Nostalgia

The worst part of it is that I’ve forgotten your face. Or the idea that each tide was a slender finger pulling at these knots, loose end then left to work on another day. Lost at sea, love is a logogram: less than, fewer still, a word made nothing more than cauter-mark on starboard hard, port I left all those years ago. Sometimes, I dream of my own (sorry, our own) great-rooted bed, shaped from something still alive. Eurycleia means “broad fame” and that’s a sandy-pit, if you ask me. It’s an island beautiful as a scarred oxen’s back, sowed with lash and eyes. I saw something of you the other day in this glass of magic, vase filled with smoke’s children. There’s that dress you wore, I said to no one in particular. There’s that blue that never bled to red wine, dark in its never-nocked-arrow waves. And suddenly you’re the moon, again, lost in reflection’s sea. I follow the light to nowhere as I wander through the sipped sleeve. Because. Because you walked the stairs that night before I left, after we heard the rain spill like grain from a split sack. You walked in front of me, just above the cochineal stars, bright bald ember, fashioned still spear. I think of nothing else but you. It’s true. It’s the worst part of forgetting, all this remembering.

Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Minicucci. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem was written as part of a new collection of poems, all titled ‘Nostalgia,’ mostly drafted during the first pandemic summer of 2020. We were isolated from each other, and I was reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey for the first time while missing friends, loved ones, and family. This poem and the larger project use that text and the context of our shared loneliness to think about the relationships and complications between a lack of nostos (a returning home, in Ancient Greek) and the pandemic’s ever-present algos (pain).”
—Matthew Minicucci