The suitors keep insisting it is time
to choose, but I refuse to turn into a lonely
echo, breathing only borrowed
sound, surrounded solely by something
to mimic.
By my fingers, this loom comes alive:
each lilting, familiar stich raveled
and unraveled each night, to slowly
weave the hours—a tapestry going nowhere,
except perhaps to inch towards
impertinence, a kind of quiet
resistance. My triumph is failing
to complete anything. Why
do I keep weaving this history
when in the dark each night I must
undo it all again? Telling and
retelling might keep us unending.
I'm
only
owed
one thing.
I've
travelled
only
air:
words.
Yet,
ailing,
I
story
us
an
ending.
Song of Circe
They call me witch—and worse—not knowing what I do.
It isn't magic, merely a trick of revelation,
a teasing of the veil, a flair for seeing truth.
Not endless damnation—it's only for a short duration,
this…porcine transformation. All those men were tested
and proved to act like swine, as many do. Not all.
I simply peeled the mask away, and they attested
to their own demise. When a woman's on top, the thrall
of jealousy will spawn a man's pigheadedness.
The smaller the man, the smaller he needs his women to seem.
A tired song. But oh, the difference with Odysseus:
undaunted poise facing my power…it was a dream.
He loved his wife. But on this isle with pigs by the dozen,
can I be blamed for wanting the only man who wasn't?