I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
The girl shoots you in the heart.
(Do you know this? Do you expect it? When she scarred your face, it was like a heart cut chamber from chamber, falling in four parts.
The first, the avarice of loss—the second, a raging plummet—the third, slush clinging like guilt to the tatters of your skin.
The fourth, love and starlight: heavens, heavens below.)
The girl shoots you in the heart. Only, she is not here. She is not here.
You flinch as though she is.
Later, she will call you a monster.
Later than that, maybe, you will tell her.
For now you gaze wide-eyed, lips parted as earth parts for water, and you hope—
(No.)
You do not hope.
Hope is for rebels, and rebellion is fire, sparks, anger—
Anger did not destroy you; sorrow found you first.
(Anger, for you, comes later.)
Forever on the other side of blood, you had a family. They loved you; that was their cruelty. For love can be cruel when it strikes hard but not quite to center, like the blast that maims instead of gently killing.
(This is the way your father falls: out of reach, out of time, on the other side of blood.)
Regret will come later; the girl finds you first.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
In a shuddering breath, taken at the seam where night is stitched to dawn, you fear that Luke is not what you need.
But what, then?
You sailed through a sea of sky to reach this Island. You have always put one foot in front of the other, if only so that you had a trail to follow back again.
(Once, though. The storms raged and the sand blew like so many spears laid end to end—you huddled in the ribcage of an old craft and waited, waited to be free.
Your footprints were gone; your lips and knuckles chapped. You prayed, but you did not know you were praying.
You only knew that you had to find your way back.)
Dew clings to the back of your neck here. You twist your hair this way and that, pushing it behind your ears.
Luke speaks rarely.
You speak too much, the words tumbling like pebbles, with no merciful tide to wash over them and order them and make them clean.
Don't be afraid, I feel it too.
When you think of him, everything else fades out.
You stop thinking of him.
(No.)
You should stop thinking of him; the deed itself is no easier accomplished than finding footprints in the maddening smoothness of sand.
When you shoot him with the blaster, he flinches, but he does not fade.
(Everything else does.)
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
The best moment of your life also destroys it:
First, second, third, like acts and axes, dreams and demons, Snoke crumbling in pieces and Rey wheeling round like she belongs—
If not to you, then with you.
Blood sizzles when it burns. Pain shrieks along a nerve-end faster and longer than light. You watch her fight and
(And)
(You have not thought about your father and your mother and they way they loved each other like the crackle of a flame in a long, long time. You have not let yourself. You have not loved yourself, not ever, and thinking of them—remembering them—is too close for comfort when comfort is far away.)
Rey's hand closes around your thigh. Her spine curves to yours; wires, not yet crossed.
She is the only living thing in this room.
Everything else is dead or dying.
When you hold out your hand—well.
The very reason you need to tells you that she will not stay.
That she is almost weeping when she spurns you is both best and brightest—
—and destruction.
Stars are always like this when they die.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
In your bunk, you lie with stillness of sand after a storm. Settled, and no one grain strung to any other.
You would sift through hands that raised you; you would crumble.
You would fall.
Somewhere in the galaxy there is a heart that is no lonelier than yours is. Whose fate that sketches more sadly, you cannot say.
One punch, and you would split sternum.
Finn and Leia, the pilot and Finn's soft-lipped girl—they would find you, hollowed. A ribcage buried like a fallen space-craft, and that ribcage—
Empty.
Tomorrow you will pick yourself up as you have always done, one bone after the other, and the people will thank you for saving them.
Tonight, you will not allow yourself to mourn him.
If you mourn him, you will never let him fade.