NO WOMEN, GIRLS, OR FEMALE ANIMALS

From this point on there will be no more women.
The gangplank has been lifted and there they are in the distance, waving.
Their presence will be erased, perhaps a phone call, a post card to be sent from Daphni.
There will be no more dresses flapping on the clothesline like flags.
No touch of perfume against the afternoon.
No one will wear lipstick or their hair down.
Mount Athos, upright and tall, will be all Zeus and no Venus.
Hips will be narrow and the cry of a baby an illusion created
by a bird or small pig.
Indeed there will be fish, but not the mirror of their scales.
The peal of high heels will not resound through monastery halls.
There will be a certain lack of order, that indescribable discipline that they bring with them.
Gone will be the silence which comes with their silence, gone the joy, the rage, the torment.
An old tale has it that an enraged icon of the Virgin chastised Empress Pulcheria when she visited the Vatopedi monastery: “Not another step. Here another queen reigns and it is not you.”
No woman, girl or female animal will walk along the paths, up the mountains or through the quarters of the transported monks.
(Though it is true that in Pantokratoras I saw hens preceded by chicks and in Docheiariou she-cats wailed for toms).
“Copulation is permitted only with the Divinity,” said Brother Palamas in his Oxford English.
“Only at night do prayers bless our souls,” said the hermit at Santa Ana.
“The Dirty One”, a monk's apprentice who even from a distance
emanates a wide variety of odors, laughs in his mumbled Greek
and serves the older monk: “There never has been nor will there
ever be women in this sanctuary,” he says.
And what would it be like if they came and cleaned up everything? we ask ourselves.
We won't be seeing women for days and we already need them
here and now.
Not here, we decide.
Let's end this just knowing they exist
and that because of them we exist.
Just like these monks who watch them from a distance.