The Dervish and the Wave

Swirling waves, dervish-like in their intent,
divining direction beneath the moon,
the water neither wandering nor sent
but turning, as all turning things must turn
toward some still point the motion can’t explain —
the eye of every gyre a kind of prayer,
where salt forgets itself, freed of its name,
becomes the simple fact of moving: here,
and here, and here. The moon gives no reply.
She keeps her cold and distant office, draws
the deep in rhythms older than the sky
and older still than any naming laws.
So let the dervish and the wave agree:
to spin is not to search — it is to be.

Twined in Bronze: Achilles Among the Shades

“O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.”

— Homer, Odyssey XI.488–491 (trans. Richmond Lattimore)

Prelude: The Calling Across the Void

Hear me, O boundless halls of shadow,
where the voices of the upper world drift down like falling leaves,
carrying my name—

yet here, in this silence deeper than death’s first breath,
I am but shade calling to shade across the voiceless deep.

Not as I was in life do I summon you, O dwellers in darkness,
but as one among the countless dead who wander here,
seeking not the glory that the living world still sings,
but what no song can restore, no fame redeem.

By Acheron’s dark waters, by Cocytus’ wailing stream,
come forth from asphodel’s pale meadows,
enter not Lethe’s merciful waters—

let me embrace again what I have lost,
not the glory I have won.

The Encounter with Odysseus

Through the mists of the unremembering came Odysseus of many turns,
his words still honey-bright, his tongue still silver-edged:

“Achilles, no shade walks more blessed than you among the dead!
In life, you were honored as a god among mortals;
here, you are lord of the departed.
Above, the poets crown you with undying flame—
your name will never perish from the lips of men.”

But I answered him, bitter with the dust of ages:

“Do not gild my shadow, son of Laertes.
Better to be a hireling alive, a drudge to some poor man
who scratches bread from stubborn earth,
than king among these silent multitudes.

Your songs reach my name but cannot touch my soul;
they raise me to eternity yet leave me hollow
as wind through bone.”

The Shade of Patroclus

Then—O mercy of the pitiless dark—
I thought I heard you, Patroclus,
soft as breath through withered leaves,
faint as the last note of a dying lyre string:

“They did not forget me, Achilles…
my name is bound to yours
twined in bronze and grief.
They sang my fall beneath the walls of Troy,
they knew… they knew I was beloved.”

“O Patroclus,” I cried across the gulf of silence,
“O companion of my heart, O dearer than breath—

yes, they sang you, but they knew only shadows.

They praised my spear but not your steadying hand,
they heard my wrath but not our laughter in the tents,
they saw my grief but not the mornings when you woke
and the world was whole
because you breathed within it.

Glory is one thing, beloved,
but your nearness was another—
greater than all the songs
that mortals weave.”

Then darker came your voice, like distant thunder:

“Yet had you not brooded, had you not nursed your wounded pride,
I might have lived to see another dawn.

I wore your armor, Achilles, and with it, your doom—
my blood became the price of your great wrath,
my grave the shadow of your choice.

They sing your glory,
but it is built upon ashes from my pyre.”

I reached through the darkness.

My hands closed on nothing.

The Voice of Echo

Then from the depths where memory dwells eternal,
Echo came, bearing fragments of what was,
and in her broken voice I heard my mother’s prophecy,
scattered like pearls upon the wine-dark deep:

“Two fates… two fates bear you toward death’s end…

If here you remain… remain fighting the sons of Troy…
brief is your life… brief… but your glory undying…
undying through all the generations of men…

If homeward you sail… you sail to Phthia’s shore…
long life awaits… awaits… but your name dies with you…
dies with you like smoke upon the wind…”

“Two roads… two roads I set before you…

Choose… choose… but know that I will lose you…
lose you in either path you take…”

Her voice faded
like waves withdrawing from a distant shore.

Epilogue: The Wisdom of Shadows

So here I abide, famed beyond forgetting,
hollow as the caves where no wind stirs.

O Patroclus, my brother, my breath made flesh—
they remember our names
twined in bronze and sorrow,
but none recall the quiet mornings when you woke
and smiled,
and the world was made new.

The poets crown me with eternal fire.

Eternity burns cold
without you near.

Alone.

[This poem revises a version first published here on August 18, 2025. It appears here in a later and more considered form.]

Return to Morning

Hairs in the damndest places—
Sticking out of ears and nostrils,
Sprouting on shoulders too.
Yet suddenly sparse
Upon the summit
Where once the forest stood.

The trees that remain
Fade in color,
yet glisten pure and bright,
Catching light,
the darker growth once swallowed.

The forest thins.
The dome beneath
Opens to sky—
as if return to morning,
the bare crown
lifted toward first light.

The Ones Who Never Left

There was a road, a path, a way. No one remembered who made it. Some say it was always there.

It was simply there, worn into the earth by feet older than memory, the grass pressed flat, the stones turned smooth by passing. It went somewhere. Everyone who walked it knew this, not because they had been told, but because the walking itself told them. Something in the body recognized the direction even when the eyes could not see ahead.

For a long time there were no signs.

Then a man came back.

He had walked the road to its end and returned, and he was changed in ways he could not fully speak. Out of love — only out of love, there was nothing else in him at that moment — he cut a post and set it in the ground at the place where the road began, where it was easy to miss, where the grass had not been pressed down enough to make the path visible to an eye that did not already know to look. He carved an arrow. He pointed it true.

Then he walked back into his life and eventually he died.

Others came. Some saw the sign and walked. Some stood before the sign and felt something move in them and followed it down the road and did not look back. These ones also changed, in the same way the man had changed, in ways they could not fully speak.

But some stood before the sign and found the sign itself remarkable.

They studied it. They measured the angle of the arrow. They debated whether the post was the right wood, whether the carving had been done with sufficient care, whether the man had fully understood what the sign was pointing at when he erected it. They wrote careful accounts of the sign. They taught their children the accounts. They built a shelter over the sign to protect it from weather, and the shelter became a building, and the building became an institution, and the institution appointed keepers, and the keepers kept.

Pilgrims arrived from great distances and were brought before the sign and shown its meaning and examined on their understanding and sent away satisfied. The keepers were kind. They were not corrupt men. They loved the sign with a love that was real, as real as they knew how to make it, and they believed that tending it was the same as honoring what it pointed at.

Far away, in a country where the sign had never been erected, where no one had heard of the man or the arrow he erected or the institution that grew around it, a woman woke before dawn with an ache she could not name. She had felt it for years. She had tried to fill it with the things available to her and none of them had filled it. One morning she simply rose and walked in the direction the ache pulled her and did not stop.

The terrain was hard. There were no markers. There were stretches of darkness where she moved by feel alone, where the only evidence that she was still on a path was that her feet kept finding ground.

She walked for a long time.

She arrived.

She could not have said where she was. She had no words for it that would have satisfied the keepers of the sign, had she ever met them, had they ever thought to ask. But she was there. The thing the ache had always been reaching toward received her, and she was changed, in the way the man had been changed, in ways she could not fully speak.

The keepers still tend the sign.

They are not wicked men. On certain evenings, when the light falls at a particular angle and no one is asking them questions, one of them will sometimes look at the arrow, and follow its direction with his eyes, and feel something he cannot name pull briefly at him, like a current beneath still water.

He looks away. There are duties. He must maintain the sign.

On the Abuse of Language: Three Small Examples

Language is too often abused in casual conversation, but even more so in the media, where precision ought to be observed with particular care. Former colleagues knew me to be exacting about language in drafts crossing my desk. Those drafts would return marked not for style, but for word choice. Words are not as interchangeable as many assume. They carry moral weight, legal consequence, and cultural implication that may not be immediately apparent. To treat them as fungible is to dull thought itself.

While reading a recent essay in The Economist (“Schumpeter’s Bonfire of the Elites: Jeffrey Epstein’s Ghost Will Not Be Easily Silenced”), that old habit of scrutiny reasserted itself. The impulse to edit was difficult to suppress. Three passages, in particular, illustrate how subtle imprecision can distort moral reality.

I. “Young Women”

The essay opens:

“When he was alive, Jeffrey Epstein relentlessly abused young women.”

Epstein’s first conviction arose from soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old girl. The investigation that followed involved multiple minors, many of them high school students. The public record is clear: these were children.

To describe such victims as “young women” is misleading. It shifts the moral register. “Young women” suggests agency, maturity, even consent in the reader’s imagination. “Girls,” or “children,” would not. When minors are involved, euphemism functions as diminishment.

Language can wound twice: once in the act, and again in the telling. Accuracy here is not pedantry; it is fidelity—to fact and to victim.

II. “Meritocracy Made Them Powerful”

Later, in discussing the infamous “Epstein class”—the network of elites drawn into his orbit—the author writes:

“Meritocracy made them powerful, global markets made them rich—and now Epstein is making them reviled.”

The claim regarding meritocracy invites pause.

But one example: Public filings, including litigation involving JPMorgan Chase and the U.S. Virgin Islands, reveal not merely talent rewarded in open competition, but networks of privilege, tax incentives exceeding $300 million, waived monitoring requirements, political facilitation, and a dense web of personal relationships. Connections, patronage, regulatory indulgence, and institutional protection appear far more prominently than disinterested merit.

To attribute such power and wealth simply to “meritocracy” is to sanitize a far more complicated—and less flattering—reality. Words such as “network,” “patronage,” “access,” or even “self-dealing” may lack rhetorical elegance, but they better capture the structural features at issue with Epstein and those who fluttered about him.

When language flatters arrangements sustained by proximity and protection, it ceases to describe and begins to launder.

III. Free Markets and Capitalism

A third passage reads:

“The twin ideals of free markets and globalization have received a bad rap since the financial crisis of 2007–2009 (perhaps the only event to end more careers than Epstein).”

The parenthetical may amuse. The larger problem is conceptual.

Free markets and capitalism are not synonyms. A free market describes a system of voluntary exchange governed by price signals and competition. Capitalism, as historically practiced, encompasses a broader architecture: capital accumulation, corporate forms, regulatory frameworks, financial engineering, and—particularly in recent decades—large-scale leverage intertwined with state backstops.

The crisis of 2007–2009 was not the collapse of voluntary exchange. It was the implosion of highly leveraged financial instruments, moral hazard embedded in “too big to fail” institutions, regulatory capture, and risk privatized in gain yet socialized in loss.

To conflate free markets with the excesses of financialized capitalism is rhetorically efficient but analytically imprecise. It encourages rejection of one when the failure lay largely in the other. Surely an author for The Economist knows better even if most readers, especially in America, do not. He should be more careful than to reinforce ignorance and such linguistic collapse.

None of these examples is catastrophic in isolation. Yet taken together, they illustrate how easily moral clarity erodes when vocabulary drifts.

The choice between “girls” and “young women” alters the gravity of a crime.

The choice between “meritocracy” and “networked privilege” reframes responsibility.

The conflation of “free markets” and “capitalism” obscures structural cause.

Language is not decoration. It is architecture. When beams are mislabeled, the structure leans.

Precision is not severity; it is honesty. And honesty, in public writing, remains the first obligation.