Ah! my dear, after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctor on his body, what can we say we really know about man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

-- Lawrence Durrell, as Balthazar in "Justine"

Odysseus' Secret

by Stephen Dunn

At first he thought only of home, and Penelope.

But after a few years, like anyone on his own,

he couldn't separate what he'd chosen

from what had chosen him.

Calypso, the Lotus-eaters, Circe;

a man could forget where he lived.

he had a gift for getting in and out of trouble,

a prodigious, human gift. To survive Cyclops

and withstand the Sirens' song --

just those words survive, withstand,

in his mind became a music

he moved to and lived by.

How could govern, even love, compete?

They belonged to a different part of a man,

the untested part, which never had transcended dread,

or the liar part, which always spoke like a citizen.

The larger the man, though,

the more he needed to be reminded

he was a man. Lightning, high winds,

for every excess a punishment.

Penelope was dear to him,

full of character and fine in bed.

But by the middle years this other life

had become his life. That was Odysseus' secret

kept even from himself. When he talked about return

he thought he meant what he said.

Twenty years to get home?

A man finds his shipwrecks,

tells himself the necessary stories.

Whatever gods are -- our own fearful voices

or intimations from the unseen order

of things, the gods finally released him,

cleared the way.

Odysseus boarded that Phaecian ship, suddenly tired

of the road's dangerous enchantments,

and sailed through storm and wild sea

as if his beloved were all that ever mattered.