For Fate Has Wove the Thread

Three thousand years ago

Odysseus comes home to a

mirage—or so the story

goes. Three thousand years

ago when I come home

it's to the same shroud of

godly illusion that tricks me

into turning away. The lie

that deceives the deceiver.

Can I call it justice?

Two thousand years ago,

the man makes the same

journey with a different

name from a different empire.

Each new generation his

story is retold, his fate is

changed. Ulysses leaves

home, again, in another

retelling. The meaning

morphs, and therefore so

do I. Maybe I am cursed

like Cain. Marked. One

with the earth I sow.

Home is just a people

when there is no place.

Home is a place in any

other circumstance. (Home is

a place. I can't reconcile

where.) I don't know

where I am but I think

I know why I'm here—this

is a wandering of epic.

"Calliope," I beg into

nothing. "Let me recite this.

Let me tell it again."

The heavens are heavy

with the weight of my wishes

of a different time and a

different place. If God saw

me, he would call me

ungrateful. If I saw myself

from a different body I would

call myself homesick, but I

know better. I'm such a sorry

sight, I think, looking at my own

image from outside my

fading form. Wanting time

to stop for nothing. I'm just

as predictable as the rest;

I would miss everything I

ever cursed, every moment

I tried to forget but never

could. I've blamed my doom

on a different pantheon

with each new phase of

the moon. If I were them

I would look down and laugh,

too, at a mortal mourning the

sublunary. If only I never died.

If only it were just my aches

and wanting that returned

to dust. I can already hear

Adam laughing from the dirt.

But I wander through mouths

like myth. My throat is

blackened with the smoke

of relics, of Notre Dame.

Of being spoken into existence.

It hurts to tell the story.

"For fate has wove the thread of life with pain,

And twins ev'n from the birth are misery and man!"

- Homer's Odyssey (trans. Alexander Pope)