My Mentor Died Last Month

My Mentor Died

.autumn leaves through glass.
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My mentor died last month. I'd never let him be the kind of guy  I went to often to ventilate or guide my undergraduate studies.

My mentor died last month. To me he was a god with skinny hairless  arms beneath his wide suit jacket and so-sharp sensitivity he seemed always ill,  like Fellini's god so ailing.

My mentor died last month. He drank way too much. When talking to me  he never stammered but relaxed and crooned and I felt like a healer, my love  for him so deep it throbbed in the air between us.

My mentor lived eighty years that amazed all who knew him. A genius in  the purest sense but so tender, so caring, he followed me as I fled him, not  knowing what a mentor was. I was at the same time so flattered.

Our brief intereactions were so magic.

He drew me out of such a low abyss I was dying and so enflamed me  with passion for antiquity's languages I returned to him five years later as a master while he held back tears.

"I went into classics because it was more practical [than Indo-European],  I told him." He chuckled.

But for me it was a slow path into the present from a past I had to swim  through slowly and put on until my first book turned inside-out the present.

He turned me into Nietzsche's child, needing the past before the present, the  present only after a deeply intuited antiquity.

Did he know I wrote a book? Would he have liked it and been proud? At a  level between us it was for him, a present of the present, paling beside what  he gave me--my own spirit, a light within that I was special that has kept me  alive when it hasn't done far more.

My mentor died last month. He came back to me as a youth last week to tell  me.

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