Scene at Ithaca i. Alone at the loom, she has no attendants dressed in bright colored fabrics, no voices chirping sweet, utter nonsense. Only a loom, battered and shining with the oil from her hands, and the smell of raw wool constantly present. ii. Each day, she weaves the threads, the beautiful reds, the rib ache of her blues and her purples, gold, silver, and ochre, and the rust brown that comes after small cuts on her fingers. iii. Each night, as colors fade in the torchlight, she devastates her handiwork

with meticulous care, reassembles the wool into skeins for her morning’s work. iv. She barely sleeps, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, the skin under her eyes the color of wine in the evening. v. Prays to the gods each sunrise to stop herself, to walk away from the weaving, to shatter the loom, burn the wood, send the room up in the flames, and dance circling the heat of its yellows and oranges and the gray ashes before her,

while feeding the fire's insatiable appetite, burning her reason, pungent as incense. vi. At sunset she pleads again to keep her hands from her loom, for the sweet paralysis of apathy, to let her creation evolve out of its misery, to say: I am finished. To say: It is done. To shout to the hangers on, the myriad of drunken men:

Here’s the damned tapestry! vii. The gods do not answer (when have they ever?) and she is compelled to follow their litany, a slave to a plot that makes her the sacrifice. viii. She imagines the poet’s voice,

the tale teller’s eyes looking at empty space,

wonders why he takes delight

in her dread monotony? Over and under,

under and through, day

after night after day

the same light, the same pinpricks of stars in the night mocking her - ix. It is not the husband she wants - husbands are failures. She cannot remember him even to fantasize, even in the poet’s mind he is dead to her, dead as the dried husk of her sex, her menopausal seizures,

dead as leaves on the olive trees in winter’s cold atmosphere,

dead as her breasts that point down to a stone floor. x. In her deepest thought, discovered over and over, she dreams

of her son as her savior,

dreams the warmth of a boy’s skin, the curve of his hips in her hands, his face hairless and smooth without razors, the sweet odor of breath when he speaks, his eyes, the pout of his lips, his kiss on her shoulder -

A son is all to a mother, xi. dependent and rescuer, she wants him beside her naked and softer than fathers,

wants to masturbate his flesh into hers, bring the white milk to the top of his tower, drench herself in its lather,

forget the shame of her nightly destruction, make a new king to sit on her throne, depose the absent deceiver. xii. But this is impossible, she knows her son is no monster, it isn't the woman he wants, only the form of a mother. Merest boy, passively loyal, not the wolf she desires,

and she is the savior,

she barters for time, barters for men, her own bastards. xiii. The poet is another man to bargain with, another man with a future

where she is a stage prop, a mere chorus of praise for masculine sagas. xiv.

She would be a killer, plot murders, hatch schemes that billow in scarlet, dry into rust in the dirt at her feet,

coagulate as her choices. Instead, she waits

to hear xv. the birds sing the same songs each day, the old dog moan in his sleep each night the same, teeth stained and weak unable to chew bones, unable to rest peacefully. xvi. It is madness, her compulsive insanity. The madwoman weaving, unweaving her tapestry. She curses her son, her name, the old dog as it sleeps. Curses her odyssey.