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
