Linear A

What Homer couldn't know was this:
For years before Odysseus
Left home, Penelope, and joy
For the long horror that was Troy
And the hallucinatory,
Waterlogged witch worlds of story,
He wrote notes.
                                  He knew the secret
Of the script already dying
Before words burnt and all writing
Stopped.
                   He scratched out his life in lines
Of dead language, a double code,
Too subtle for suitors to know,
That a seer couldn't chant aloud.

 

Before his wife began his shroud,
Before the waiting game commenced,
He inscribed loss in present tense.

For himself, his child, and his wife,
He curved the surface of his life,
Shadow and light, insight wrestling
With foolery, fear, everything
He thought to observe while he could,
Before Ithaka's cliffs and woods
Sank in the turning of the sea
To the west as the wind turned east.

Who knows if his notes told the truth?
Reading the lines to trace his routes
Can't decipher his intentions.

Time is the only dimension
Anyone's ever traveled in;
His lines are time unravelling.

Whether near to or far from shore,
Because of monsters, gods, or storms,
Or because sailors misbehaved,
All his ships sank in the same waves
And only appeared to scatter.

Sifting place names hardly matters.
It's lost script. It's finished. It sleeps.
It's the fish rising from the deep.