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
