By Elaine Maria Upton

I am Penelope and I sat here weaving
all these years, weaving and waiting.
My story may seem very dull,
the story of weaving and waiting,
unless, of course, you want to add
some Hollywood or Cannes/Riveriera intrigue
and write of all my suitors, and my temptations
to an adulterous life, and unless you want
to write that I worried about Telemachus,
my son, and his ability to endure the slander
of his father’s name. But even that
seems dull beside tales of one-eyed monsters,
Scylla and Charibidis, and all that drove
my husband round the world. No, waiting
is not particularly an exciting tale to tell.

You’d have to be here, to live
where narrative is swallowed up
in the turns of a spinning wheel,
and a particular herb tossed
in the noon meal soup. The herb
would make you drunk with sleep
and you’d dream of spinning and
of looms where names and forms
are woven while the sun falls slowly
in the long Mediterranean afternoon.

And you’d wake to a tapestry
that your fingers followed into being,
a tapestry of names, colors, shapes
to hang on a wall, or to drape
the backs of children, old women,
and returning kings. This woven
thing–this tapestry–would remind us
that history and time, like distant horizons
elude us forever, and this body,
this adventure, these wars, these seas,
are but the densest measure of a dream.

Wait, then, upon the fuller dream, the one
woven in the loom, lent us by the weaving stars.

23 February 1999

Read more poems from Elaine Maria Upton

Index of poets on Allspirit