Fast Day 178 October 29 2010 {Homecoming}

Homecoming 

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notes
Odysseus = Greek form of Ulysses

Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa = girls Odysseus met on his voyage home.
Penelope =  I assume she is rather like Guinevere, and actually possess lands.... mightr be a warrior queen, too, although we do not go there.
I imagine she holds green lands beyond Dodona.
Agamemnon= was killed after his return home by his wife, Clytemnestra and her lover. He was killed in his bath.



synopsis:  The Greeks went to war in Troy for 10 years. Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, went to war under his obligations to Agamemnon. Odysseus made the god Poseidon mad, so it took him another 10 to get home, where Penelope was waiting, while 100 men sought her hand in marriage. She put them off by saying she would wed when her weaving was done.  By day she wove and at night she unthreaded that which she had done during the day.
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Penelope sits up late at the loom

that wove the dreams of twenty years,

wondering how to depict the full moon

playing in the wind-chased clouds.

Odysseus sits outside at the gate,

and when the moon filters through the trees,

it paints his skin with stripes, and he

looks feral  as an argent tiger.

Penelope

Look at him…. A wild thing!

Sitting just where he sat

Twenty years ago, wond’ring whether

to take ship and sail to war.

Still we sit here.

Ah, well. What of it? What more did I wish?

He has killed one hundred lusty suitors

who would take my torch to warm their beds…

he is devoted to me… or to my dowered lands!

Great meadows beyond Dodona lush,

not like the rocky shores of Ithaca!

Odysseus

Damn! Agamemnon… killed in the bath! Of all places!

Even great Agamemnon gone! – our lives

misplaced from throne room to out-buildings!

Every friend with whom I sailed to Troy

has left this world. I am the only one

remaining. Is this fate? Or accident?

The aegis of the goddess that covers

the porridge of our lives, the layered mush

of steel-cut oats boiling in a pot.

(Odysseus hears the ghost of his mother.)

Anticleia

My son, Odysseus…

O, you were the boy, the very best son!

I waited on your return…

I saw no sails, nor white nor black!

I fell into death, tripped like a orant

of Poseidon missteps and falls into

the cruel maw of the sea unyielding!

I have waited here since the first snows.

(Odysseus cries out faintly. One of Penelope’s ladies  looks out the front door. His father, Autolycus, peers out into the night from his wooden hut by the barn.)

Autolycus

Ha!  Two decades toil!... and now he sits alone!

That bitch! That shrewish and unfaithful wife!

I was here! I saw it all! I am no fool!

She wove not stories of the goddesses

and gods, no themes of the holy erotic!

She wove and embellished lovers’ messages

and pornography of delights upon

that loom to show the lucky prick of the

hundred aristocrats the pleasures she

would bestow…  that very night upon the

panting suitors in their kennels wrapt!

Lady

What disturbs Odysseus?

He sits lonesomely.

If he broods upon

his lady wife’s fidelity…

well, for that I will avouch,

serving here long years.

(Sighing, Odysseus rises and turns to look at the bright window of his palace. Penelope has gone to bed.)

Penelope

It seems that I am always waiting,

we straighten up what men disturb;

like Poseidon they quake the tender earth,

and women wait upon the littoral

to recreate after tidal waves.

(Odysseus enters silently, but she feels his presence fill the vacuum about her. He lays beside her. His skin seems surprisingly harsh, since she has been used to twenty years of lonely linen sheets.

Later, he is sleeping and Penelope thinks in the darkness…)

Penelope

Some things never change…

He has kept in practice. That’s what comes from

hobnobbing with goddesses and witches!

I will not begrudge him Circe

nor the iconic Calypso, for when

a goddess beckons – or a woman with

an unnatural relationship with

herbs and snakes and circles where Faeries dance! –

it is best for man to answer

or they never find safe harbor!

But, Nausicaa! That tawdry little tramp!

a tart!... a whore!... playing at celebrity

and aristocratic ways… the duchess

of drop-my-britches! Men are such fools!

….

Twenty years, and he has not one friend left alive.

Twenty years of a war fought on a foolish whim,

an impulse erotic made disastrous!

There is no going back, and no need to

poison the future with

history’s failures!

I am all there is left. His mother’s gone,

and his father is quite mad, thinking that

he is a young bull living by the barn!

It has been a long, long journey, apart

and together, in joy and in sorrow:

Where is the thread so strong, the dye so bright

to weave the line of this devotion?