THE IONIAN BACKTRACK
The Appian Way ends in two broken columns and a passage to Greece.
Stand and bear witness to an impossible journey.
The real traveller establishes a route and does not go back.
He knows that footprints are distorted by loose sandals.
(Pilgrims, nothing on their backs except the sun, a straw mat, and instruments
without strings make for the beach, a rock island where only the future exists).
Going over old ground is not to return home. It is to lose one’s way.
There the blue flowers grow over the ruins, and the wind comes through
the roots of trees. And the leaves talk.
(Brindisi 1984)
A NOTE BY THE AUTHOR
Regarding ‘Ionian Backtrack’
I’ve always been interested in the interface between archeology and mythology. During the early 1980s I spent a summer traveling along the east coast of Italy and Sicily. I was looking for the ancient Greece of my imaginings. Near Crotone I thought I heard it in the air. The Ionian mode is a form of ancient Greek music. Thus the title.
The poem is part of a sequence written while watching backtrackers at Brindisi make their way to the Greek Islands. I though they were going the wrong way. There is a sly nod to Rimbaud’s life after poetry, establishing routes in Africa. I was reading him for the first time.
BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Augustus Young was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1943. Forthcoming publications are THE SECRET GLOSS: A FILM PLAY ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF SOREN KIERKEGAARD from Elliott and Thompson, 2008, DIVERSIFICATIONS: POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS (Shearsman), and THE NICOTINE CAT AND OTHER PEOPLE: CHRONICLES OF THE SELF (New Island/ Duras, due in 2009). He has published two volumes of autofiction, LIGHT YEARS (2002), and STORYTIME (2005), and innumerable works of poetry.
