Odyssean Musings

Frank De Canio

Description

Hypothetical ponderings of Odysseus (Ulysses) as he struggles to return to Ithaca after the Trojan war. He’s at odds with Poseidon (Neptune), the sea god, (for having blinded his son, the one-eyed monster, Polyphemus),and his own licentious leanings that are aggravated by separation from his wife, Penelope.

Sujets

• Thought
• Poetry
• Frank

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 07 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669865360
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ODYSSEAN MUSINGS
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
FRANK DE CANIO
 
Copyright © 2023 by Frank De Canio.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023901857
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-6538-4

Softcover
978-1-6698-6537-7

eBook
978-1-6698-6536-0
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 02/07/2023
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
850210
Contents
Poetic Encores
Making Spirits Bright
Eight and a Half
Pungent Aftertaste
The Ridiculed Ponders Rules
A Masked Bawl
Noxious Vapors
Pollinating Bootless Love
Close Call
It Takes a Village
Migrant
Reconstructive Surgery
These Realtors’ Bleeding Hearts
Postmortem to the Derek Chauvin Trial
Bristling Memories
The Boughs of Yesteryear
Sound Rearing
Shrill Music at a CD Signing
Yearning to Be Free
Providential Perspectives
Flowers
Serial Killer
Plundered
America’s Weak Constitution
Just Dessert from a Tough Cookie
Amerika
Bottom
Her Peacock Feathers
Music Primer
Looking Back
Customer Service Indeed
Tweaked by a Waitress
Winsome Witness
Blessing in Disguise
Dry Spell
Revelatory Vistas
Narcissistic Fish
This Movie Heiress
Going Psycho
Foiling Fraulein Fate
For Their Sport
Philosophical Rant
Cashiered by the Cashier
Intoxicated
Fervor’s Flower
Gone with the Wind
Please Don’t Disenfranchise Me
Food for Thought
Fighting Aphrodite
For Peers in Arrears
Time Served is Best
An Actor’s Lament
Vernal Equinox
Blanketing His Love
Elegy For My Mother
Alex Dunphy Trumps Co-Valedictorian
The Siren’s Song
Taking Control
Bedside Manners
Heartless at the Checkout Line
Baleful Harvest
Workman’s Beef
Retired
Charu Turns Lovelorn Shrew
Western Dream
Civil Prayer
Language Primer
Modeling Behavior
Policing Siren
Spanish Siege
Beasts
Leave-Taking
Morticians of the World
Morose Measures
Bon Voyage
Miffed by What Ifs
Buddhist Rap
Meeting of Disparate Minds
Meeting of Disparate Minds
Adam and Eve
God
Adam
God
Adam
God
Adam
God
Adam
God
Adam
God
Adam
Eve
Adam
Eve
Adam
Eve
Adam
Eve
Adam
Eve
Adam
Infernal Comedy
Infernal Comedy
17 Youthful Blossoms
Fifth Elegy
A Mother’s Prayer
Liebestod
Second Elegy
Sorrow
Narcissus
To Adele
Despair
Third Elegy
Fourth Elegy
Requiem For Those We Love
Despair
Narcissus in Love
Metamorphoses
Desiree
Discretionary Scruples

 
Adversity’s the wind that keeps my ship
at bay, preventing it from reaching land.
And fantasy’s the Siren in whose grip
I cede the little left of my command.
For I cannot pursue a life offshore,
where options range from winded Charybdis
to Scylla’s gulping me beyond its roar.
And still Poseidon threatens the abyss.
So I must fight to stay afloat.
No wonder that Calypso has a hold
on me and that my makeshift boat
was wrecked. In order for my story to be told
I needed storms that later would abate
so that I could assess my dismal state.

For how could I find pathways to my home
and try to get life’s raucous suitors out
when I’m compelled by turbulence to roam
and heed seductive Sirens’ bawdy shout?
I was dispatched along a warming coast
where I could best assess my bitter fate.
And even as I rode my bardic boast
to cast away the need to sublimate,
it took a wind-tossed argosy of years
before I could propitiate the Muse
and start to write like well-versed sonneteers
who use the ego as creative fuse
instead of the enchantments of the Id,
which got me started on my downward skid.

