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Sport 41: 2013
White Horses
White Horses
When I returned to Ithaca
after ten years
I discovered a white cruise ship anchored in the bay.
My house had become
a backpackers’ hostel.
Homer’s epic to those nameless seafarers
lost at sea
like a court of enquiry pointed the finger at me.
But by far the worst shipwreck
was the one that awaited me on the cold stone step
of my own front door.
Not long after my return
when I thought that things might settle down
Penelope took to sharing the same bed with one of the servant girls.
With my sea bag and a crust of bread
I sailed a dinghy with tears in my beard
over purple and white waves to Piraeus.
After a week on the beach I signed aboard a tanker
owned by Aristotle somebody or other.
I last saw my island
slip like a dolphin below the horizon.
I recalled like a village pantomime
the puppet armies of Troy and Greece—
all for the sake of Helen
street walker and
phantom
violet scent and clarity of mint
vortex dark whirlwind
her body a rumour of voyages and dolphins.
When she laughed a white sail slanted across the horizon.
page 69
I paid off that ship in New Zealand
took on the hard life of a fisherman
working out of Wellington the cold seas of Cook Strait.
Lost in a world of white horses
hauling aboard great blubbery sea monsters
groper with heads like disfigured gods.
These days I often walk to a beach
to sit up against an upturned dinghy.
I listen to the sea as it talks to the dinghy.
Sometimes on my rounds I meet Helen face to face—
Behind the counter of a delicatessen in Courtenay Place
I see again the dark harbours of her eyes
that still await the return of some lost fleet.
In the black squall of her hair I see a village of olive groves
unmoored beneath the moon.
I walk out with a loaf of fresh bread
the shape of a fisherman’s
cottage in Crete.