Letter from Ogygia

She made the worst threat without

even meaning it; pillow talk,

mist-thin morning, about to melt

in sunlight. I could, she said,

make you immortal.

I don’t remember what I said.

I stared, for a moment, down

the barrel of eternity, in those

sheets, waking up wrists

tangled in that caramel hair.

I vomited in the back garden, after.

That is the closest I came

to throwing myself back on

Poseidon’s non-existent mercy,

just letting myself sink down

into the waves. The thing was that

down in Hades, I could hope,

at least, to see you again. I could

wait there, at the dock. I could

take you by the hand and help you

off the ferry boat. We could walk

through the asphodel, down

to the river, and drown

our old selves and surface,

blind, unknowing, but

together, into the next life.

the ends unwoven in

the ends unwoven in—strange

how the brain is programmed to

seek finality, find closure, in lives

undesigned for neat conclusions.

we play a finite number of times,

but never know the last one—no

final certainty to calculate back,

we can only assume that we will

go on forever.

the snow melts before the snowman

is finished. the scarf knit only so far—

someday, I will put it down, and someone

else will pick it up and bind it, weave in

the ends. maybe not the scarf—the last

dish in the sink, the poem half-written,

the melody with no chords under it. live

with the fact that it stops, someday,

mid-stream—live with the fact there will

be detritus of a life. someone else someday

will clean up after me, will find a thousand

things undone, incomplete,

unresolved