Pelion
Pelion
Calling it a mortal fog
That slides across your late decade
Doesn’t ease the mystery ahead
Or the feeling that you’ll never know
What it is when its time has come.
And it doesn’t work to pretend you can still
Play with it in metaphor, like a thing
Arriving to surprise you on little cat feet
Or rubbing its muzzle on your windowpane.
Maybe dealing with that darkening night
Can only come with rousing memory,
What the mind still holds of those greener days
When the sun slanted across the cobblestones
To clear the way for a climb on Pelion
And the long rest at the first clearing,
Your companion silent, turning to see
Where the sound of a goat bell hid in the distance
And the myth of piling Pelion on Ossa
Hovered as a cliché that no longer entertained
Rebellious giants and nostalgic philosophers,
The truth of sprouting pine and olive
The first truth surrounding a spring
Still enough to clear the mind
And hold for a second the two faces
Suddenly reflected there
So alive in your reading of the moment
To kill the literary conceit of Narcissus
Or any mythical love of self
That challenged the love the gods had planted
With the lucid waters of that mountainside
And those other springs in the years beyond
Returning to guide you through the dimness
To feel that knowing how it ends
Would be nothing to remembering what it was.