The Friday Poem on 08/03/2024
Homer’s Odysseus found his return to Ithaca fraught with danger. Here the poet takes that idea as metaphor and runs with it. A bit of classical allusion is scarcely rare in contemporary poetry, but this Ithaca is movingly (almost comically) ordinary. The fragility of the woman whom our hero loves – and he does, plainly, love her – is beautifully conveyed. The couple are close, though distanced by illness and uncertainty. We know little about them. And yet we know everything.
Return to Ithaca
He arranges chairs, has quiet words
with waiters, reprises their old walks
in a golf buggy so she can get around, then
lies in a corridor on a raft of malodorous
hotel sofa cushions, which ferries him
through the watches of a wakeful night, freeing
his wife to manoeuvre her retreating body
on the broad battlefield of the double bed
holding (then abandoning) positions, trying
to be pain-free, whittled back to the bone.
In the fingernail light before dawn
words like the first morning calls of birds
leave her bedroom and float
along the passage to where he lies:
You were always so far away,
away over the sea,
I was never sure, until now,
that you loved me.
