New Year’s in Corfu
Above the village of Gastouri, during Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign, Corfu’s Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, summered at the Achillion Palace. A recreation of a Phaeacian Palace, it was used as a hospital during World War II. It was later transformed into a casino.
I would have kept us as we were
above the village of Gastouri
in winter, pensiones closed,
vineyards ripe with kumquats, fennel,
stray cats crouching under rain pipes,
olive nets damped down with mud.
Even though it was not our island,
not our goats to unchain from the hills’
Phaeacian ruins’ stiff-jawed rockrose,
each tree scraping starfish from the sea,
each beach a frieze of Odysseus’s shipwreck.
Even though the road to Perithia
was brocaded shut with ferns,
the stone fields fevered with poppies,
and Mount Pantokrator sloped with crocuses
where we walked to that high monastery,
gold-headed thistles igniting the apse.
Even though we lost our way
in the island’s windy basilica halls
where goat bells clanged for its Old World Empress
whose daughters, dogged in winter pelts,
sprawled on marble by the icon kiosks,
and priests, swinging their rust-gold lanterns,
darkened the storefronts of lingerie
on the cold slate sun-bleached promenades
of gold-foiled chocolates and baklava bakeries,
dim bulbs half-lighting skinned lambs on hooks.
Even with the shepherds sinking beer cans into fog
to measure the tide of their clambering sheep,
their bleating and beclouded Ionian Sea—
even at that bottom of January,
the Sirocco blowing through Judas trees,
Santas noosed from loose shutter hinges,
a freezing rain hoofing over roofs,
and the two of us, embers in an emptying tavern
with an out-of-tune bouzouki band,
spinach pie and gritty wine—
I would have kept us as we were
knowing that the spring would bring
its umber clouds above the sea,
the casino re-colonized by black moss
and tulips, and Calypso’s spellbound
mirage of an island, shingled with egrets,
would fade in the tradewinds
as the fishing boats flashed off
their last-catch starboard lights,
and the Virgin of Kassiopi, the Saint of Sailors,
would throw her crossbones overboard,
blow our votive out.
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Jennifer Elise Foerster received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts (July 2007) and her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2003). She has received fellowships to attend Soul Mountain Retreat, Naropa Summer Writing Program, Idyllwild Summer Poetry Program, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. From 2008-2010, Jennifer was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Of German, Dutch, and Muscogee descent, she is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, and grew up living internationally. Jennifer lives in San Francisco.
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