I was lucky enough to kick off National Poetry Month as one of the poets reading at an event at Book Passage in Corte Madera, flagship of the iconic Bay Area bookstores. Rebecca Faust, great Poet Laureate of Marin County, presided. I chose an old poem, first published in a chapbook, Travels, by the Argonne Hotel Press in 1996.
I chose it because, with its retelling of Odysseus’s homecoming to Ithaca from his wife Penelope’s point of view, it seemed a good segue from celebrating National Women’s Poetry Month to celebrating National Poetry Month. Also, it was on my mind because I am soon to accompany Wanderland Writers to our writing adventure in Greece.
Penelope and the Suitors
She had heard the whispers:
fish-tailed maidens
with nets of gold hair,
those sirens, their bitch calls piercing
his ears, painted hands strumming
his legs
and Circe. Ah, Circe,
wild young body dancing to calypso eyes,
that one, she’d heard, had lasted a year.
But only Helen’s face
oval goddess beauty
that he had looked upon
haunted her
and her heart, slow constricted fist beyond the leap of yearning, stopped its beating.
Now, they said, he was dead.
For the first time in twenty years she laughed, twenty years of rock island, stone, sea, swells of waiting.
Now he was near and those who could not follow his wake said he was dead, those who could not tell dying
from coming.
At last near coming home,
the waves pulled back from the beach
like parted lips, like
hands running over hips,
rounded still, and she laughed
again knowing how the gods and suitors
wet their tongues.
Hair to waist, laced with silver
precious metal, like gold
on the looking-glass
where her face, smooth and finely laced,
finely colored from
twenty summers’ sun was,
she knew, lovely.
So, what had he heard?
If he knew her, he would know
she did not remain untouched,
not by the sinewy black one
who loved her like the night,
or the fisherman with the wise beard
casting his net of stories
about her, rubbing her back,
or the philosopher who thought best
with his slender fingers,
or that young artist with Vulcan eyes,
all like the seasons, her weave of patches
a coverlet to cover
the marriage bed.
That was what they came to.
Still she dreamed Odysseus, closed her eyes to see him wearing those twenty years.
But she saw only his likeness, Telemachus, the son,
beauty in his fierce and tender restlessness,
the boy left behind, the guard charged by men
to do what no man can:
Separate a woman from her desire.
Still she waited, had waited, waited and wanted
husband, blood-mate,
twin of the inner mirror
whose likeness only knew
the holier longings of love.
Then he came. Strong-chested.
Broad-armed, steeled in beard and bone.
Did he know at last what this journey had been for?
He saw her first, her eyes
the lissome blue his glance once
skated over,
mirrors on a pristine lagoon.
Now, around them, little creases,
terrain,
a holding place
before plunging
into the deep sea.
You are the most beautiful, he thought.
Yes, she smiled.
Come in.
Within days of the reading, I received a copy of writer, friend and publisher, Rose Solari’s reissued book of poetry Difficult Weather.
Winner of he Columbia Book A
ward for poetry, it was published by Gut Punch Press in 1994. In the introduction to the new edition, published by Alan Squire Publishing, Katherine Young makes the observation that for the first volume of a young poet, these poems are “extraordinarily mature.” In reviewing the book now, I found it was like revisiting an old friend who has, in every respect, stood the test of time. Among others, the themes of family and the struggle for one’s own identity are particularly strong. And on this reading, I was especially taken with the poem “The Beginning, 1939,” in which the poet goes to her own imagined roots in an early moment in her parents’ relationship. The sounds of the piano, often associated with her mother, echo through it.
The Beginning, 1939
for Joseph and Mary Solari
That she was beautiful. That her nails
were red and tickled the palm of his hand.
That she could talk and laugh so generously
she gave his answers grace. That her eyes
could flush past brown and into black.
These were the reasons he turned away
from his books in the evening, and spent
his paychecks on small clusters
of gardenias, which she would tie
around her wrist with a wide green band,
or folders of new sheet music, songs
she would hum on the streetcar or sing
while they walked. He’d never courted a lady before,
had never known how much
small conversation mattered; he’d never
learned to waltz; he’d never felt
this foolish or this happy. After
he’d called on her, he’d walk back
to the rooming house, remembering things
she’d said. It was summer. The sky
was full of heat and water. He’d take his time,
promise himself that when he saw her next
he’d leave no long tight pause for her
to fill. And he would pause beneath a gas lamp
and pull the photograph she’d given him
into light. It was a profile. Her sitting
at her piano. Whatever tune she had been playing
then was one she knew by heart: the music stand
was bare, her chin was tilted up, her eyes
were closed. And while her left hand was dissolving
in a bass chord, into shadow, her right hand —
a little closer to the camera —
was caught in the air between the last note and the next.
And in that last note, suspended in air, the reader gets wind of what is to come: difficult weather.
Joanna Biggar's Blog 
Leave a Reply