Kandylakia

Petros is driving.
Away from Athena, east to the Aegean
chortling a bazouki beat
past olive, cypress, past angulated, geometricized
confections in marbled cement invaded by
tokens of human existence:
shirts pinned in positions of helplessness,
soggy towels, potted plants, plastics.

My hand is grasping the grab-handle.
Hanging on in a filling highway wind my heart
ripples loose; I see Iris in the front
Germanically calculating the chances of death
as Petros sends horn-sounds around
the right side of a dwarf-Peugeot.

Roadside, a tiny church on a pedastal, a kandylakia, winks by.

I see inside for an instant.
Like the ember eyes of a young Greek priest
who passed me along Athinas Street, I see

behind miniature windows

smoky saint-eyes, watching, remembering
the world, and the long-ago accident that
pushed a soul through his gateway-iconastasis,
that soul-sized door.

I am still too composite for that door.
rocking and flapping past the candle-lit eyes,
the sea-soil-olive air fills me still
like a lover's breath.

But-- how, if Petros flicks a finger wrong and we die?

If you could only confect a kandylakia,
rooted in Greek soil, Agios Nicholas to watch
for us, to beg for mercy, then
you could believe I went through that tiny gateway
like a lover's breath.