Penelope - whom suitors in her house
encumbered with demands that she accept
the hand of one of them as lawful spouse -
could not have felt more shamefully inept
than I who bore a lien that I should fight
to help secure a peerless belle from Troy.
Though I feigned madness, sowing fields with salt
in hand, I was exposed by some Greek’s ploy
whose cunning matched the Argives’ wooden horse.
And like its cargo rushed to unlock gates
to help their comrades seal the battle’s course,
at war’s end, fancies would disseminate
into my forlorn mind, as I lay wracked,
apart from wife and home, and senses sacked.

Just like Penelope unknit the shroud
she slowly labored on throughout the day
to guard against foreclosure from the loud
intruders. I unfastened the crochet
of sublimations sewed into my mind
that it took years of interlocking yarn
for me to do. Such work was done to bind
the raucous loose ends of my psychic barn.
And yet, in order to evade concerns
regarding looters knocking on my brain,
I soon reversed the skill a seamstress learns
to stitch a cloak, reducing to a skein
the garments that were proof against the cold
rebuke that years past left me buttonholed.

I fixed my wayward fancy to the mast
of sonnet form to mark the Sirens’ song
and ape its craftsmanship, until it passed
and swept me up, until, beside myself,
I walked the road of its corrupt conceit.
The portholes to my Reason being plugged,
I couldn’t ask assistance from its fleet
but let myself be by sweet measures mugged,
while I fought vainly to survive the trial.
But since they served to mitigate my fear
of harm, I let new-fangled strains beguile
me till I could revisit them untied,
but not without the sense of being tried.

How would the wily Argive have survived
if he was not allowed to string the bow
and slay the suitors after he arrived
in Ithaca attired like a schmo?
Should only law’s propriety prevail,
he would have been reduced to servitude.
A laughingstock to rivals, with his tail
between his legs, he would have had a rude
awakening in his co-opted house.
Or else he would have found himself disgraced
beside so many suitors for his spouse.
Humiliated, he could not have faced
down ruthless numbers that were poised to kill,
but swallowed, helplessly, their bitter pill.

The violence suitors used to agitate
for abdication of the Argive’s slaves
would serve as ground where they’d disseminate
the rabble-rousing rationale for knaves
and mercenary visitors to kill
the young Telemachus. Yet, the shrewd one
won’t play into their hands and boast his skill
in ways that would have left the man undone
and given foes unmerited acclaim.
For why would he confront them on their terms
and play the vipers’ acquiescent game,
when there are wily ways a man affirms
his bravery that doesn’t bank on strength.
Thus, Odysseus plied the bowstring’s length.

Odysseus threw over spoils of war
in order to survive the storm at sea.
For what good is a confiscated store
of riches after a catastrophe?
So I threw over all that I’d achieved
in order to negotiate the gale
winds blustering against what I conceived
to be the destination of my sail.
Instead, I brought a barren wreck to port
in vain attempts to mend its shattered hull.
For being morphed into Poseidon’s sport
since maiming his son, my future was null.
And having wasted cultivated seeds,
my flowering ambition turned to weeds.

As if they were Poseidon’s progeny,
squalls waited till my ego’s raft was built
before they stormed my mind’s integrity.
Penelope could not undo her quilt
as rapidly as I, whose psychic coat
unraveled at the seams until I cast
it off and made regressive dreams my boat,
and fantasy my topmost sailing mast.
For how else could I navigate harsh winds
except to be abstracted from their threats
and patronize Poseidon’s ghastly grins.
This only would assure him that all bets
were off against me lasting through the siege.
I catered thus to every wave as liege.
I also idled on Calypso’s Isle,
where I was forced to linger many years.
No mistress, but the wry, pernicious smile
of her who kindled fantasies through fears
I had of being trodden, and the need
to temper them with some consoling world.
Ah yes, there was the salutary seed
I’d sown before the tempest’s whirlwind hurled
the last of my possessions off the boat
and cast me to imaginary seas.
And then my only raft was what I wrote,
disguised with metaphors and similes.
These tendered me a solid piece of land
which would itself engulf my life like sand.

An interrupted lad for countless years;
with half of them caught in a shadow war
and h