The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Patric Pepper
Prince Valiant
Sunday morning, January 7, 2018, in my bathrobe, my new titanium and plastic knee packed with ice. I sip a cup of tea and sit with you in my hands. I read “the funnies” as we used to call them, though you were never funny I seem to remember. Was it 30 years ago? The last time I checked in? Val? May I call you Val? In the title frame you and your companions drift on your raft through murky caverns, an underground tributary that opens out, at last, into the world, onto the Great Yinchu River. With rest and salix extract, you have finally regained your vitality, and your daughter, Karen, is perhaps sweet on Vanni, who also knows about healing herbs and such. Raven suddenly alights, and Karen locks eyes with Raven, as steering the raft Bukota grins, “Why, Karen is telling Raven to let her mother know that we are all well and coming home!” Home! Home! I want to come home, like you, Val. You have given me vitality, just as I have renewed your life by reading your “comic strip,” my Prince! And next Sunday, if I choose to check in again after 30 years and a week? “Next: Beyond the sea.” I want to come home, Val, beyond the sea. Ithaca He orders himself to be lashed to the mast, to hear the Sirens’ peculiar voice of “home.” I admire him. Almost like him, butcher that he is in this his epic, as if I envisage my would-be self in a mirror. I read in bed by electric light, sickened to recall Troy: Odysseus, mire-bespattered, blood-encrusted mother lion of the Achaeans. He chased the Trojans down and feasted on their entrails. That’s right, Mother Lion, who kills and feeds the males as they destroy each other. Achilles whines. Agamemnon roars. But Odysseus, besotted with love of gore and glory, rages ready to be himself devoured, should life come to that. But Mother Lion? Yes. And I do like his crew—shipload of ordinary killers, ears plugged against the lying sea nymphs’ song, You’re home! O, Ithaca! Soldier-sailors who cinched their guide, their lifeline, tighter to the mast when he ordered, Untie me, boys! We are home now. O, Ithaca! Men like me, who don’t know their fate, yet unknowingly almost know they are, as if in fact, already home in their own warm beds reading of heroes tonight. Home in their hungry bodies as they pull the oars. Home as their king babbles on. Home with each other, sailing their mum toward Helios, where, against orders, they will feast on the Sun’s cattle— so Zeus may fairly slaughter them, and move His epic forward toward Ithaca. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |