He builds it in five mornings. The bronze axe bites clean. He strips the trunks, squares them, bores holes and drives pegs through the joints, lashes the frame with cord until the wood creaks under its own weight. His father Laertes taught him to work wood as a boy on Ithaca. The knowledge is still in his hands. He sets a mast of pine and rigs a yard, takes the cloth Calypso brings without looking up, fits a rudder, tests the steering with his palm. The raft is open and crude and his. Seven years he had not moved like this. Calypso watches the axe ring out across the beach and feels the loss happening in real time. The raft is the first thing in seven years that belongs to him alone. Poseidon shatters it within sight of land. The man survives the wreck.
The Raft
Bound logs of alder and poplar and fir. Crude, open to the sky, no rail worth trusting. Odysseus builds it himself and rides it seventeen days.