Not even Odysseus was a man of as many
Shades as Charon, forever returning. Ferrying
Is oscillation, is time, is clockwork change,
The elliptical journey so often completed
It creates within its coils the fiction of a place.
Pick up the pole. Haul on the sails. Seize hold
Of the rudder. Whatever you have to master
To make it across. Even the daily toil of carrying
Souls, collecting the gold-leaf obols from under
Their lying tongues, has its misadventures,
Its storms. No one ever challenges the same
Styx, the same Acheron twice, not even
The deathless, not even the dead. It comes
With the territory. Ferries often sink. Only
Charon himself scrambles out of the wreckage
And swims. No afterlives for those twice-dead
Poems, only more work for him. Some nights
The rivers are oceans, some nights tunnels,
Some nights deserts or woods. He sinks
From sight, again and again. And then,
From mists, great scraggly beard as silvered
As the fog, he reappears. Time to cross over again.
You can spend your whole life traveling around
This round world, but in his grim, tight circuit
He nonetheless transcends your excursions,
Transits between worlds, links meanings
To meaninglessness, ends to unknowns,
Histories to eternities he will never begin.
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