Penelope

When Penelope goes to a party,

The men remember.

They do not expect to see her there

And are shaken out of their slumber.

They are now grown used to seeing

the women freed from feeling

Women who are only echoes.

They remember without truly remembering,

Odysseus does not recognize her for he never got back to Ithaca.

Ithaca is no more, now is only a vast mainland,

And Penelope the orphan,

The wanderer among men.

She carries her knitting and weaves and unweaves it obsessively.

She has no stories to tell.

She carries with her the spider womb and that’s what wakes them,

Odysseus remembers being tied to the mast.

Penelope would not forget even if she ate the lotus-flower,

And she is immune to the voice of the sirens.

She brings this with her as a heavy but soft truth on all of them.

The other women are stirred and grow defensive.

They don’t know what it is, for they don’t see the charm in her:

Penelope looks haunted by shadows and whispers,

She’s not quite there.

She speaks with no gift for interaction,

She can only interrupt.

Her words are lullabies, they soothe with their musical strangeness,

But none do sleep from them: they are awaken to their own words.

They don’t really think much of talking,

They speak like they fuck and like they hunt: to expel from themselves a weapon.

"How can we deny the self when all of language is exploring its existence?

How can we ask "why" without a separate self?

Penelope must ask herself in silence.

How can we learn to not fool others if we do not study

the ways that we fool our selves?"

Postmodernism, please don't kill the self,

She begs.

You kill all the opiums, all meaning.

Penelope does not understand violence because everything is touch to her:

The contact of two eyes the basic and most meaningful.

She searches with her eyes around the room,

Hoping but no longer expecting to be caressed.

From her exudes a hum that all do fear but can’t resist, the hum of memory,

The hum of time suspended,

And all approach but turn away at her twitchiness,

Her nervous thirsty body.

She may not remember how to love,

And really it is tragic.

Only in the trance of music

Penelope sets her compulsive knitting down.

In one great exhalation of movement, she swoons somehow:

Two bodies are close together and the light that exudes them seduces.

After all, he is a man

And she is a woman.

They will go to a quiet place and he, pleased at her soft features,

Will kiss her without much thought,

But she will in passionate anxiety emit through her body a tremor of urgences:

We must look in the mirror and succumb to a waterfall of forgiveness,

we must cleanse and treasure our selves to be true,

and be a different color of the rainbow in the different types of light,

which is not, in fact, as blank as being black.

“If we stop relying on theory,

If you don’t forget you and me

And that you and me is not a temporary thing...

(I am not dead if I have only gone away,

You men do not know how to wait)

and return to being, quietly and thoughtfully,

it will happen without us even trying to understand...

And that's when we'll go back to childhood,

to the fantastic exploration and admiration of the Other,

the true God who is not Ourselves, in heaven!”

That is her climax, 

In her heart of mind,

She is not interested in half-shared climaxes:

No climax beyond the warm cocoon of a body around her.

She’ll still love with the strangely dignified love of woman

That knowingly loves what is unworthy of her.

That way, she lives in the world of shame,

But is free from the world of guilt.

Heaven, the end,

is just a promise to the return of Paradise,

the beginning,

only supreme in that the sunset is more “meaningful” than dawn,

Or so they say.

Penelope sighs.

Guilt is a rush to earn that future paradise,

and shame is the bitter but secret knowledge 

that we could just have stayed with the dawn.

"We could have stayed in Ithaca..."