two such “little gods”
return to one another
what the other missed.
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