Yesterday, as I was copying out some passages from the Aeneid, I came across this line, spoken by Aeneas's father, Anchises, in the underworld:

Each of us must suffer his own demanding ghost.

This is the line that still clings today, the line I cannot helping breathing in like smoke. But now, as I riffle the pages, passing through clash and battle, I find more lines that reach out and catch at me, quietly, like the casual claws of a cat as I walk past his chair. (And why am I writing in similes?)

These are the words of Dido, queen of Carthage and Aeneas' spurned lover:

Why labor to rig your fleet when the winter's raw,
to risk the deep when the Northwind's closing in?

This poem has set out to haunt me . . . or hunt me down.