Alex Leigh Farber | Mediterranean Poetry

Alex Leigh Farber is a poet and teacher from Pennsylvania whose work blends contemporary experience with the lingering presence of the ancient world. His writing explores how memory, desire, and history find their way into the body and landscape. Recent poems appear in Apofenie, with new fiction forthcoming in Rawhead Journal. His poetry has been shortlisted twice at Frontier Poetry and received recognition from The Ex-Puritan and The Account.

Greek House

surrounded by these ancients
on their dusty shelves
we dream rising
streaming lives
whirl-pooling into
aquamarine fates

somehow joined to our own

from wrists and souls and
chosen raging muses
while singing silent nocturnes
to the waves breaking

against our broken shore—

eons silent touch

and then the dog that
barks desire’s flame
into another rose tipped dawn

finding us staring at the sky

in the backyard

Petra tou Romiou

I love the ocean between your toes. I love the sand in the gully where your back meets, my finger tracing that space. I love your hair concealing the pale of your neck skin, once a colonnade on that distance shore, but now our private crumbling. I love your thighs right where they collide with your ass, that crease beneath where they meet with its silent sweat. The back of your knees gliding to your ankles, those petite balsa bones. The veins of your feet, the leftover streaks from so long ago. The uncovered smell of you, salt and oil and body odor—smell word for desire to escape all of this civilization. All of this. This all. Skin is everything. Spirit is everything. The present, the now. We play and pretend at civilization. It keeps us warm, gives us the sense the world is an old blanket. But in shadows, beneath the blanket where no one can see what we do is the real. Only then do we become flesh. We are mud. We are lava. We are endless and dying. We can never be whole without dividing completely with another. Your armpit, your elbow, the knuckles of your fingers, the leftover tears beneath your chin. I outline your body in lyme for the sea so the Gods can hold it for me.

Pleasure and Hedonism

Hanging, yellowed notes and epigrams:
scribbled reminders
of meetings and moments, of pleasures and hedonism.
Quotes by the known
to you (and perhaps me), the unknown.
Those carved, fountain lines,
your elegantly restless handwriting;
there were so many words lining those mirrors and walls they often reminded me
of leaves falling from trees
as they blew around
that room
in the last autumn breeze.

But more than
ink and paper,
these
were your talismans,
totems in miniature to protect you
from ever
losing yourself again;
I will never know if they worked.

Tonight
it’s so quiet
on this coast relentlessly jutting towards Africa,
and only now,
staring out
at waves
I can never know,
do I finally realize
how little
pleasure and hedonism there was
for you,
the fading ballerina
of my ocean mind.