Poem-A-Day: The Odyssey, Book 11: ll. 538-556 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

December 19, 2013 The Odyssey, Book 11: ll. 538-556 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips     The soul of swift-soled Achilles hearing me  Praise his son, silvered, and then was gone,  His long strides causing him to blend, light-bent,  Into the shining, maize meadow cloudbank Shadowed by that one solitary tree  It takes sixteen years for light, let alone  A soul, to cross.  The other dead, who thrived  Though they had died, rejoiced at seeing me  And sang, one by one, to me; and I in  Turn said back to one after the other  That the song that soul sang was a blessing  And that I had never heard anything  Like it; which was true, but also, I must  Admit, they bored me to tears, tears that their Surprisingly still finite knowledge took  As tears of pure joy from hearing them sing.    Only Ajax Telamoniades  Kept away, arms crossed, refusing to speak,  Dim-starred and disappearing into his rage.  All because of a simple spar of words,  A mere speech, and winning Achilles' armor.  Athena above and those men at the ships  Decided that, not me, although it's true  He never stood chance. But by custom  Should have been given the matchless metal.  How I wish I hadn't won that contest.  How the ground closed over his head for it.  What a fool I can be. Ajax. Who knew  No equal in action but for the one  Man who surpassed him, just-fled Achilles,  So capable of happiness despite  All that happened because he washed up here,  Heaven: this implausible place for us.   Strange that Ajax is also in Heaven  Despite ending his legendary life.  In the end he's won, but he doesn't seem  To understand that he's won. Poor Ajax.  Like always, I thought I had winning words  And so I said to him with unreturned gaze:  "Son of great Telamon, mighty Ajax,  War tower, shake free of your anger.  No one else is to blame but Zeus, and look,  He is no longer here, friend. Paradise  Has found you and given you an eternal  Roof under the one tree of High Heaven.  Zeus treated us so terribly, and you,  Whom he should have loved like his strongest son,  You worst of all.  But that is history  Now. Come, my strong brother, lord and deserved Winner of all Achilles wore and was,  Come, be with us here; let me hear the light  Of Heaven in your voice; and let me know,  Because I love you, how you (of all men!)  Ended up in the keen of this endless berm."  But Ajax, gift-eyed, said nothing to me  And took his seat under the rowan tree.       Copyright © 2013 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem "This is a vision of the nekyia in Book 11 of The Odyssey as taking place in Heaven as opposed to the underworld. The silence of Ajax in the face of Odysseus's beautiful but suffocating grandiloquence, and his anger at Odysseus even after death, is one of literature's grandest examples of the power of silence and the endurance of rage. I have long been transfixed by this moment and by the open-ended chill of that silence. Set against the constant need for Odysseus to speak and his seemingly instinctual impetus to try to either win things or fix things, I heard, as I thought through this poem, Heaven emerge as a marvelous mise-en-scène through which to further explore that poignant human chain that ever connects us to the poignancy of poetry's past." --Rowan Ricardo Phillips Most Recent Book by Phillips The Ground (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012)   Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.    Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of The Ground (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). He is associate professor of English and director of the Poetry Center at Stony Brook University, as well as a contributing writer for Artforum. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.  Related Poems The Last Known Sighting of the Mapinguari  by Traci Brimhall  Complaint of Achilles' Heel by Charles Jensen  Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh XXI Dynasty by Thomas James   __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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