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logos

Preparation

Heatwave. August. High summer, and scant wind
to launch a voyager upon the sea,
and yet Odysseus is again content.

He sees a young man lying by a house
whose angled doorway catches, holds, the sun,
nothing to do, nowhere he has to go,
is suddenly aware of what he feels:
for heat, light, air, sound, silence, expectation
hold him, too, in their balance, set him free
to roam, when he is ready to, the world;
is struck by insight: “Why – this is contentment,
filling me completely!” and resolves
to fix this moment in his mind forever,
frame and feeling, there for memory,
for future need.

Older Odysseus smiles
beneath the broad white canvas’ shade and thinks
the youth was right, remembering. He sees
bees working the hypericum, a mottled
butterfly resting on a green stem
of sky-blue, sea-blue hebe. The lanterns,
their candles burnt, before him as he writes
have last evening’s cool in their emptiness,
look to tonight. The sun’s upon his back
and he will wait Penelope’s return
to move the shade. And this – a man’s faint song,
birds cooing in his trees, the distant sounds
of agriculture, butter yellow blooms
of oleander, agapanthus white
as gulls against the blue sky – seems enough.

Penelope knows how to read his moods:
eight months she’s watched and seen his doubts increase
until he calls himself ‘ex-mariner’;
she sees in him, at moments he recalls
his Odyssey, uncertainty, self doubt,
that he’s unsure what all this might be worth
compared to that, whether he has the strength,
cunning, luck, skill…whatever, that it took
once upon a time. She sees him sigh,
his eyes unfocus as he recollects
that recollection’s not enough. The lines
on his brow deepen. Sometimes he looks lost….

And now that August’s near, feeling his wounds,
sleeping long, taciturn, recouping strength,
he finds his Muse again: his tongue unbound,
he starts to scribble, jots in the notebooks
she knows she will read when his voyage is made
and he’s returned, for she is full of faith.

Shipbuilding

The Earth has sailed a circle round the Sun
since the keel was laid: Odysseus
forgives himself for not reading the signs
until his nose was rubbed. The two worked well,
his (younger) brother and her elder boy,
clearing a level place on which to set
the beams that built the raft, fetching the wood
and fixing it. While he looked on and mused…

It came as love comes: suddenly, behind,
kissing one’s nape, a possibility
instantly seen and known, changing one’s world,
changing two’s. This was his craft, his season.

Some time that spring Penelope or he –
he can’t say who – first floated the idea
the cross-planked structure underneath the trees
could be a raft for him to voyage on
the coming summer; as the plan took hold
they both became their deeper selves again.

The launch

Some things could not be done: he planned to make
a ceremony when his brother came,
to show him and to thank him for the gift
and pour some wine – but though he led him out
and told him as he stood upon the slats
what it all meant, how he had changed its shape,
boarded its edges, had the gangplank laid,
there was no sense of celebration shared;
and neither could he name it, though he searched
the star map and the sky. And so the launch
was gradual: a retrospective launch
if such were possible: one blissful day
he recognises he’s at sea again…….

Casting off

Landlocked Odysseus on his slatted craft,
planks brown against the sea of tangled green,
watches a world where nothing moves but wind,
the sun minutely, loud fat drops of rain
falling from where they’ve gathered on the trees
that spread a canopy above the raft
as sails that he sees now in his mind’s eye
sheltering little from the fierce sea-sun,
speeding him on past voyages. And noise,
his constant, noticed most when least present:
roosting birdsong, running water, wind,
the silence of the seven earthed masts, mossed
and ivied, here beside him as he slips
his moorings, waits to feel the current’s lift
and take, his craft’s slow swing onto the sea.

Odysseus feels no urgency, could stay
all day here, waiting for the wind to rise.
He sees a sunlit village, a harbour,
paints, as if by numbers, a white house,
an ochre roof, a dusty road, his son
off bathing, his daughter in a straw hat
sat smiling in a quayside taverna,
smells the jug of wine on the broad table,
the roasting lamb….someone’s eyes see a head
falling towards the sand….He turns seaward
and hears the seagulls cry; and still he waits,
thinking: “The time will come. The time will come.”

The sea will not leave him: indigo-throated,
bluer than the bluest sea he’s known,
hibiscus opens new blooms to the sun
daily: refracted light beneath his hull
shimmering fishes. And always the wind.

