Antiphons of the Known World

For Daniel Morden Athena, coming onto me (verbatim transcription): Every step you take will be the right one. Women encouraged me like that: Avoiding void, no one goes nameless in this world. Power? I was the son of a king: Hacking the armor from the limbs of the dying. In the path of the blade of the plough I met God my foe: Oh blight his voyage with trial and calamity. All he needed was a taste of his own medicine: The water was white with the blades of our oars. Long-limbed Circe, the troubled, could only bring trouble: Sure enough that month became a year. Then Demodocus struck his lyre, and sang for me: In that soft song I led one hundred lives. I was young, singing such distance, when I set out: The meters were my cloak, my map, my axe. Declensions of the beasts defined my travels: I made the lions purr; the lions licked my hands. When gulls cry over rough water, home is close: I remembered Charybdis the Swallower, in her magnificence. Horizon-soaked, I sat and sobbed. Sunset. Shoulders shaking. This was the liver’s dying, the world’s waking.