Anchises
And then, because it couldn't be the end,
it went away for twenty years. He, older
than I am now, and I, then, bidding him
farewell, the way we do in careful code
when someone who has journeyed close with us
lies on that river-bank, the curtained bed.
We'd parted on the telephone for good.
The next day someone put me through again.
Language was then not language, not a code,
a bridge or anything, beside that shore
he was now queueing by, and moving on ‹
for his was not the boat I would be getting.
Language, a well that had run dry at last,
a mocked mirage, dream prisoned in the head,
had failed, for all my knowledge of it. Neither
the widest spaces brooding in the skies
nor false reflections beckoning my eyes
held hope for it. Farewell meant what it said.
On unresolved, with many things, but more
to do with speech, I journeyed till I heard
a line from Vergil I had known for years
but hadn't noticed, or it hadn't stayed:
how brave Aeneas, visiting Anchises,
thrice had struggled to embrace the shade.
Sally Evans
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