This is the fourth 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 3 poems can be read here. The third 3 poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Penelope tries to work out her understanding of the black, volcanic fields which lie high up at the centre of the island of Ithaca, but she feels the limitations of the life she has been expected to live make this impossible. Odysseus is wrestling with the facts of change and suffering. He thinks of his dog, Argos (who features a good deal in Nolan’s film), not merely their recognising each other, but their being capable of loving the apparently unlovable. Later, Penelope, knowing she is ill, drives up into the Ithacan hills in search of a shaman, in search of a cure.

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 remembers the High Centre

in the Crater Zone

curves like highways giant magma slicks

the cone’s last eruption

x

earth’s seismic sneezing

x

black peppercorns the size of footballs

the shape of human heads

x

the size of black refuse sacks

big as overturned cars—

x

the last thing old men remember

that there were years before this darkness

x

this turning inside-out

x

these older oxidised rust-red levels

that begin to wrap themselves

x

in pine and stonecrop

the age for which all subsequent ages

pay unwilling price—

x

yet what she saw was more like eternity

grown short-lived

and what she witnessed

x

everything getting ready to dissolve

where old men cry out

watch that mountain watch that mountain

x

the bravado

of youngsters sneering and shrugging up

fuck this shaking my fucking feet

x

her understanding how this must be

and that she can lay claim to neither

x

having waited too long

x

he considers what the young have to teach

to stand up invisible

as a forked child squalls in the whip

and withdrawal of waves

x

black sand thrown at shins and toes

sensing

the slither of ground beneath

x

and surely love this thrill of it

knifing him ecstatic

x

establishing its open wound

x

its soul-shaping progress the young know

yet unaware of—

x

trying to re-learn this

in part the effort not to flinch

x

as the dog he trained when young

coursing wild goat and deer and hare

x

like its master

no quarry able to slip away—

x

yet when he returned

almost unrecognisably changed infested

with ticks

x

half-dead from twenty years of neglect

an old rug

lay in the agave shade

x

dog and master thumping in recognition

x

barely able to drag themselves together

each as unpalatable

no finer test

x

the unlovable other

x

his wife drives herself there and back

only in the High Centre could the shaman

be uncovered

his reputation for re-building those

x

who ascend through the pine belts

women particularly

pick across the lava fields

x

put themselves in his hands

feeling disappointed or depressed

x

bringing their clicked back

or cracked heart—

x

she brings a lump in her right breast

he will spirit

to the basalt from which it was born

x

in its place

locates a piece of red coral

thought to transpose itself to human flesh

x

at his whirling prayer

though it must continue to ache

x

like a pulled tooth

to the probing helplessness of her tongue—

x

winding from the brutal fields

she tries the descent

crossing the long shadows of pine trees

x

enlivened by the hope of lying

precious again slowly

x

under a husband’s kiss that will be ready

to touch and test and find

x

her out again