As Odysseus finds his portal
to the underworld,
delivers his libations, I kill time
just down the shore,
a page or two away, in the blur
the book becomes
after taking off my glasses.
Such trouble seeing,
Tiresias must think, and why
Odysseus goes there.
Once I almost killed some folks is not
a known beginning
to any passage of the Odyssey,
though in Anzio,
just south of Rome, I almost did.
Rental car. Mist and night.
I had been drinking is sort of how
the Greek bard starts
his tale, and how I almost ended
everything.
You don’t come back from that,
is probably what,
watching Odysseus set out,
Circe thought.
I thought the guy would kill me.
He earned that
dispensation, I suppose, from whatever
held my car
a second in the roundabout.
Not one blemish
on the bright red scooter ferrying them
right up to the edge
of my last night in Italy, and far beyond.
I cannot see beyond that
bright non-tragedy, and yet
return again, again
in mist, unlike the hero, man
of many turns,
who beholds his mother’s shade
in Erebus,
and three times tries to grasp her,
to earn his passage home.