Solitude

Of course he has known loneliness, adrift
for weeks and months, marooned or prisoner,
even while fêted felt the tug of home,
but not before like this, unmixed with grief
at losing men, rage at the fates, or fight
against the odds: no, this is unforeseen –
long hours with only thought for company,
half-dreaming and adrift upon the currents,
content to watch himself as, motionless,
he roams remembered pasts, imagined futures,
slipping across the line between the two,
the present moment, as a fish’s tail
flicks it unthinking from the limpid water
of river outfall to the deeper green
of ocean. So he sits, entirely lost
in musing, while the world turns around him
unheeded, and the currents take him back
past voyages southwards and far to west
which he returned from changed and marked for life,
to moments when his future pivoted
upon a single word; then a sea-change
sweeps him beyond himself, to the horizon
arcing around him, yielding sun and moon
alternately through all the time he’s left,
and all the many lives he now imagines,
of which he knows one only will be his,
enriched and not diminished by his dreams,
as he needed to see just once the night’s
infinite brilliance above the ocean
to be illumined by the sight forever.

Sirens

What do they sing to him? “Odysseus,
come to our arms and we’ll love you forever;
our bodies and our beds will keep you eager;
O, listen to us, sweet Odysseus,
listen: we share your secret appetites:
there’s nothing we won’t do, won’t let you do,
if you will only come to us and love us…”

He has a mast from which, securely tied,
to listen to the sweet, seductive madness:
wrapped in each other’s arms Penelope
and he make dreaming love for hours, tell
their stories to each other, one of which :

“A river sparkles in the morning sunlight,
as does a woman’s jet-black glossy hair
while she waits for her transport. And here come
our heroes: holy men walking to where
need not concern us. As they near, they’re asked
to carry her across: one man half-kneels,
sets her astride one shoulder, then stands up
and in both stride; and she’s carried across,
watches the pair continue on their way.

Little is said between the men: maybe
nothing till nightfall; then, as they turn in,
one asks the other: ‘Since we’re not allowed
dealings with women, how it is that you
did what you did this morning?’ The reply:
‘I put her down beside the river: you,
brother, are still carrying her tonight.’”

…Odysseus says he’s carried through decades,
giving him both licence, and a key
to one of the conundrums that makes him
the man he is (no different from the others,
he’d say), in the same safe place that he keeps
‘I cannot praise a fugitive or cloistered
virtue.’ , a sentence which unlocks a trunk
containing the same treasure, winds a spring
in the same clockwork of his age-scarred heart.

Monsters

Their absence troubles him. For weeks he tries
to summon them, hordes, flights, squadrons of them,
any and all the monsters that he’s known,
heard hinted at. But still they refuse
even imagined conversation, evade him;
his voyage founders on this absent rock,
becalmed for days with no progress in sight
and this for no reason he can discern:
the wind is up and tossing the tall waves
of strange, familiar, half-remembered seas –
Odysseus must fight to steer his craft,
submit to the winds’ serendipity,
or something in between, as images
are gusted here and there like pennants snatched
from a snapped lanyard, and he with them –
then dies and leaves him once again becalmed,
nauseous, his solar plexus crabbed,
breath short, eyes rheumy. Nights without much sleep,
too much navigation of the soul,
too much fantasy unships his bearings:
he misses turns on maps, attention lags
and lapses, lids close. All around a surface
close-wrinkled as his hand’s back and as mobile,
a tiny segment of a sphere’s surface,
vast in scale, and coloured as no hand
since his forebears painted themselves for battle,
meets the smooth unbroken sky. A toy,
pointed, painted, dances on a string,
balanced between the wind and gravity;
he’s leaden, but the sky is a comfort:
a sea of sky for ever wave of sea,
so vast, what can he hope to set against it?

