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Sport 41: 2013
Bob Orr
Bob Orr
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.
Helen of Troy
This is my story—
I was a trophy wife
make no mistake about that
married off to the veteran Menelaus
a silly old fool as shrivelled as last summer’s passionfruit.
I did my best to be an obedient wife
yes it’s true I did indeed launch a ship or two
and I can’t begin to tell you how boring it all soon became
those long-winded speeches and the stifling heat
myself a beautiful woman in a world of back-slapping men.
When I eloped with Paris how could I’ve foretold
that my affair with a sunburnt shepherd boy
would end in the complete destruction of Troy?
His body was a herb that went straight to my head.
Each evening the great arc of the Mediterranean night sky
a million stars held in the cusp of one moon.
Ah Troy a city kissed by Asia’s warm wind
if only I’d read the small print of the gods.
The fleet that rode in through the breakers
as if propelled by some hand that fate had decreed.
It was all such a long time ago
a conflict now almost forgotten.
Each generation reveres its own scars.
Remember me—
a dust cloud out of Africa
the shadow of a bird on the sea.
The first modern woman.
Standing alone in a field of red poppies
sometimes I find myself weeping.
The Song of Telemachus
Ten years
after Troy
Odysseus my father returned—
silent at first
but then given to babbling
about an island where men were turned into swine
a one-eyed giant as tall as an oak tree
seabirds with songs that drove sailors crazy.
He admitted he couldn’t describe everywhere he’d been
but that we could take it from him that he’d even been to Hades.
My mother took to immersing herself in the pages
of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.
When I set out in search of him
I became as a child who looks under stones.
Sometimes I discovered monsters there too
silences rumours and shadows
the phantom of truth like a lizard that lets slip its tail.
Those dreadnoughts I once launched
in the tadpole-dark waters of a farm trough—
in quieter moments he would ask
about a boy’s ambition to be a naval architect.
Today I launch this poem
out into the ocean of his life.
The farm has become a cloud shadow racing across the Waikato.
At midday between the pump shed’s oily earth
and the solitary hour of a tank stand
I listen to an island that sings like a cicada.
Cast into this beaky ocean—
Ithaca.