poesia spun in c1rcles no sober Greek can navigate. He is afraid the whining, greasy animals who bury chewed meat beneath his window are only human, and will claim h1s piace of honor on the couch. His heart Is swallowed in h1s throat; it is only an ache of the mind, the twilight of early morning ... "Why am I my own fugitive, because her beauty made me feel as other men?"" IV She stands, her hair intricate and w1nding as her heart. They talk like two guests waiting lor the other to leave the house - her mongrel harmony of the irreconcilable. Here his derelict choice changes to necessIty; compassion is terror, no schism can split the ruthless openness of her y1elding character. Her eyes well, and hypnotize his followers, the retarded animals. They cannot stay awake, and keep their own hours, llke degenerates dnnking the day in, sweating it out in hystencal submission. Young, he made strategie choices; in middle age he accepts h1s unlikely lite to come; he will die like others as the gods will, drowning h1s last crew in uncharted ocean, seeking the unpeopled world beyond the sun, lost in the uproarious rudeness of a great wind. On C1rce·s small island, he grew from narrowness - by pettiness, he ennobled himself to fit the house. He dislikes everything in his impoverished lite of myth. The lotus brings a nostalgia tor the no-quarter duels he hated; but she is only where she is. Her speech is spiced w1th the faded slang of a generation younger than his - now the patois of the island. Her great season goes with her; the gorgeous girls she knew are stili her best friends, their reputations lost like Helen's, saved by her grace. She is a snipper-off"er - her discards lie about the floors, the unused, the misused, seacoats and insignia, the beheaded beasi. She wants her house askew - kept kevs to lost locks. 38 - Robert Lowell unidentifiable portraIts, dead things wrapped in paper the color of dust... the surge of the wine before the quarrel. Sl1ght pleasantries leave lasting burns - the air in the high hall s,mmers in the cracked beams w1th a thousand bugs; though th1s is m1d-autumn, the moment when insects d1e instantly as one would ask of a fnend. On hIs walk to the sh1p, a solltary tree suddenly drops hall Its leaves; they stay green on the ground. Other trees hold. In a day or two, their leaves also w1II fall, l1ke his followers, stained by their hesItatIon prematurely brown. V "Long awash and often touching bottom by the sea·s great green go-lIght I found my exhaustion the light of the world. Earth isn 't earth 11my eyes are on the moon, her likeness caught in the split second of vacancy - Duplicitous, open to all men, unfaithful. Alter so many millennia, Circe, are you tired of turning swine to swine? How can I please you, 11I am not a man? I have grown bleak-boned with survival - I who hoped to leave the earth younger than I carne. Age is the bilge we cannot shake from the mop. Age walks on our faces - at the tunneI·s end, il faith can be believed, our flesh will grow lighter." VI Penelope Ulysses circles - neither his son's weakness, nor passion lor his wife, which m1ght have helped her, held him. She sees no feat in his flight or his flight back . ten years to and ten years fro. On foot and visible, he walks from Long Wharf home. Nobody in lthaca knows hIm, and yet he Is too much remarked. His knees run quIcker than h1s feet,
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