Ithaca

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost:
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

By Ester Astudillo

You’re wrong, it wasn’t a dream
I was dreaming,
Though you keep humming that litany.

You’re wrong, it wasn’t a castle in the air
I was pursuing to erect
With none of your granting,
Though as the lines go,
No beheading need be decreed
Had I surrendered.

No, it was simple and pleasurable
Falling for you
Even if I was never the type
To sell her soul cheap:
Arthritic in her best days
Both body and mind.
Heart feverish, though,
If languid, I admit,
Sitting in its widowed cage
Just ticking the time
As it passed solidly around
Miraculously skipping me.

And then you stepped in
And the melting, the flood, the softening,
Those bizarre accidents of fate,
Were no longer a fancy,
Old troubadours’ songs
In history books and rhymes
I always found so puzzling.

They rang real,
You sounded live.
So I lied down outstretched
Weaving the closing lines
For that epic hiatus.

But still the heart,
That’s right;
Still the heart remains unfixed.

So now I’ve resumed my patient
Sitting position,
My watch of the night
Over the milky ocean water,
Only till you consent to the tide
To bring you in,
My smiling, my very fine,
My war-salvaged, unwrecked Ulysses.