Guest Poet: Robert Taylor

RETSINA

If there was, running in its sweet bitter scent,
A thread of breeze playing the glint of sea’s glass,
Glare off walls needling tears, tongue’s tingle of wine,
That tress of air, light, memory, warmth, that taste;
If there was that and the linger of resin,
Fast against spoil like a loving drunk, 

I would reinhabit this and be that drunk
And recompound it with the heart-stop scent
Blown from the pine grove and its glue-gilt resin.
All afternoon, with every emptied glass,
Memory-tussled oblivion scud where we taste
Less hurt in the yellow clarity of the wine.

The gliding fish, the dolphins and the wine
We downed and downed until the sea seemed drunk.
The offal-coloured olives sheening wet began to taste
As acrid as the stony ground-weed scent
Where a throttled-sounding cockerel swallowed glass
In smashed throatfulls where light congealed to resin.

Its gurgle of blood mimed the sun that set as resin. 
A judder of bouzoukis coaxed more wine
Your eyes shot their decision, their green glass;
Your eyes of sea too clear for one so drunk
Shone with what couldn’t be thrown off the scent
Leaving the bewildering, unmanageable taste

As though fate transmitted in the mouth, a taste.
Somewhere a fly engulfed itself in resin.
Soon you receded to a ghost of scent. 
Speech foundered in the dregs of wine. 
And every night thereafter I was drunk. 
Pathetic; staring blankly in a glass. 

Now is an aperture the day seeps through, its glass
Bears no trace of that island’s sleepy taste.
The only constant is the being drunk. 
These days secreting no protective resin
Thought drifts back out on seas as dark as wine
When night falls and I topple to its scent.

Sweet bitter wine that soured in the glass.
Memory a scented resin bleeding out. 
How everything just tastes of being drunk.

                                                        Robert Taylor 2020 ("a sestina written with the further constraint that the title had to rhyme with sestina")