After twenty years of mum moping about the palace,
Wringing her hands and complaining, I decided:
Enough is enough.
So I ran away
To see if I could find this guy, Odysseus,
Who everybody said was so amazing
And by bringing him back make my mother smile
Not the ghost of a smile that misted her lips
When I did something dad would have done,
But a real smile with an echo
The kind you could kiss.
In Pylos senile King Nestor, dribbling into his cups,
Told incredible stories about shape-shifters
And other metamorphic claptrap,
A hundred years of superstition wrapped up in a purple cloak,
Saying: “Your father is seven feet tall, boy,
With a neck like a bull’s and the mind of a fox,
God-like Odysseus.”
And as he dribbled my father became Achilles
And Ajax, every great hero of whom I’d ever read.
So I gave up the ghost, and left.
I was almost home when a beggar crawled up to me,
Crawled like a snake and snivelled my name:
Telemachos.
And as I edged away, tripping over myself,
He shifted shape
Became a god, all shiny and ripped and there I am
Pissing myself on the side of the road when he says:
“Son? It’s me, I’ve come home at last.”
And the empty wind sang along
No longer a potential bearer of messages in a bottle but
Blown out
As Odysseus stood there on the sand,
Uncertainly extending his hand for a manly shake
And maybe a pat on the back.
I backed away from this hero, this god
Who didn’t yet dare embrace me
(Though he wasted no time with my mother,
Stealing back the bed and hogging the duvet
While she shivered against the headboard).
“What’s wrong,” he asked,
“Don’t you recognise your old dad?”
Who the fuck do you think you are?
I didn’t say,
Barging in here after twenty years
Like you’ve never even been away.
I didn’t tell him about all the other boys
Whose fathers went away, how we played on the sea-shore
Pretending to be our dads
On this single-parent island, Ithaka rich in sheep,
Black sheep
No chips off the old block, with attitude problems and
Daddy issues like you wouldn’t believe.
Or how I watched my mother flirt with a string of not-quite stepfathers
Who ingratiatingly patted my head
“He’s the image of you,” they said.
My mother laughing silently disagreed
Stood by her man, by the loom,
She wove a life for us from the same bare threads
The loom clacking like a stuck clock’s tick
Until Odysseus came back.
Until I said, “Sorry, what was that?”
And he grinned: “You kids, you’d think you had wax in your ears.”
Like he knew anything about it.
And I
I
I
Stuttered like I did when first he left
Along with the bed-wetting and the
Thumb-sucking
And other therapist-friendly ‘abandonment issues’.
I told him about the suitors - how could I not? –
And Odysseus narrowed his fox eyes
Grimly he told me what we’d do to them
The crown-stealing, home-wrecking, mother-fucking
Pigs.
“Think of it as a father-son bonding exercise,” Odysseus said.
I did.
Back we crept across rocky Ithaka
Rich in sheep and broken homes
Until we reached the Hall where the suitors
Squabbled and gambled for my mother’s hand.
My mother.
And I took my bow and arrow and shot him
And him
And him him him
While Odysseus chuckled:
“That’s my boy”
As he lay about him with an axe
And mum unwove the threads for the last time
Until we were back where we started.
And we hung the maids on the clothesline to drip
Dry and later, when dad and mum had pulled the
Purple curtain close around them I took them down
And folded them away in cedar caskets
To be saved for special occasions,
When I could triumphantly unfold them and say
“Look, look what you made me do.”
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