Michael Ryan poem

Tourists on Paros
Michael Ryan

If I die or something happens to us
and a stray breeze the length of the house
takes you alone back to that June on Paros
when we wrote every morning in a whitewashed room
then lay naked in the sun all afternoon
and came back at dusk famished for each other
and talked away the night in a taverna by the water---
I hope the memory gives you nothing but pleasure.

But if you also suddenly feel the loss
snap open beneath like a well covered with grass,
remember our stumbling in T-shirts and shorts
onto that funeral party in the cafe at breakfast:
not the widow, barely sixteen, in harsh wool cloth
nor the grief that filled the air and seemed boundless,

but the brawny, red-haired Orthodox priest
whose shaggy orange beard over his black-smocked chest
was like an explosion from a dark doorway
of a wild, high-pitched laugh.