An Achaean Sulk
Odysseus keeps trying to hug his mother,
who only showed up to slurp sacrificial blood
from the hole he dug in hell’s corpse-gray ground,
but she keeps slipping through his flailing arms.
She lifts her gory chin and lips from greedy sipping,
like a slurking jackal laps the remains of a kingly lion’s
feast, to blubber to him that it was her love
for him that killed her. Perhaps she saved her tears
in small alabaster bottles, for singers of songs,
for which I’ll have to do, can say anything,
even if they’re hardly singing, and who these days
is any the wiser? For what is sung in open air
to men with ears to hear lives, while what is written
dies like the fleet roebuck of the forest that lies slain
by swift arrows, never to leap in joyous sun again.
Odysseus is also bawling, for Homeric heroes
let tears fall freely, just as our many starred generals,
those bronze-faced slappers of cowards, cooed
baby-talk to their mothers who followed them
to prep school and West Point. No one dead
stays long in one place, lacking attention span,
and so mother is soon gone, and Tiresias,
who is the business of this trip, floats by to advise
in exchange for a drink, and then a parade
of celebrities wisp on by, including Achilles,
who’s never liked silver-tongued Odysseus
and tells him to cut the bullshit, until he struts
off successfully schmoozed. But not so dour Ajax,
related to no gods and thus favored by none,
cheated of plunder he’d won, who glowers
in silence far to the side of the mob ravening
to slake their deep longings of the dead
from that hole of thickening blood. In silence
he stalks away from the honeyed entreaties
of the great tactician whose cunning was weaned,
perhaps, at the breast of a doting mother.
who only showed up to slurp sacrificial blood
from the hole he dug in hell’s corpse-gray ground,
but she keeps slipping through his flailing arms.
She lifts her gory chin and lips from greedy sipping,
like a slurking jackal laps the remains of a kingly lion’s
feast, to blubber to him that it was her love
for him that killed her. Perhaps she saved her tears
in small alabaster bottles, for singers of songs,
for which I’ll have to do, can say anything,
even if they’re hardly singing, and who these days
is any the wiser? For what is sung in open air
to men with ears to hear lives, while what is written
dies like the fleet roebuck of the forest that lies slain
by swift arrows, never to leap in joyous sun again.
Odysseus is also bawling, for Homeric heroes
let tears fall freely, just as our many starred generals,
those bronze-faced slappers of cowards, cooed
baby-talk to their mothers who followed them
to prep school and West Point. No one dead
stays long in one place, lacking attention span,
and so mother is soon gone, and Tiresias,
who is the business of this trip, floats by to advise
in exchange for a drink, and then a parade
of celebrities wisp on by, including Achilles,
who’s never liked silver-tongued Odysseus
and tells him to cut the bullshit, until he struts
off successfully schmoozed. But not so dour Ajax,
related to no gods and thus favored by none,
cheated of plunder he’d won, who glowers
in silence far to the side of the mob ravening
to slake their deep longings of the dead
from that hole of thickening blood. In silence
he stalks away from the honeyed entreaties
of the great tactician whose cunning was weaned,
perhaps, at the breast of a doting mother.
