The olives have gone rotten, root and tree
powerless to save them. They fall like light
across the rippling turquoise surf. Sing now
of youth’s inertia, how it burned in us,
a lip of lightning on the blackened sky,
the thunder’s thousand tongues. A golden age
is always past: its papier-mâché masts,
elaborate stage-set, fatidic dreams,
spun-sugar of the psyche, inheritance
of collective fictions— victories, defeats—
dark catalogues of theft and misery.
Recall the four hundred ships at anchor
off Troy. Did anyone pause to mention
the old men bathing in the winedark sea?