This is the third instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. The second three poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Penelope finds herself thinking about the island’s volcanic past and about the tourists who come to this modern version of Ithaca. What are they looking for? Odysseus has taken to reading Ibsen (of all writers) and questions his old attitudes to language, purpose, to the ‘things / laid open around him’. Telemachus, meanwhile, can only bitterly see reflections of himself in the island’s schoolchildren, even in the island’s desolate landscape.

from Essays in Island Logic

‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’

his wife watches a fragment of rock

where her husband

rakes black leaves from the blue water

she watches them ruddy their faces

x

off-comers holding their breath behind

the Paradise Hotel

x

words like appointment

second quarter cumulative results

becoming a strange language to them—

x

their longest meeting poolside at noon

where dolphin-like

x

they go ducking for silly-coloured stones

the stubbled father

resting one on his belly

x

floating

as youngsters splash to plunder it

folding up around the black

x

micro-aerated chunk of volcanic clinker

picked from the wall—

x

the eye of a shark

once punched well past the cruising height

of in-coming white jets

x

extruded at such extravagant pressures

superheated shot past

x

self-determination

the long wait paying off now time settles

to slower rhythms

x

it sidles

down through the clear blue water

x

he considers the uses of his mouth

sits down with one of those great writers

who managed to survive

nearer the Arctic Circle

x

who kept a scorpion under a glass

till he saw it visibly sickening

x

would fetch soft fruit

for it to sting

x

poison expelled it would be well again—

x

what has accumulated within him

over the years

he sees now as incoherence

x

as a submerged and unmapped ocean bed

invisible from the quayside

x

and the looked-for cure

to bring it into relation with language

x

though not mere eloquence this time

rather a purpose

x

more worthy than the need to persuade

than this blind

preservation of the healthy organism—

x

what must be loosed in his mouth

he thinks of these days

as some finer sense as stark contradiction

x

to his old occlusion

what must be loosened and laid open

x

to the multitude of things

laid open around him

x

more smile than sting

x

his son has a vision of the lava flows

after ten years

then ten more lost at sea

his son would sometimes catch him fretting

x

at the school’s new green security gate

x

watching each year-group

growing restive

fumbling with how to fulfil themselves

x

children

ignorant of how to work themselves

into their own lives—

x

like the island’s native rock

blackened and pocked as a fossil sponge

x

completely unworkable

so the art of sculpture never took root

where tarmac ribbons

x

cut across fields of lava

razor-edges murderous to shoe leather—

x

still boys free wheel off the road

at any hour of the day

x

to stand cooling

in the empty mouths of airless tunnels

no taller than themselves

x

where lava-flows boiled

each burrowing far beneath hardening crust

x

threads glowing huge and slug-like

undeflected heads down

x

single-mindedly

shouldering their way to the sea