At night I imagine the dark ferryman, leaning on his pole, pockets laden with coins from all countries. (What did my father, a refugee, exchange for passage?)

How quiet that final journey must be, as the boat’s beaked hull sways toward the arctic shore, for the dead have no need for idle chat. Whatever they were, now they are argonauts

in a hitherto unknown realm, gloomy, except where asphodels grow, tiny torches in the heathered fields of forgetting. Worldly inclinations drop away

into an ultramarine undertow from which clouded faces peer up. Remembering is like plowing your hand into a sea of gore—the unexpurgated past—

rooting for some illuminating thing, a dark crystal, that concentrated mass of old, still useful meaning. Here, passengers discard what was once valuable to former selves:

certain names, wishes, scraps of songs, a child’s toy. Imagine what I would relinquish to Acheron. I would finally cast aside my begging bowl. Let this vessel rock me into starless night.

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