Calypso

Calypso lives at the edge of the world on an island no mortal ship can reach. Cedar smoke drifts from the cave mouth. Grapevines climb the rock face. Four springs run clear across meadows of violet and wild parsley. She sits at her loom and sings, and her voice carries beyond her home, across the island. She is beautiful and immortal and patient. She offered Odysseus immortality and the island and her bed for seven years, and for seven years he sat on the rocks above the sea and wept. He wanted Ithaca. He wanted his wife, whose face he tried to imagine older now, lined by ruling a kingdom alone. He wanted the son who had been an infant in the sand. He was living inside someone else’s dream and he could not escape. When Hermes came with Zeus’s order to release him, she could not hold the pose of indifference. Her smile dropped. She put her cup down carefully. She did not argue. She brought him a bronze axe and carpenter’s tools, showed him the alder and poplar and fir, gave him cloth for a sail and food and wine for the journey. She stood at the waterline as the wind pulled her hair across her face and watched him go. [SPOILER: When Odysseus tells the story to Penelope on the night of their reunion, the seven years on Ogygia are the part he can barely speak. The shore was the only place a king could break.]