This week's poem by Kim Lasky won first prize last year in Agenda magazine's poetry competition. It takes the form of an imaginary nocturnal monologue, spoken by Odysseus's wife Penelope – "circumspect Penelope", as she's called by Richmond Lattimore in his much-reprinted 1965 translation of the Odyssey of Homer (source of this poem's epigraph). As Lasky writes in her descriptive note, this Penelope's perspective is "one that might be more complicated than is usually told".
The revisionist approach to the heroines of myth and fairytale has produced a lot of fascinating poetry and fiction in recent years. This poem deserves the exalted company of writers such as Margaret Atwood. An emotional depth-charge, its most striking technical quality is verbal compactness. A monologue can ramble and still be successful if the voice convinces. This one succeeds also as a tight-knit lyric poem.
Like Penelope is throughout most of the Odyssey, Lasky's Penelope is convinced her husband is dead. Her speech fittingly draws on the threnos, the keen sung as part of ancient Greek funeral rites. The quoted "scraps of lament" are from the beginning of an actual threnos: "My love I loved you well, I kept you well. I kept you as musk in the box, as wire in the reed. I kept you as a silver lamp which lit up this house." The poem is infused with this lament, which is particularly appropriate in its reference to the loom ("the wire in the reed"). Other significant phrases recur. True to the spirit of Homer and epic poetry, anaphora serves this lyric beautifully, keeping it minutely connected, building the rhythm, and intensifying the mood.
The subject of the original threnody seems likely to have been a wife rather than husband. In Lasky's poem, with its female narrator, the phrase "kept you well" and the following similes take on subtly different colouration. The well-kept husband might not be materially supported, but he would have every wifely attention he desired. Penelope's maintenance involves both the physical and imaginative aspects of love. "The musk in the box", "the wire in the reed" and of course "the bed that is a tree" are images carefully planted to grow into powerful erotic metaphors. For example, the absence of the expected punctuation in the last line of stanza two (before "my love"), followed by the surprise stanzaic splitting between "my love" and "I kept you well", strongly emphasises the sexual overtones of the claim.
Homer's Penelope unravelled by night the shroud she wove by day; part of a ploy to keep her suitors at bay. In Lasky's poem, Penelope's very thoughts are an obsessive weaving and unweaving, yet the narrative always moves forward on its own small odyssey. Impasse occurs only when, finally, instead of "the wire in the reed", there is merely "the wire", like an exposed and painful nerve.
It was when Odysseus described the construction of the marriage-bed that Penelope recognised the ragged stranger as her husband. The bed, rooted because Odysseus had made the post from a living olive tree, symbolised immovable fidelity. At the start of The Bed That Is a Tree, when Penelope imagines herself a corpse, the bed is also a deathbed. We imagine a woman wasting away and faithful to the end. But the narrative unfolds a little differently.
"Wanton grief", almost an oxymoron, is the phrase which provides the emotional hinge. It shows Penelope's despair overflowing into physical infidelity. Stanza four works with the logic of the turn, beginning with the evocation of Odysseus's supposed death at sea, and contrasting it with the assertion that "I hold the living near to me, saved". But the suitors, bringing seduction in the guise of consolation, are tricked as well. Penelope's true response is only to the frail shade of her husband, hovering in the gentle wave-like rhythm of "the listing hull of a driftwood ship".
The eagle, appearing to the original Penelope in a dream, decimated her flock of geese, then comforted her by explaining that the birds represented the suitors. He, the eagle, was Odysseus, who would destroy them. The "sharp flaunted freedom" of Lasky's Penelope implies both sexual boldness and desire for revenge. She sees herself as the eagle she dreams. But the isolated last line takes her back to her lament, and seals the poem. Once more, the speaker is alone, and once more inconsolable.
While it enriches the poem to compare and contrast, the reader doesn't need to consult, or even be aware of, the story of Odysseus in order to be moved. The rhythm inescapably draws us into the mood, and the images are almost archetypes. Cut lose from classical context, The Bed That Is a Tree works perfectly as a resonant contemporary love poem. The speaker could be any woman moved by grief to emblematic utterance, and the governing metaphor, the bed as tree, finds all kinds of shapes in a reader's imagination, combining growth and death, cradle and coffin, security and evanescence.
The Bed That Is a Tree was published in Agenda, volume 46, no 2. The current issue focuses on neglected poets and is subtitled Retrospectives. Future themes will be "celtic mists", "exiles" and "poetry and opera". After that, the future is uncertain: Agenda is one more victim of Arts Council funding cuts. Founded in 1959 by Ezra Pound and William Cookson, and now edited by Patricia McCarthy, the journal has an exemplary record in many areas, exploring Irish poetry, for instance, as well as re-evaluating the recent past and encouraging emergent writers like Kim Lasky herself. The Bed That Is a Tree demonstrates the power to be accessed through poetry's oldest roots, and reminds us that living trees, if thoughtlessly cut down, take much else with them.
The Bed That Is a Tree
… and as she mourns him the tears run down from her eyes, since this is the right way for a wife when her husband is far and perished.
The Odyssey Book XIV
Naked, I am without a sheet to wind me.
Even vacant sleep won't shroud me tonight;
so exposed, I notice the blood thinning
in my corpse-veins, hear the shrinking of skin,
see bare limbs decompose in the darkness.
Lost, a tragedy without a body.
Scraps of lament my love I loved you well
distract me in this bed that is a tree
where we should lie together my love
I kept you well (forgive my wanton grief)
like musk in the box and wire in the reed
in this bed that is a tree, where night falls
and things are not as they seem.
When night falls, the sea is a distant death.
Your bones roll in the wash of the breakers
and I hold the living near to me, saved.
My love I kept you well; this bed, this tree.
Easing wanton grief, they come to caress
my dreamless breast, but you come to me too;
the listing hull of a driftwood ship.
My love I loved you well; this tree, this bed.
So much done in darkness, unsaid. Night work
scorns the loom's reed, wires that would keep threads
apart are sidestepped. We come together
barbed in intimacy, secrets well kept.
I look for you in them, my love, don't know
what they see in me. Aggrieved, perhaps
talons and beaks, the sharp flaunted freedom
of a woman always dreaming an eagle.
Lamenting: like musk in the box, and wire.