Host at Last.

• Position: Poem

If I am host at last, It is of little more than my own past.

--James Merrill, "A Tenancy"

Summer: time to visit the old house. Nostalgia is a kind of quenchless thirst. Mooning over marks the years have made, I used to pine for all that had been lost. But nothing's ever thoroughly erased. Sandwiched between the future and the past, generations dreaming in each bed toss (who's alive?) and turn (and who is dead?); brush past the present as a passing guest spends one night, then wakes and takes the road. Faint ancestral echoes barely guessed: what was it our predecessors said? Shake out the musty sheets. Wipe off the dust: tasks of a mother or an aging host sandwiched between the living and the dead. I used to pine for all that had been lost...