Late Epistle
Anne Myles
—for my first therapist
The choice was, to obey the Lord, carry the weight
of sacrifice, no old burden I’d inherited; or select
myself, that jostling drawer of hungers. How hard
to meet your eyes, still in your pale face. Your feet
precise in dainty sandals, white hands I knew caressed
their prizes: husband, child. I chose to be a faithful
disciple of the merely human world—I only needed
to be fixed. Snow fell beyond the window, melting
into the lake and the river running backward from it.
I didn’t grasp I’d made another God; didn’t see light
dappling ivy in your private garden, or feel spring
blowing in an end. But those who are not chosen
still worship. No deity I’d dreamed up was as gone
as you, behind your closed door. It opened me inside
to down and down. For I was every dead thing; for I was
the monkey baby’s scream. But I was not, nor would be
her fist that punched the glass—the one you took back in
to bind her bleeding hand. Stunned with envy, I had knelt,
trying to sweep the shards: good patient, parfit knight.
How could I rage, or revile the memory of your smile?
You were my altar, my grail, my shrine at the world’s end.
You were my covenant of dark grace; the long tap root
to what I couldn’t say. You were a jeweled casket I held
for years until it smashed and I could choose myself again.
Anne Myles’s poetry has appeared in the North American Review, Split Rock Review, Whale Road Review, Lavender Review, Early American Literature, and other journals. A recent transplant to Greensboro, NC, she is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Northern Iowa and in 2021 received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.