Prospero in Exile
After the Rapture
Wedded to the past, he is a passer-by. How to distinguish between a pain put upon and a pain extracted from? On the shortwave: voices, but none speaks a language he learned in school. Nevertheless he listens and is kept company, surrounded in his solitude. Wind shuffles chaff off the threshing floor, but the fog stays put. Its hem: wet raw linen. Sounds enlarge and amplify: a ship’s stuttering engine, gull squabble, a rope snagged on a squeaking pulley. The signal fire burned out long ago. Come nightfall, he’ll enter easily, willingly, the exile of sleep.
Lights still burn in empty rooms despite the unexpected departures. The bare tree leafed-out with starlings still murmurs and stirs past twilight. The commute, less congested, adds another hour of leisure to the day and that hour longer for its aimlessness. When the chosen, ungrounded by gravity, lifted away from the lawns and sidewalks, we had time enough to bid them bon voyage! We were neighbors after all and although we rarely talked we had always waved warmly as we hurried through our daily disarray.
Eric Pankey is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. His recent books have been published by Milkweed Editions.