Sea-sickness is a victory of sorts,
better than nothing. The nights’ residue
can, perhaps, be forced to be of value,
something that he is prepared to own:
but in a world where so much is wasted –
thistledown scaling the off-shore wind –
should he expect, just because he’s called
Odysseus, of all the multitudes
of multitudes launched into existence,
to be the one to fertilise the egg?
Wouldn’t it make anyone desire
to vomit – with their backs against the wind
of course – also? Wish again for days
of reasoned navigation, sleep-filled nights?
cut losses, anchor-chains, mooring-ropes,
rigging, umbilica? Where does it end?
What should he keep and what should he destroy;
diminish or enhance his epitaph?
What does one do and then obliterate?
What does it mean to be one’s audience?
Who does what to whom? Who is afraid
of what? When will he stop asking questions,
start answering? Who will listen? Why does he
want to reveal what’s hidden? It has to be
survived, and he knows how, at least, that’s done:
this is what it means to be Odysseus.
this is his gift: to live until he dies
his own free man, to navigate himself,
while the sun sets and mal-de-mer subsides.

Homecoming

All journeys have their histories: he knows
that she and he are changed when he makes landfall –
and comes ashore sun-browned with a sea-haul
with which he’s almost careless, as if having
were of little account compared with getting -
he can’t tell how, only that the wind blows
from points propitious, the Fortunate Isles

And though their journey, measured in sea-miles,
is three parts over, what’s to come’s the best,
the rest is sea-spume. “Yet sometimes wave-foam
is all there is to set direction home:
memory’s weathervane,” he writes, “heart’s clue.”
and shuts his log, prepares to pay his due
to Aphrodite of the shining breast.

eros

Odysseus offers himself to death

Stretched on a country gravestone, with a whore
old enough to be his granddaughter
leading his body through the act of love –
the air, the ministering flesh above,
the sun-warmed, moss-cushioned, hewn stone beneath –
each summer’s end he keeps a date with death.

Breasts in his palms, mouth on his mouth, her hips
steadily milk him, as a stockman strips
a bull, ‘till he shocks with his battle-shout –
then silence, as his semen pulses out
as if the man’s already quit the earth
and ships across the Styx towards the berth

he’ll ready for them both while, sobbing, she
runs off to break the news to Penelope.

Siren songs (1 – 3)

“That is the theme.” he says: ‘The variations
might start with the proximity between
a woman’s fragrance and a man’s nostrils,
the pressure of a shoulder and a thigh,
a toe chancing to brush against a member
under a robe, if either reach as far.

And then the possibility exists that he,
reaching the further shallows, stops beside
a large, flat, sun-warmed slab and, landing her
upon it, cups his hands and calls: ‘Don’t wait –
I’ll catch up with you later.’ Or he stands
up to his chest in water, while she slides,
skirt lifted, from his shoulder to his front,
her arms around his neck, cheek against his…..”

Water, islands, temples, nursery rhymes,
obscenities – all that’s heard is Creak, creak:
the smallest bed. Creak….. creak. Swap his sea-log
for one perfect erotic lyric? Creak,
Creak. Penelope stares hard into
the sea of lilies. Ochre fur, with fists
anchored, slides over bone. Girl, bear. Creak, creak.

“Narrow paths mown through the meadow lead
beyond the rushes bordering the half-
glimpsed pond, to there beside a small pagoda,
a close cut, dappled lawn, seen through the leaves
and branches of an ash, where Hylas kneels,
splendidly naked, fishes water-nymphs
out of the water one after another,
enjoys them on the grass. He’s seen, somewhere,
Odysseus, a complicated toy:
a tiny painted fellow humps a group
of miniature mannequins, one by one,
while a handle’s turned. As, so it seems,
will Hylas, to his wishes, pull a girl
out of her element onto the bank,
and hold her down as one would hold a fish
just landed, liquid silver, knelt between
her knees, one hand upon a breast, the other
aiming himself down at what fishes lack
but these aquatic siblings sport and flash,
their little nips-and-tucks of skin, infolds
of flesh, moist sphincters, mollusc-slipperiness,
sea-manifests that Hylas enters like
another world in which his fate is not
to be pulled under, drowned for wanting what’s
impossible, but is crowned King.”

Penelope at breakfast

When one of her women takes a little while
longer than might be strictly necessary,
sitting on the terrace, Penelope,
waiting for him, has been observed to smile,
acknowledging, towards the distant sea,
her man’s not lost his power to beguile,

his half-tumescent organ’s to mislead
(long, heavy, warm, lying upon a thigh)
fingers intending washing him to try
something more adventurous instead.

Omega, pi: until the outlines blur
she traces amber absently on bread,
thinking about the shared lives they’ve led,
wondering if the world should envy her.

Between the tiger and the valley below

Log- and eros

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