This is the fifth – and final – 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. The fourth 3 poems can be read here. In these concluding 3 poems, Odysseus catches sight – on the street – of a woman he used to love, who left him, who hurt him. Telemachus’s own erotic encounters with women never come to anything, yielding for him only further frustration and unanswerable questions. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Teiresias tells Odysseus, after he has killed the suitors, to continue on his travels, but this time to head inland, carrying an oar, in search of a people who know nothing of the sea.
from Essays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
he considers the longevity of love
beside the plash of blue fountains
fronting the Paradise Hotel
x
the shade-end of Flamboyant Street
he glimpses
x
her unfashionable blonde
medium-cut not prison-razored or wrapped
x
not seen folded
to the clipped déshabillé the younger girls
begin to favour these days—
x
her body thickened
more severe in the black business suit
x
but the long swing of the left hand hers
pale strands
on the nape of the neck hers
x
hers that bold
address to the world’s sunny littoral
x
to the sunlit corner
beyond the blue of tumbling water
where now he is able to own the hurt—
x
no finer test
nor anything less than what his old self
would put to the sword
x
no more than the heart’s bloody rent
she made of him
x
the gaping wound surviving still
restless in its stony bed
x
man’s glittering and impassive ocean
to woman’s cold moon
x
his son finds himself looking at the moon
obscured by the flashing Bar Promo sign
the crescent moon
x
the night they met
x
the boy then with no thought of light
only gravity
her beauty as it drew him
x
across the dull universe of Tuesday night
the Place of Our Sacred Lady—
x
her glance across the tables
full of milky
outspokenness the whites of her eyes
x
the glossy black reserve in her pupil
those pale perfect breasts
his goal
x
in the ease of which he would find time
to reflect
on the nature the allure of such goals—
x
until the following Sunday evening
when they have outstripped
a whole series of unremarkable love songs
x
once more he walks
far out beyond the marina lights
x
once more to wrestle
with whether it’s the moon must envy
his agitation and immobility
x
or whether
it is he who must envy the moon’s
serenity
x
and slow movement
x
he fails to grasp good advice
what passes for gods have not finished
with him yet
x
says one in the bar
who had things gone better
should by rights have been forgotten—
x
when you think you are done
there is still further to go
with something across your shoulder
x
you are not sure is not a gun
because you find yourself
x
travelling amongst people
who know nothing of the sea
x
who eat no salt
who have not seen a ship’s purple sails
nor the long oars that drive them—
x
they ask
what is this something-something
across your shoulder
x
suggesting you lay it down
lay it right here
that you perform what rituals you recall
x
then perhaps if things had gone better
had this love
this hurt even the bright wind’s shifting
x
this dream this joy
at the glittering brink of sight
where the sea-rise sways
x
to bring in another
this next of catches
from the salt’s sharp throat
