Hospice

No, shut those blinds. I’d rather not
        be shown the evening star.
Venus? We knew her well. She used
            to fuse us in her stare.
But she is still herself, and we
            are not the two we were.

Give me lamplight from the guttering
            bulb. Let love now mean
me recycling fluids, you
            mired in your magazine,
till I slip through these catheters
            mid-paragraph, unseen.

John Talbot is a classicist and the author of The Alcaic Metre in the English Imagination, The Well-Tempered Tantrum, and Rough Translation. His work appears in Poetry, The New Criterion, The American Scholar, and elsewhere.
Originally published:
June 1, 2022

Featured

Reading the Declaration of Independence as Holy Text

How the American creed emerged—and evolved—over 250 years

Writing

Unpublished journal entries

Searching for Seamus Heaney

What I found when I resolved to read him

You Might Also Like

Talking


Pacific Palisades


Messengers


Newsletter

Sign up for The Yale Review newsletter to receive our latest articles in your inbox, as well as treasures from the archives, news, events, and more.