“Are you a sex therapist or something?” a waitress asks Heather McHugh as she drops off a drink at our little corner of the bar at Taverna Mazi. 

Between discussing the color of Greek food and the charm of wimples, I’d brought up an anecdote about crucifix-shaped dildos. The conversation waxed salty. We had come around to discussing duck sex by the time the waitress decided to ask what the deal was.

“No no, Heather’s a poet! She’s amazing. You have to google her,” I insist.

Heather McHugh’s poetry is….I hesitate to use words to try to describe how she uses words. I’d be making a fool of myself. Syntax flips, quivers, frissons at her fingers and on her lips. She’s been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, she’s held the position of Writer-in-Residence at University of Washington since 1984, she’s received too many grants and awards to mention, from Stranger Genius to Guggenheim Fellowship to the NEA.

So how does a poet like Heather McHugh like to dine? We could have gone anywhere. She takes me to her favorite seat at the end of the bar in her favorite Greek restaurant: Taverna Mazi in Ravenna.

It’s clear that Mazi is one of the poet’s haunts when a bartender, unprompted, hands her a cloudy, cold drink mere moments after we’re seated. McHugh calls it a Dead Dog. Technically it’s a misnomer. “Dead Dog” usually means a drink made with whiskey, beer and Tabasco; McHugh’s Dead Dog is a play on the stiffness of a Greyhound that’s been all but deprived of grapefruit juice.

I head straight for the Cambas Retsina. Retsina is a weird white wine the Greeks have been making for more than 2,000 years. It gets its name and funky flavor from the pine resin originally used to seal amphorae and casks during wine production ages ago. Some say it’s like drinking straight Pine-Sol, but I’ve found that it grows on you, as it grew on the Greeks and Romans. Admittedly, I’m no expert on retsina, but in my limited experience, this Cambas is one of the best I’ve had: very dry, very drinkable.

Neither of us has eaten much, and like glassy-eyed, Dickensian urchins who haven’t dined in days, we order a slew of appetizers pell-mell from the menu. We cut into prassopita, huge triangles of filo pastry stuffed with roasted leeks, sheep’s milk cheese and sweet caramelized onions. We dive into the clay pot baked feta. Sprinkled with chili flakes, roasted olives and sautéed red onions, it’s fluffy, a molten ambrosia. McHugh insists that I try the skewered chicken souvlaki. She also insists on ample tzatziki (I also enjoy ample tzatziki!) and it arrives in fleets, lighter than air, dappled with flecks of parsley. By the time we’re eating the Santorini drunken prawns with orzo and roasted tomato ouzo sauce, we’re beginning to roll back in our seats, a tad on the full side.

In fact, she really is enchanted by wimples. When very young, McHugh attended Catholic school for a stint and the awkward headcoverings made an impression. “If clothes make the woman, it seems a wimple should impart virtue,” she says. And she wanted to be virtuous. “There are two things I’ve always craved: a wimple and a backhoe. I wound up with the figurative forms of both, though in general it’s the literal I like,” she says, cryptically.

By this point I’ve moved from retsina to Mazi’s Greek Margarita. Dubious about the drink (I suspected “Greek” was merely a nominal decoration), it hit my lips and delighted. Crushed fresh cucumbers and a dash of orange liqueur transform the classic cocktail into something lightly botanical and refreshing, infused with a hint of olive and orange groves.

Our talk turns eventually to time. “I really believe in waste,” McHugh says. “One has to crumple up half a ream of printing paper and throw it away from oneself, with great force, to make room for the unexpected phrase.” She calls the forced perspective of time, time chauvinism. “Time is the ultimate fiction. Time is considered strictly in adult terms, the way adults experience time. But there is children’s time, which looks deceptively like inventing, and elderly time, which looks deceptively like forgetting. These aren’t considered proper time.” She sips her Dead Dog. “What does time look like to a hummingbird?” she says. “A hummingbird thinks we’re dead, it’s moving so fast. To us, starfish and limpets look dead.”

What would time look like from the sluggish stillness of outer space? She wants to experience it. “I want a Hubble for my birthday,” she says. “A backhoe, a Hubble and a wimple.”

By the end of dinner, the retsina and tequila have gone to my head. The final notes scrawled in my Moleskin are indecipherable: “year of the rat, month of the tiger; animal time; verb verve; cognitive cage; freedom.” Rhetorical intoxication has taken grip. It turns out that with McHugh it’s possible to become drunk on wine, poetry and virtue over the course of a meal.