Such is her hunger that her arm continues to bring the bird to her mouth even as a stroke of lightning cracks from the back of her head to the front, a long, branching fracture of white, as though the vault of the sky has splintered, and the world goes dark.
SEVENTEEN
THE WONDERS OF
CLOUD CUCKOO LAND
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio P
… mild, fragrant…
… a river of cream…
… sloping glens and ·[orchards?]·…
… met by a bright hoopoe, who bowed his feathery crown and said, “I am the vice-undersecretary to the viceroy of Provisions and Accommodations,” and he draped a garland of ivy round my neck. Every bird swerved overhead in welcome, and sang its most tuneful…
… unchanging, everlasting, no months, no years, every hour like spring on the clearest, most gold-green morning, the dew like ·[diamonds?]·, the towers like honeycombs, and the western zephyr was the only breeze…
… plumpest raisins, finest custards, salmon and sardines…
… came the tortoise, the honeycakes, poppies and squills, and the ·[next?]·…
… I ate until I could ·[burst?]·, then ate more…
LAKEPORT, IDAHO
1972–1995
Zeno
Supper is boiled beef. Across the table looms Mrs. Boydstun’s face, haloed by smoke. On the television beside her, a brush strokes the upper eyelashes of an enormous eye.
“Mouse poops in the pantry.”
“I’ll set some traps tomorrow.”
“Get the Victors. Not the garbage ones you bought last time.”
Now an actor in a suit testifies to the miraculous sound of his Sylvania color television. Mrs. Boydstun drops her fork trying to bring it to her mouth and Zeno retrieves it from beneath the table.
“I’m done,” she announces. He wheels her into her bedroom, lifts her onto the bed, measures out her medication, pushes the TV cart and its extension cord into her room. Beyond the windows, out toward the lake, the last daylight evacuates the sky. Sometimes, at moments like this, as he scrapes the plates, the sensation of his flight home from London comes back: how it seemed as though the planet would never stop unspooling below—water then fields then mountains then cities lit like neural networks—it seemed to him that between Korea and London he’d had enough adventure for a lifetime.
For months he sits at the desk beside the little brass bed with the first verses of Homer’s Iliad on his left and the Liddell and Scott lexicon Rex gave him on the right. He hoped that vestiges of the Greek he learned at Camp Five might still be embedded in his memory, but nothing comes easily.
Μ?νιν, the poem begins, ?ειδε θε? Πηλη??δεω ?χιλ?ο?, five words, the last the name Achilles, the second-to-last identifying that Achilles’s father was Peleus （though also suggesting Achilles is godlike）， yet somehow, with only three words in play, mênin and aeide and theā, the line bristles with landmines.
Pope: Achilles’s wrath, to Greece the direful spring.
Chapman: Achilles’s bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse.
Bateman: Goddess, sing the destroying wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.
But does aeide fully suggest “to sing,” because it’s also the word for poet? And mênin, how best to translate that? Fury? Outrage? Vexation? To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.
Tell us, Goddess, about the wild temper of Achilles, son of Peleus.
Not good enough.
Speak, Calliope, about the outrage of Peleus’s boy.
Worse.
Tell the people, Muses, why Peleus’s kid Achilles was so fucking furious.
* * *
In the year following his return, Zeno sends a dozen letters to Rex, adhering strictly to questions regarding translation—imperative or infinitive? accusative or genitive?—ceding all romantic ground to Hillary. He sneaks the letters out of the house inside his shirt and mails them before work, cheeks burning as he slips them into the box. Then he waits for weeks, but Rex’s replies do not come quickly or regularly, and Zeno loses whatever bravery he began with. The gods on Olympus, sipping from their cups of horn, peer through the roof of the house and watch him struggle at his desk, mockery on their faces.
The vanity of assuming that Rex might have wanted him in that way. An orphan, a coward, a snowplow driver with a cardboard suitcase and a polyester suit: Who was Zeno to expect anything?