Argonaut

The familiar rattle, clink and creak of a plundered supermarket shopping trolley filled with empty bottles and cans, steered across city streets by a stunted, hopeless figure, anonymous, still bundled in his extraneous rags, scarves, and filthy newspapers even beneath the penetrating summer sun.
Perhaps it was the circling seagulls crying above us in a Greek-blue sky, and the roar of onrushing traffic, but for a moment it seemed to me as if the tall apartment buildings that lined the street had become steep cliffs flanking an ocean passage suggested by the flowing waves of cars and trucks, rough waves through this channel the hopeless figure navigated his cargo of redeemables with great difficulty: an Argonaut separated from his fellows, bewitched by the Medea inside himself, in search of a golden fleece that shimmers unattainably in the bottomless depths of an ocean of intoxicants.