Waiting beside the window while I was brushing back
my hair, Odysseus sat and stared across our empty
garden terrace trashed from last night’s welcome home.
One unspent pine-pitch torch remained, its glamored
pool of light laid down like the suitor’s shield on our
once more dimly blood-stained ground, while out
beyond those tented hills, the salt immortal sea unwound
from a ghosted bobbin of moon-scrubbed sand.
And I remember, too, how the the pines’ high crowns,
mantled in lichen, had tipped beneath the stand-still
of the morning air, how, when I rose from my chair,
naked in the lamplight, I could see, even then, his
thoughts
had traveled far from here, and already he was lost to
me,
drawn back out on that underworld tide-pull he’d
forsworn
and it was, poor man, as if the scavenging gulls trailed
after him, as if my harbored longings drove him out of
reach.
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