To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology

Where are they now, those days that belonged to you

When you were here on earth? Passing days,
And your mind shuttling between their joys and sorrows

As if they displayed a pattern of the cosmos
That you would weave with your own words, someday.

Between the smooth banks of Time the current's
Surge hasn't carried a single verse of yours

Down to us: your name survives as a footnote
Salvaged from the numbered flow of years

By a dense appendix. For you no inscriptions
Carved in shining marble, no grave profile

Staring back from medallions, and not one scholar
Scrupulous enough to record the living trace

Of your legacy. As long as the gods have chosen
To bestow on others that brilliance that never fades,

You'll be left in the dark forever, dear friend.
And given that dark, what more can we say, really,

Except that once you heard the nightingales singing?
But even now, obscured by the growing shadow

Of the asphodels, your shade must stir a little
Against the inattentiveness of the gods—

Your shade in its silenced pride. But as long as the days
Add up to nothing more than a tangled web

Of the usual troubles, how could the gods have given you
Any greater blessing—you who are now the very

Substance of oblivion, the ash out of which
Nothing rises? The gods have kindled their aura

Around the foreheads of others, minds whose unyielding
Powers of illumination must expose the heart

Of each mystery they encounter. Which means they can't help
Revealing every flaw in the rose they hold sacred,

Consuming it petal by petal, in a blaze of glory.
The gods have treated you more tenderly, brother.

For an evening that will never get any darker,
You can listen to the nightingale of Theocritus,

And nothing there will ever disturb your rapture.