Penelope

Dorothy Parker In the pathway of the sun, In the footsteps of the breeze, Where the world and sky are one, He shall ride the silver seas, He shall cut the glittering wave. I shall sit at home, and rock; Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock; Brew my tea, and snip my thread; Bleach the linen for my bed. They will call him brave

The World as Meditation

Wallace Stevens

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought of it kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet's encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

Penelope In A Tantrum

Helen Rhoda Hoopes

She bit with vicious little teeth a length of purple thread.
"I've made that silly old man's coat a thousand times," she said.

Time-tarnished gold she intertwined; the wall-of-Troy was done.
"It's twenty years since any man has kissed me, hut my son."

She thought, "He's very like his sire," and hummed an old refrain:
"Odysseus, from a sea girt isle, bends to the oars again."

The clamor of her wooers checked the song upon her lips;
She sighed, remembering men at sea and battered hulls of ships.

A golden chain, a prince's gift, lay warm against her throat;
A swaying link caught warp and woof, and rent the purple coat.

She tried to mend the tattered web, a moon-besilvered pall.
"Yet this one smiles as do the gods; that one is strong and tall."

She turned impatiently away from loom and tangled thread.
'Tll never set another stitch in that," she almost said.

For she could not snap the shuttle, and she dared not leave the loom;
And she hoped her tears were for her lord, there in the quiet room.

Winter Twilight On The Victory Highway

Helen Rhoda Hoopes

The mellow concave of the sky rests its pale apricot brim
On the brown edges of the Kansas prairie.
Venus and Jupiter, two distant crumbs of light,
Cling to its cerulean surface.
Twilight smudges the nearer fields
Where snow lies white in patches.
The dry cornstalks solemnly mark time
In long rustling rows
Up and over the curve of the hill
In the west seven acres.

The little house and the big barn
Draw closer together in the dusk.
Things are happening in the house
And in the barn: cosy, comfortable things
That have to do with pails and frying pans and cradles
And whatever leads to supper and an early bedtime.

Along the highway, between drifts of snow,
Leviathans with gleaming eyes
Glide ceaselessly
To the city^___from the city^___
From the city^___to the city.

Sometimes the little house and the big barn
Delegate someone to go to the city,
Someone who is told to come back
Before it gets dark.
You see, there are so many things going on at home,
Happy duties that no one should miss.

Two wires are strung between the little house and the big barn.
From the lower one limp garments dangle:
Aprons, and heavy blue drill shirts,
And a baby's pink gingham rompers.
(It hadn't been quite cold enough to freeze them dry.)
On the upper wire there is nothing^___nothing that anyone can see.
Like a fishing net of a single strand
It reaches out into the wide ocean of the air
And gathers in a harvest of messages:
Market reports and recipes, sermons and solos,
The weather, bedtime stories, and music,
Music from Los Angeles, Hawaii, and Edgewater Beach.

So busy is every living creature
In the little house and in the big barn
That not one of them cares a flip about Jurgen,
Or the marriage problem,
Or life at Deauville,
Or the tendencies of modern fiction,
Or "Sweeney among the nightingales."
,Nor would they care, even if they knew about such tiresome things,
For here at home,
New things are always going to happen,
Really intoxicating things.
They are going to get a new car, maybe, and a washing machine;
And Lady will have another Jersey calf.
Soon they will have to move the old baby into the crib
And make the cradle ready for the new baby.
They will plow the west seven acres, and get more stock;
They will buy new dishes, and a rug for the front room,
And get a loud speaker. And nothing will stop them^___nothing^___
Unless the day comes too soon to join a slow procession
Along the Victory highway, (Leviathans then must wait,)
Up to the little churchyard on the crest of the hill,
To add another stone to those sturdily keeping faith there now.

But in the little house they have not yet had time
To think of the slow procession.
They are young and very strong.
There is good food in the pantry, and plenty of sweet hay in tho
big barn.
In the spring the redbud will blossom;
The pasture will be green again.
The fields must be harrowed and planted.
They will plant potatoes and beans, and put new shingles on the
house.
The meadow lark will whistle in the stillness,
And in the barnyard
Buff Orpingtons will clatter over their yellow corn.

And every day, from morning until midnight,
Along the highway,
Between banks of evening primroses,
Blue spiderwort, and wild verbena,
Leviathans of shining nickel and enamel
Will make their swift and ceaseless journeys
To the city^___from the city^___
From the city^___to the city.
More and more pink rompers will hang on the sagging lower wire;
And over the upper one will come messages,
Stock reports and symphonies,
Mighty music from Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Edgewater Beach.

Penelope

"Penelope"

At first, I looked along the road
hoping to see him saunter home
among the olive trees,
a whistle for the dog
who mourned him with his warm head on my knees.
Six months of this
and then i noticed that whole days had passed
without my noticing.
I sorted cloth and scissors, needle, thread,

thinking to amuse myself,
but found a lifetime’s industry instead.
I sewed a girl
under a single star—cross-stitch, silver silk—
running after childhood’s bouncing ball.
I chose between three greens for the grass;
a smoky pink, a shadow’s grey
to show a snapdragon gargling a bee
I threaded walnut brown for a tree,

my thimble like an acorn
pushing up through umber soil.
Beneath the shade
I wrapped a maiden in a deep embrace
with heroism’s boy
and lost myself completely
in a wild embroidery of love, lust, lessons learnt;
then watched him sail away
into the loose gold stitching of the sun.

And when the others came to take his place,
disturb my peace,
I played for time.
I wore a widow’s face, kept my head down,
did my work by day, at night unpicked it.
I knew which hour of the dark the moon
would start to fray,
I stitched it.
Grey threads and brown

pursued my needle’s leaping fish
to form a river that would never reach the sea.
I tried it. I was picking out
the smile of a woman at the centre
of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content,
most certainly not waiting,
when I heard a far-too-late familiar tread outside the door.
I licked my scarlet thread
and aimed it surely at the middle of the needle’s eye once more.

- Carol Ann Duffy

The Stuff of Ozone

Harper:

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening.

But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.

And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

Angels in America, Tony Kushner

( I always start crying when she gets to the part about the souls being three-atom oxygen molecules )

We'll mend

Harper: I'm going to like this place. It's my own National Geographic Special! Oh! Oh! (She holds her stomach) I think...I think I felt her kicking. Maybe I'll give birth to a baby covered with thick white fur, and that way she doesn't get chilly. My breasts will be full of hot cocoa so she doesn't get chilly. And if it get's really cold she'll have a pouch I can crawl into. Like a marsupial. We'll mend together. That's what we'll do; we'll mend.

Tony Kushner. Angels in America, Millenium Approaches: III.iii