Achaemenides

Achaemenides

The sybils didn’t bother with me

but one or two poets filled the blanks in:

an Ithakan king, vying for the sea,

conscripted men to the mast on

his flagship crossing to Troy.

Nearly his whole crew, wretched cost

of rudderless roving, would die

in some way or another. I’d outlast

my comrades, my skull a cave

for every cast-off thought,

cleared by sea-winds. The waves’

aged murmur, a wine-dark clot

of spray, was my eternal clock

to flail and flare on the ebb.

I stood watch as if on my ship’s deck

and slept in a berry-shrub

at night, held my hungry peace.

He was out there, tremoring the island

with his rams, roaring without cease,

a brute, drooling shepherd, blind

in one gored eye and still raging.

Him, and a tribe of him, their fangs

gritted by quotidian carcass-gorging,

eyes rusted as mooring rings.

I’d neither the brains nor the backbone

to engineer my escape, as my pilot

had. I preferred to linger, my beard laden

with barnacles, and eye the blood-lit

skyline for rescue. Laughing gulls,

black-armoured scorpions and flame-

petalled flowers thronged the hills

and shore, and the sun’s daily whim

beat too heavily for comfort. When

sleep did take me, I saw brass shields,

chariots, my old xiphos drawn,

flames tearing through Trojan fields.

I prayed for the gods to be cruelly kind

and smite me with flood or drought;

somehow I kept my presence of mind,

did not gasp my despair out.

I needed a woman, needed her touch

and kiss. I thought often of the girls

I’d loved before sailing, memories a crutch

for my mind to stoop on. Heavy scrolls

of loneliness, heat-rippled, tore at me.

I’d see none of them again, I knew,

drank my life’s fill of their beauty;

had lost them like my ill-starred crew.

If I am to die, I want to fall by man’s

hand, not crushed or sunk or devoured.

I prayed for that much, at least: the plans

of Olympus to see me safely delivered

from his eyeball’s crimson gush,

the cave we’d made our woollen escape

from gawking at the bay, lethal hush

stirring him from sleep, the grapes

that gave him his wine burst in his palm,

his voice and footfall alike echoing

the strafed harmonic of thunder. Blessed to swim,

or condemned to sink: I’d no way of knowing

until a fresh, high glut of tide brought

the Dardanian galleys, and my first glimpse

of raised sails, bellying and white,

in an age. Mariners walked in slumps,

leaning to their oars, arid lips

panting for haven and home, beards

surf-smeared, fibrous as bullwhips.

I saw horsehair helms and blunt swords,

a fleet steered clear off the map’s edge

and held back, afraid for my life.

But these were men in the anchorage,

not beasts. Surely blood was enough

for mercy; with my thorn-fixed cloak,

what possible threat was I to them now?

Despair, weariness, terror and shock

felled me at the knee, and I howled out:

“Men of Troy, fly you far from this shore!

Where you make port is not important.

The danger you here face is too great to ignore.

Put back to sea, save yourselves this instant!

I who was your Grecian foe, now beg thee

to grant but one meagre service:

bring me with you if you will, or else kill me!

But cast off now, before the giants arise!”

I say this without shame: I wept, grovelled,

kissed the barren sand before them.

The oldest of them stepped forward

to give me his hand, and I stood abeam.

Their captain, a born survivor as mine

once was, saw the giant for himself

and did not stay to fight. Jaded as his men

were, he led them back down the pebbly shelf

to the ships, with myself in their number,

and we slipped a swift course from the cove.

The one-eyed clan cursed our venture

but fathoms ran too deep for their heave,

their stride. Now seaborne and free at last,

I was ragged locus for the shoal

and river-mouth, reefs clenched like a fist

under the bare walls of the Geloan.

Yet, sun-drunk and hunger-shredded,

I saw we had a good skipper, wary

in his pilotage but alert to the dreaded

unfolding of a voyage, dogged emissary

for nomads. Yet he never claimed

to know his heading; he was as lost as I.

As gratitude, I kept my head down

and worked the mains, my new duty

to share utterly in my rescuers’ fate.

They fed me, healed me, found me a home.

And it came as no surprise of late

that a price isn’t on my head, or that no-

one even set off in search of me

or my brothers. Yet I am here, thankful

and restored, saved by an enemy

whom I greet and look to now as an idol

of my flight, no longer hunched

as the rock I saw the blind herder fling

at my receding ship. So from staunch

shores, now, may my voice once more sing.