Sea of Sound

Preface: My band (trio arjento--check us out! we're awesome!) does a song called Sea of Sound (you could check that out too, if you like--it's also pretty awesome!). One day Marcy, the singer, asked for clarification about the lyrics. I, surprised, said "Well, it's, you know, the story of Ulysses--the Odyssey." I may have added "Obviously," but I hope not. I can be kind of jerky sometimes.

Marcy said something affectionately along the lines of "Not everybody knows the story of the Odyssey, smarty-pants--please elaborate?" So I did. And when I was done storytelling that afternoon, we all agreed that the song needs a preface whenever we perform it. The lyrics make perfect sense if you know the story, but they're otherwise pretty oblique.

This, then, is my first foray into spoken-word storytelling poetry. I had three goals: find rhythm and rhyme to match the push and pull of the sea; find pauses and swells and musical language to match the drama of the greatest story ever told; and fit it all on a single typed page. I don't pretend this is on a par with Homer's original, but I think it turned out pretty well. And I didn't even have to be blind to write it!

…when he turned away, the fires continued to burn behind him;

beautiful—like every deadly thing.

His ship surrendered to the soft pulse of the sea.

“Lost,” the storytellers say. But “lost” is not the word:

Ulysses always knew the way back to Ithaca. The map

was engraved on his heart. Blood flows

always out into the body; blood always returns.

Still, the fires burned. The beautiful hands of destruction

lingered over the land, beckoned him on.

There were so many more mistakes still to make.

He ate forbidden meat; he tasted forbidden lust.

He journeyed to the dark basement of human memory,

To learn that death is final, even if love is not.

He followed the call of the great destroyer,

seeking a souvenir or a skeleton, a trophy or a bone;

something, anything beautiful to take home

to make home a place where a lost heart could finally slow.

Ulysses burned: not lost, but beautiful—like every hungry thing.

Circe who turned men to docile beasts

sang him the song of a secret, the secret of a song:

poured into his ear the idea of the music of the sirens, perfect and fatal,

calling sailors towards the rocks to learn that the future

has no place for them outside the pages of books.

Consumed with longing for a home in this idea, he abandoned

Her too-easy charms and turned his ship around.

‘Lash me to the mast,’ he told his crew. ‘If I cry, if I complain,

 if I beg you set me free, do not listen. Only pull the ropes tighter.

Here is beeswax. Stop your ears.

The perfect song is not for everyone to hear.

Love is not a burden for every heart to bear.’

The ship sailed on, deafened by the hum of absent bees, into the sea of sound.

Ulysses cried an ocean of lost ships, a lifetime of wandering; wept until the song faded.

Slept, a hollow shell held up by ropes, watched by a crew of the blissful deaf,

Ignorant men, free of desires. When he awoke to the soft pulse of the sea,

he turned towards home. “Lost” is the wrong word:

he had always only been incomplete. Never full, never even properly empty, until then.

But in his old age, the music haunted him.

Cadences cracked by the ravages of memory danced the spiral of his ear.

Haunted by whispers of beauty half-remembered, Ulysses took an oar,

put it on his shoulder, and carried it inland until he found

a place where no man had ever heard of the sea.

Content at last, he built a house, and sat down, smiling, to wait for death.