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It’s silent as I ascend the stairs
The shop feels like a hospital, an airport,
or another place where the official business
is to pass through unscathed.

I’m not cool enough to be here,
therefore I am determined to stay. My entire being right then
is an embodiment of a great big “fuck you”
to all the hipster bio students and lit majors
crowded around me.

The table is awash with coffee cups and books–
Organic Chem, a book on dental hygiene,
and a Loeb version of the Aeneid, which I eye
and covet quietly.

In the story Prince Aeneas survives the siege of Troy
and as he’s sailing towards the future Rome,
two of his companions fall in love with a beach
where the company has taken momentary refuge.
It reminds them of home before the walls were burned
and slathered with the blood of Trojan children
sacrificed to revenge, power and grief.

Aeneas leaves them on the island,
and sails on.

I want to turn to the person
whose copy that is,
and tell him that I am the echo of Aeneas,
hard like stone, adrift on inhospitable seas
searching for a place to rest my ship.
I want to say I have hoisted my sails
to get to this place, though I was weary
from the world, from years of battling,
from the bodies of men and their ghosts.
I too have lost many loved ones
and my tears taste like a potion
of bitterness and regret.

I want to tell him that I am also trying
to be an incarnation fed on wolf’s milk,
pricked by thorns of moonlight in an orphaned,
balmy night, that I have remade the words of Virgil
with my own body, given to them my bones and the marrow of my dreams,
rickety but both still deep, deep within me even as I slept.

I have allowed Virgil to be the god whose instruction I followed
along swiftly tilting seas
in the hope of rebuilding a temple in my soul.

I want to say: I have finally made it here
through all monsters of land and sea,
through my own wildness and fear
and the wilderness of my heart
I have been courageous enough,
or foolish enough, to land upon these shores.

But though I want to reach over
and grasp the book on the table,
instead I say nothing and turn away.