Ios, Greece

Tell us about a complicated man, 
the wine-dark sea, the salted smell. 
Muse, tell them, though your voice has thinned with use, 
as open water leans toward sand. 

Strangers, I will tell you truly: 
ropes, knots, and nets entire. 
War, revenge, and rite and wrath. 
Itched skin patient, inward sight 
recounting tales shaped old by tongue. 
And he sat among them, limbs grown heavy, pleased. 
Dawn’s rosy fingertips had almost sprung. 
Throughout this heavenly telling, 
since the day before the last, his body ached. 

They rushed at full tilt across the foam of salt sea, 
in open air, no mist nor cloud. 
Ios awaited them, and their arrival too. 
And so the great Muse and the Poet, 
tired from their travel on the long wide sea, 
known to the ship-boys, spoke with custom, 
salt-scented, foam-frowned, wind-worried. 
Then the telling came at last to rest, 
Odysseus having slain those men. 

What are your pastimes? asked the man. 
Arcadian boys replied with hook 
and line, and said, to Ios now near. 
How has your luck been, Arcadian boys? 
They flinched and itched, a smile upon them. 
Wine-dark, blood-like. Grinning, one replied, 
The ones we caught we left behind, 
the others joined the answering tune, 
the ones we missed we carry still. 
And so the old man wept, as once 
the oracle had said he would. 

He stepped, grown fragile, onto sandy shores, 
to beach and bay. He knew at last 
he was not meant to see another day.