I found an old photograph in the drawer of my mother’s Singer, slipped behind cotton reels of yellow, red and black, the same my grandmother used to mend my mother’s dresses. Resting on its back in my palm, its skin ambered with age, I see the fray of silverfish, the calligraphy of tails, columns and gates with strokes for breath.

But I can’t read Greek.

Turned over in my palm like the etch of a silver plate, this image is anaemic, bone-black. A laneway is parted by a triangular shadow. All I see of the old man is his back: his head tilting down, the curved lip of his hat, his ears, fleshy and folding. He forges ahead with the feel of his cane, following the light that flows like a river past derelict buildings and drainpipes. Dead-ahead in the haze, the sun silvers cliffs, roofs and chimneys topple together like old foes. I know it is Him, on his way back to Thebes, bleeding from the eyes, a hand to the hem of his jacket, a pension cheque rolled up in his pocket.

(Where is the daughter to guide you? By the groves of the gods, stop, rest, set yourself down. Soles―how many times―these lanes of abandon?)

His sons sailed long before on the Mizéria, the one said for Egypt; even back then they had fists for each other. And his daughter, a mast spirited by the wind, the steadiest; she hauled the moon on her back singing xenitiá, loved to the earth’s end of open lands, waters and seas. For all the things you’ve seen and wept for: anaemic, bone-black, only his back. He strikes the pave to each sound conceding. Who knows? Maybe in a new place he can learn from strangers.

(What soul of invention lies unwritten? Surely, when people learn of your name, they will come to your aid. You, the great man, at the crossroads!)

He knows what it means to be three-footed in the evening. The days are long, unnamed, almost the same. The eyes of strangers might take hold of his feet, his back, his shadow―hold him in their palms and make him their own.