Epiphany

Maria Callas came to our banal climate, aged five,
wearing her first pair of glasses, so that perhaps
the fizz of palms was the first thing to come into focus.

In time she might have seen the crucifix dive
at Epiphany, when rain like a jeweller taps
gingerly into the crystal of a water crocus.

At five she was known as Mary Kalogeropoulos,
and if I could, I would tell her how my relatives
changed their amphibrachic name to ‘Bass’

gaining intelligibility despite melismatic loss,
the Slavic sonics of affricates and fricatives
(they pronounce it like the fish, not the tonal range, alas).

But her lossy name provides its own gloss.
Let mine underwrite hers like a bass line,
as though I had her otherworldly ear.

I attended to the Greek boys diving for their cross
as a girl released a white dove from the shrine
of her consecrated palms. We watched it disappear.

If Callas preferred to perform sans lenses,
leaving the concert hall a gold-vermilion blur,
was it to shield her conscience from the world,

so that she moved and sang in fictive stanzas?
Dives and songs that would disclose our nature
are from one held breath methodically unfurled.

Yes, here’s a rump of Poseidon’s kingdom.
In the gift shops, St Michael spears the basilisk,
and Medusa rears her seething skull.

Some coral are classified as ‘gorgonian’. Some
petrified bodies the treasure hunters frisk
might have been her victims, turned to marble.

The descendants of those divers will now dive
for the crucifix, in white tees, fresh from Mass,
processing barefoot down the main drag behind their priest.

A liturgical singer’s baritone comes to us live
from the bayou’s edge, where sacerdotal gulls amass,
and the modal melodies strike our ear as from the East.

They blessed the boats on Thursday at the docks.
By Friday, the wind was high, and late in the night
came torrents. To cancel a dive because of showers

creates an elemental paradox.
But here was the miracle: the rain took flight,
the clouds blew off at the behest of unseen powers.

Now the procession halted at the bayou,
and the priest took over from the singer – though
he wasn’t singing exactly; but neither did he speak,

or rather, he spoke in circles, as rhymes do,
a sermon on water. That little of its flow
was in English, some diverted into Greek,

excited me like screams to the angelic orders.
For isn’t a foreign language the beginning of terror?
May I ask the diva, if I briefly have her ear?

The boys leaped, and in the maelstrom, towards
the centre, one surfaced. The cross-bearer.
He was borne on shoulders back to the pier,

all handsome as cherubs halfway to turning seraphim.
The crowd erupted in applause. Meanwhile the terns,
facing the proceedings, crossed their wings

behind their backs. Their X’d tips had a darker trim,
as a soprano may have colours our ear discerns
when the language disappears in what she sings.