I. Respect
“I have escaped the salt sea and Poseidon.
Even the deathless gods respect a man
Who is as lost as I am now.”
—The Odyssey, Book 5
Odysseus saw it then: how even gods
must pay respect to those most truly lost.
How when we’re broken, wrecked on rock-sharp coasts—
torn flesh a map of crusted salt and blood—
pain makes our spirits clear to gods: our shapes
grow recognizable, abstract, like theirs.
Refocused through the narrowed lens of hope,
they see us constellated out as stars.
Acknowledgement is what they offer us;
respect, that we endure their anger, greed,
indifference, and lust. When things are worst,
then, like Odysseus, we shall know the gods
have seen us; they respect us and approve.
Respect is not pity. It is not love.
II. Notes Toward a Telemachy
A father is not destiny, but fate:
not hero’s quest, but obligation’s bond;
nativity retold as city-state;
the name we spend a life to sail beyond.
So I was born Telemachus, not “lord
of Ithaka,” not “wanderer on the waves,”
but “he who hears the battle by report,”
the heir apparent of his sheep and slaves.
Now tell me, Menelaus, of the one
whose cunning sacked the Trojan walls, who fooled
the Cyclopes, who thwarted Circe’s spells.
Then I (O muse!) would tell that tale again:
tell how the epic absence of a man
becomes the only story of his son.
III. Parnassus
A goddess walks beside me who can change
my form to fool the eye: sometimes I seem
a beggar, then a king—each day more strange
and stranded farther from the thing I am.
She changes me so often that I fear
I cannot find the face I wore that day
you took my hand, Penelope, and swore
the bridal vows, and kissed to close my eyes.
Unlucky man, who weaves his life from words,
who knows the no-man in himself, who’s learned
the facelessness a trickster’s cunning earns.
First wounded on Parnassus, I return
from war to heft the spear and hunt the boar.
The wisest ones shall know me by my scars.