Zara Raab
Odysseus
Standing on the dock to greet the ships,
a woman middle-aged avoids my gaze,
as if she hadn’t known me almost all
her adult life. You others cannot know
as well as I her knack for talk, her clear
authority and eloquence. She has
survived domestic woes—plenty—and now
she simply carries on with work: debriefing
survivors of the war, and offering aid
and comfort to the wives and sons of soldiers
shot down, but I can see now that she’s worn.
Once we would have met on that sun-bleached
terrace above the wharf as I began
to heal from long ordeals at sea, the wars,
and voyaging. She would have listened well,
with a soothing, tranquil love, were it
not that our fire had long since burned to ash.
“‘Odysseus’ is one of several poems in the voices of Odysseus and Penelope. It seeks to fathom one of the mysteries of love—how deeply intimate love can connect us; even after the fire has turned to ash, the source is ever present, if silent, in our lives. Over the centuries, how indebted Odysseus remains to Penelope, and she to him.” —Zara Raab
Zara Raab’s most recent book is a new, expanded edition of Swimming the Eel. Her poems and book reviews appear in various small magazines, including The Hudson Review, Ibbetson Street, Verse Daily, New Verse News, and Stand (UK). With degrees from Mills College, the University of Michigan, and Lesley University, she is familiar from childhood with rural Northern California, and now lives north of Boston, where she’s one of the Powow River Poets.