Читать книгу You Must Remember This - Michael Bazzett - Страница 11

Cyclops

The story is such a story we don’t always stop to think

about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor

packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels

of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how

utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor

made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh

of good friends dispatched while we watched—

it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.

Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself

there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton

and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself

after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.

He’d had plenty of time to think there in that hollow

belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his

piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat

rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.

And now here he is again groping for his sharpened

pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.

He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles

it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.

You probably know the rest—plunging the blackened

tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball

burst, the geyser that shot from the socket—then huge

hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,

the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might

land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks

under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held

high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.

Maybe then you’d feel the warmth of Polyphemus’s

wounded breath, washing across three thousand years

as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,

inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?