Penelope
This time, it is Penelope who goes off
while Odysseus stays home to mind the kingdom,
not to a war, but to the wedding of a special
girlhood friend married off to a barbarian
to seal a treaty. Then things kept coming up,
for twenty years – not monsters so much, though
sometimes monstrous things. This is a life, after all.
The god she angered was Zeus who preferred
that women stay at home, but he largely ignored her
having his own affairs to tend to. So, mostly
she lost her handmaidens through natural causes,
cholera, accident, love. She lost none to Scylla or
Charybdis, giving herself time to sail around. The sirens?
They ignored her. No need to waste music on a sister.
Oh, yes, there was a man on whose island she spent
some time. Though it was clear he was no immortal,
sometimes he made her feel as if she might be.
Towards the end, tired of the gypsy life, she
traded her last jewel for passage home. The curious
Phoenicians thought this dusty, graying woman claiming
to be queen a little daft as they rowed her ashore, but queen
she was, for an old woman curtsied and an old dog, for once
not barking, stretched out its gray head. At the palace, she
found her husband besieged by women wanting to be queen.
Odysseus had been faithful in his own way,
favoring one woman, then another, weaving relationships
at night which he undid in the morning. He had always
expected his wife to come back. At her entrance, the suitors
sniffed at this unlikely female, but when the king rose
and bowed, they turned, gathered perfumes, robes,
ornaments, and scattered like bats at dawn to isles
where royalty might be a little less canny. That night,
the wife and husband lay down in their ancient bed
each wondering how much they should say to each other.
by Nils Peterson
