What Odysseus Might Have Said to Kalypso
\nIf She Had Actually Offered Him Immortality
\n(As It Seemed for a Few Pages that She Might)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
O mistress goddess nymph
\nyou who dwell beyond what we call beauty
\nmen and women live and die
\nin hundreds of our generations
\nwithout one glimpse of splendor
\nwhile you, your every breath is splendor
\nfabrics that grace your body
\nglow where they have touched you
\nlike altarcloths in candlelight.<\/p>\n
We come from nowhere
\nmake our little rounds
\nwither and die and go back into nothing
\nwhile you go on
\nresplendent and unchanging\u2026.<\/p>\n
Mistress goddess immortal
\nyou have called out love
\nfrom depths in me I never knew I had
\nI have worshiped and cherished you.
\nLover, who have lavished on me the gift
\nof sharing your bed of coming to know
\nthe slick and ever slicker
\ninner surfaces of your body
\nthe smell of your sex in my beard
\nyour cadences the rhythm of
\nyour moans when passion takes you
\ntill they are more familiar than the beating
\nof this heart I used to think was mine
\nthe far-inward look in your eyes
\nwhen our faces close together
\nbut the point of things is elsewhere<\/p>\n
the dream-state that overtakes you
\nsometimes when it pleases you
\nto pleasure me\u2014<\/p>\n
yours is a love that does not need to be
\nforever thinking ahead to the next thing
\nbecause there is after all
\nforever\u2014<\/p>\n
You are the island, we are grains of sand.
\nThe tide rolls us in
\ndeposits us awhile upon your strand
\nthen at the wine-dark whim of the sea
\nor worse, its vast disinterest
\nwe are swept away again to rest
\nforever unaccounted and unmissed
\nupon the ocean floor
\nno one ever to tell our story.<\/p>\n
You offer me what all men dream about.
\nWe sweat and strive, endure, connive
\ntrain our bodies school our minds
\non the dream of the offchance
\nthat now and again we might win this\u2014
\nthe boudoir prepared for our coming
\nthe hero’s welcome the lover’s kiss.<\/p>\n
You are the moon
\nthat night by night is different
\nand month by month the same.
\nYou show us only what you’d have us see.
\nWe are wisps of cloud that drift
\nacross your face by night
\nwe cannot hold one shape
\nfor even the brief moment
\nwe are visible only by your light.<\/p>\n
Maybe, in a thousand years or so
\nmen or gods more wise and eloquent
\nwill have devised a graceful way of saying
\nwhat you know is coming\u2014<\/p>\n
there is another, and I belong to her
\nin ways I never understood
\nuntil I learned from you
\nthe wisdom of the heart.
\nPenelope: is she as beautiful as you,
\nas skilled at sacred arts of love?
\nDoes she have as much to teach,
\nas much to offer me as you?<\/p>\n
I will not disparage her to you
\nbut no, on all counts.
\nYou are a goddess
\nif this were a competition
\nlike that other one
\nshe and I would be humiliated forever
\nglimpsing the depths of our unworthiness.<\/p>\n
But what it has taken
\nall my adventures to teach me is that
\nif there is a point in being human
\nit isn’t being first or best or winning
\nit has not to do with competition.
\nMy choice is not which one of you is better
\nmy choice is simply which of you is mine.<\/p>\n
I once told someone that my name was No-man.
\nToday I know that I am one man\u2014
\nnot less than one, nor more than man.<\/p>\n
Maybe there is no meaning to human life
\nbut if there is it has to do
\nwith things begun in earnest.
\nIt’s with Penelope that I shall find it.<\/p>\n
The life that we began was flawed,
\na fragile, mortal, human thing.
\nAlready it is dreadfully curtailed
\nmaybe maimed beyond recovery.
\nI need I need to go back
\nfor what little may be left.<\/p>\n
Mistress, goddess, I am at your mercy.
\nDo with me what you will.
\nSnuff out the guttering candle that I am.
\nOr, exalting me in legend sentence me
\nto some eternal torment like Prometheus.
\nOr humor me, and smile me back to bed
\nmaking me forget all this
\nlike a dream that flickered dimly in the light of dawn
\nthat I never tried to apprehend
\nthat left behind it no more than
\na child’s footprint in wet sand
\nbetween wave’s retreat
\nand wave’s advance.<\/p>\n
Or grant my wish
\nand send me with your blessing on my road
\na road not given to anyone but me
\nand seal forever in the hearts of gods and men
\nthat this is how a human being should act
\nand this, a god.<\/p>\n