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Advocacy Poetry and Other Writings That Heal Divisions
I.
In the shadows, strung with olive-pollen and moonlight warm as arms, she sits. The suitors have passed out piled on the stairs like old laundry. Their dogs belch quietly in summer-heavy sleep. Her back is straight, well-trained to posture and poise, as she picks at the tight little stitches. She pulls at the brown threads of a deer's haunch, the green of over-hanging foliage.
She has forgotten what it was for; a wedding quilt, a blanket for her son's cradle, perhaps just something to keep her warm when winter comes? Or a shroud--was it meant to be a shroud? She is afraid that it will be, that soon she will drape it over a drowned body, lips burst and blue, seaweed-strangled, mouth clogged with sand.
If she is honest, it is just habit, empty as a clay jar. She sews all day, mechanically, swollen fingers dipping through the fabric. She smiles when she ought to, laughs like old doors creaking-- and it is twenty years since Aulis .
At night she claws at the pastoral scenes, her nails tear off on the thick cross-hatching, her hair hangs limp in her eyes and she does not cry, she makes no sound, but her breath is scored with the edges of owl-feathers, and her belly chews at itself, screaming: Where is my Odysseus? Is he safe, is he dead? Is he warm in the arms of some white-armed goddess, and am I forgotten?
Should I take one of these young men with shoulders like bronze hammers and wrap my legs around his waist?
If he returns and finds me ugly, limeskin-pocked, barren, will he laugh at my pouch-belly, my flabby arms, my breasts ruined by suckling?
Are his brains already dashed out on a Trojan stair?
In the shadows, strung with the breath of sheep and pigs, she sits. Her famous mouth is set in a thin line, and she has stopped believing that her grey-eyed husband will swallow the breath of her body again.
Yet still, she pick, pick, picks at the skeletal shroud.
II.
She is bundling brooms in the shade-- lashing stiff lemonwood twigs with chewed leather; her daughters strain tart cheese in the house.
She is no Penelope, she does not wait and she has always been hopeless at the loom-- but he did not mind. He called her his nightingale, and she tried not to be hurt at the comparison to a plain, brown bird.
Now he has strapped a second chest onto his own, one of bronze and unchewed leather, and a shield whose wide bowl could have held her whole body, curled into itself like the meat of a snail hidden in its shell. He has gone to Persia , to the sand and the hanging gardens, and the women with expensive skin.
She has heard that Alexander took a Bactrian wife and is carried into battle on a golden chair. She has heard that the army always wins, and that all of Persia flames like a hecatomb raised up against the winter sky. It does not matter much to her; the cow still complains when she needs to be milked, the girls still produce lumpy, over-wet cheese.
She hopes her husband does not come home with a black-haired wife to replace her.
She misses his smell, like bread-crusts and washed horse. She pays an old woman to sacrifice four squirming piglets so that he will be safe, so that his second chest will not break.
When the winter comes, she brings the cow inside to warm her daughters with its grassy flank. Against the spotted hide, she dreams of India , of rivers muddy with ashes, of babies born with blue eyes, and elephants screaming.
III.
She lectures to a class full of Master's candidates, deconstructing the sophistry of The Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales . Her mouth forms around Middle English phrases, coarse Germanic syllables describing false relics, a dozen shrunken heads of St. John-- but she is thinking of his letter,
how he said the Persian Gulf was alive with turquoise light, the bio-lumenescence and patches of old oil spills shining underwater like a lost city.
Greek-American, three generations out of Argos , he sailed an oarless ship back into Persia , with his wife's annotated copy of the Lattimore Iliad stuffed into a seabag. In her flourescent-flooded classroom, she smiles when she ought to, laughs like old doors creaking.
On television, missiles arc across the lightless sky, green comets streaking into Babylon , Persepolis , the winter court at Ecbatana . She cannot help it, she does not know the new names of the cities, except Baghdad , except Fallujah.
He writes that dolphins swim alongside his ship like Minoan frescoes, and that the dawn really is rose-fingered-- he writes that she should not worry: he was not on the helicopter that burst like a jar of Greek Fire catapulted against a mud-brick wall. Yet
she proctors an exam on Socratic philosophy and picks at the tight little stitches of her Italian skirt: Is he safe? Is he dead? Will he come home and find me ugly, thin with fear, bitter as coffee left out overnight?
Is he already gone, vaporized over that glowing sea, another Greek helmet rolling up on the Persion shore?
by Catherynne M. Valente 
The Fund for Women
Artists
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