Twenty Years

Twenty years is the metronome of the whole poem. It beats under every scene of the homecoming. Ten years of war at Troy and ten years of getting back, and what those years cost in lives at home is the slow accounting the second half makes the reader sit with. Anticleia died waiting. Laertes left the palace and slept in the dirt of his vineyard in servant’s clothes. Argos lay on the dung heap losing his coat to ticks, holding on for a master he would see for one breath before his breath stopped. [SPOILER: Penelope held a hundred armed men at bay for the back half of those years with a loom trick and a careful word. Telemachus grew from an infant to a young man who had to be told what his father looked like. Eumaeus tended pigs for an estate whose owner everyone but him had given up on. The number is everywhere. Twenty years she had held them off. Twenty years he had been gone. Twenty years compressed into the cavity of a borrowed chest. The poem keeps saying it because the poem is about what time does to people who are waiting and to the man who is trying to come back. The reckoning takes one afternoon. The twenty years are the weight the reckoning has to lift.]