- Philoctetes, Long Afterward
They're nice to me, I guess,These ghosts who never quite know what to say, Having lived out meaninglessLives here in Thessaly. They fear each dayThat they have been somehow defrauded, But bring me my DilaudidOut on this sunny terrace anyway
In their soft shoes and scrubs.They putter forward into their futures while Helping us into tubsOr pushing Lethean pills to coax a smileFrom us, who see, played on these plains Once more, our ancient pains,The green a stage that holds Troy's burning pile.
It's like some movie set,This hospice. We're the actors; they're the crew. They bring our PercocetAnd coffee, do the lights. What do we do?We act like we are still the men We were, in that time whenOur lives still mattered. Could be worse. It's true
Time's poison ravagesThe body, but what are gout and diabetes To one who knows what he is,What he was? What can they be to Philoctetes?I am the man who slaughtered Paris For his crime, here, on a terraceIn a wheelchair, dribbling milk from soggy Wheaties, [End Page 406]
Browbeaten by these ghostsWho've never lived. Here's the survivor's fate. And always with the ghosts …My own dead friend came to equivocateFor Pyrrhus and Odysseus, And he made such a fussThat I slouched off to fight for men I hate.
For what? Lo! My rewardFor saving the Achaeans with my bow? Great Agamemnon, LordOf Men, long dead; Achilles, too, laid low,And no one cares what they debated Or how, manipulated,I left where Lemnos' sleepy breezes blow
As soft as Mother PeaceUpon the fevered brow of her sick child, Who's sick with the diseaseOf life. They could have left me in the wildWhere I'd hobble from my quiet cave Like Lazarus from the grave,My dying and my living reconciled
As in an afterlifeI could not end, since ending it would mean Another afterlife.I've never seen such darkly brilliant green …Living on bread the ravens brought And the few fish I caught …Things I'd ignored for years took on the sheen
Of jeweled seas at noon,The deep-down stir of things made evident While I lay in a swoonOn the stone ledge above a forest, bentOver a sprig of thyme, white-capped, As if some breaker lappedWithin the limestone shelf its growth had rent. [End Page 407]
The changeful days were changeless,And I was most alive when numbered dead, When the unexpected angelsOf daily observation crowned my headAs mayflies form a halo over A lily in the cloverNobody's ever seen. But now, instead
Of that, the TV blares,I email different people. Memory fades. We're dying. No one cares.They feed us burnt steaks. We wield plastic blades,And wish we'd known the naïve joy Of those love felled at Troy,Who don't now live as shades among the shades. [End Page 408]
RYAN WILSON is the editor of Literary Matters and the author of The Stranger World (Measure Press, 2017), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Recent work appears in Birmingham Poetry Review, Dark Horse, The New Criterion, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and Best American Poetry. He teaches at The Catholic University of America.