Bard

Outside, the streetlights through poplars

are Troy’s towers aflame.

New moon, a welling darkness.

No compass beneath

the cloud-drowned stars.

The mind telling itself

the story of the mind

in the flickering chambers

of the once-splendid banquet hall

of her foundering brain.

Memory unscrolls, summoning

all the storied heroes and heroines—

their noble exploits

and humdrum mornings—

each one appearing for a moment,

bright as beaten gold.

Impossible to separate what she’s lived

from what she’s dreamed.

Daughters in hospital gowns

sacrificed to calm their fathers’ seas.

The rubble of broken armies

scattered along desolate shores

like dead bees she found shoaling beneath the attic window.

Lost now in the labyrinthine mind,

she finds no shackled monster

crouching in the shadows,

no prize to win nor

long-sought godly favor.

She sees only a small skiff

waiting on a fortunate tide

and nothing to detain her any longer.

“Water,” she says, a hoarse whisper—

the first word uttered

since the coma claimed her.

The family scrambles; her son

fills a plastic cup and

brings it to her dusky lips.

She doesn’t drink.

There is no horizon now to separate

the night sky from those open waters.

The wind is freshening and already

the first white swells are breaking

across the blade of her dipping prow.