Dateline Milna: Saturday, July 24, 2010

'I alone hold the key to
this savage sideshow,'
crowed Art Rimbaud,
little Banty rooster.

I don't know if that was true,
but I do know that
I haven't got a clue.

Smoking a Thompson Co.
Red Label 'everyday smoke'
I descend to the Riva on a warm night,
height of the season,

past the
kukuruz-on-the-cob stand,
and the
a capella Klapa singers harmonizing outside one cafe,
and the
big charter boat of
drunken English
going noisily beserk.

Outside Fjaka,
maybe 8 or 10 Rasta-like
young
sprawl on the asphalt,
pivo, steel drums, and smokes.

Down towards Cafe Vox
a three piece band covers
old Rolling Stones with
an accent.

Motorcycles complete with
thin, thin Croatian girls
streak past
flashing into the night like
that early scene in Rocky Horror,
just before Brad and Janet
arrive at the party-cum- temporal warp.

All the marina slips and sidewalk tables on the Riva are full
and
people flood over into the street.

I find Djani, renting a house in town this season
'cuz his 15 year old daughter, Marina,
gets bored in his quiet place out on Makarac Bay.

We drink a half a liter of pivo or so and discuss
which place would be best to visit in the States
if his wife Jana gets her way and drags him there.

Maybe Las Vegas, we think,
or New York City.

Walking home,
I see a crowd gathered around two thin, thin
Croatian girls
dressed all in black,
who are whirling flames
in the darkness

and somehow this reminds me of
asking
a local
about the changes in the village . . .

O no, he said, no changes. Milna is just the same.

I persist
'what about all the tourists
and the foreigners buying up
all the property and
the old people dying?'

Sure, he replies,

easily
dismissing the thought
as if all this was only
a rattle and flash

before the reality of the
fishermen's
old stone houses,
grouped in silent witness
around the
harbour.

hey,
I'm just a warm season tourist.

what do i know?