As Odysseus Finds His Anticleia, So I Find You Poem by Dennis Ryan

September 2000; revised Friday morning, November 18,2016 at 7: 34 a.m.

- a poem in memory of my mother, Etta Reed Ryan (November 10,1926—August 20,1994)

As Odysseus finds his Anticleia, so I find you,
in a central Pennsylvania train station, our relatives
waiting to drive us home throughmorningdarkness
to Mount Carmel, where your mother lay dying upstairs
under that thin sheet, not wanting you to see her, so
sickly thin under that thin sheet.I'm rerereading your letter
to dad even now, and I don't know exactly how to say this,
but I can't help wondering "how genuine innocence always
seems to lose itself in the vicinity of blood guilt."

I share your loneliness, your intensity,
your—well, Life plays dirty tricks on us all.
When we're young we don't care enough, and when
we're older it's often too late to do anything about it.

Me?You ask about me?I write these poor proems
of regret.What then?Wait then?Hope then?Well met?
Do we think of our own then, act with care, forethought
and forbearance?(Here's Life again with the capital "L".)

And that passenger train, tracking through that Pennsylvania
darkness 64 years ago, where was it headed, to a final rendez-vous
and destination?Elsewhere, Odysseus has drawn his sword
only to find Anticleia sipping black blood.Nearby.Nearby.

She calls out to him:only my loneliness for you...
blood will have blood.I bite my lip, draw blood
at the thought of his reception there:three times

he put his arms around her, yet three times she goes
shifting through his hands impalpable as shadow wavering
through thin air.The pain Odysseus bears, I bear too.
I cry out in the darkness—I find you.