From this distance the old city on the hill
looks now as it did back then,
gold in the slanting sun of the afternoon,
its honeycomb walls standing strong.
As we approach we see a breach
or two we missed before,
signs in its masonry,
in its gates and gargoyles
of the wear of history.
For six years we lived
behind the battlements and portcullis,
compelled to recite the doctrines of medicine
the rigid orthodoxy of anatomy
the poetic excursions of psychiatry
the catechisms of surgical belief,
soundly indoctrinated
until we were deemed safe
to go forth, steady in our conduct,
observant despite accumulating doubts,
until our time was past.
Today we are back and we see faces
that gain in familiarity as we talk,
the wrinkle and sag of age erased as if
by magic not of our making.
Within an hour the intervening years
have slipped away
into an implausible past.
Implausible but not impossible:
something must have happened
between now and then
something that has made us old
that has cracked the city walls
that has chiselled and smoothed
the faces of the gargoyles
that has caused the solid iron gates to rust
and hang, rather as I feel some days,
limp and slow with crepitus
and diminished clang.
We know a lot but understand so little
about what happened.
Soon we will be sent away again:
this time we will not be leaving as emissaries.
It's getting late: the afternoon is nearly gone
and the sun is moving, creating new horizons,
seeking new cities beyond to illuminate.
