Jakesong

TRISH DOUGHERTY | VERMONT

That Wednesday in July we attained peak Beowulf. Side by side in our own Heorot, me with the fish and you with the vegetarian, refilling our comically-small water glasses. Inflated by the articles we mainlined, masters of our own little corners of the text. Dropping plurilinear units, sketching the larger rhetorical patterns on napkins.

We snickered together on Francis’s couch; six of us jammed in his office passing his treasures round like toys. Pints at the campus bar, in old-timey pubs, in London. Mead shots on the train from Salisbury. Pimms on the quad. We finally stopped at that tuck shop, (the one with the gigantic lines), after our last class. I had a panini.

And then it ended, the rewrites all rewritten, grades were given, flights were boarded. Color me Aethelred, unready.

You’re landlocked in Denver, safe from Viking raids, but the miles between us gape like a gigantic caesura. I never caught the name of your girlfriend, somebody’s unnamed daughter.

I am holding on to your voice and smile Jake, Happily forgetting every Saxon king and all the Spear-Danes just to keep you.