Some names are words for grief,
graceless words for failure.
Actaeon was a crowd, a lonely man,
and in the end nothing,
awaiting his descent into simple witlessness,
cold beside a river of fire, who,
the story goes, either wandered
into a grove sacred to Artemis
and saw her bathing naked
or boasted he was the greater hunter.

And so, enduring the deep wrath of god,
thinking, No way out of this,
about to surrender it came to him that,
like any hound or creature in this world,
he too had yearned and hunted.

Later on in the underworld, he began to wonder
about symmetry, his cousin, unborn heirs
to the throne of Cadmus and whether or not
he’d been forgiven: a crowd, a lonely man,
nothing, awaiting his descent into witlessness,
and so cold near Phlegethon,
boundless river of fire.

Some men have grief in place of dreams.
How cold and sad an end those men will come to:
white caps over the blue, no linden trees
or red acorns under which to find shade,
and not one god to pray for mercy to.