The Boat and the Blindfold (Homer)

Lyrics

[Verse 1 — Chronos]
You may not
have existed
and that
is the first
and funniest
thing about you —
the greatest poem
the western world
ever produced
may have been written
by a committee
or a tradition
or a blind man
on an island
or nobody
in particular
and the poem
does not care
which one
and the poem
has the warm
salt-cedar smell
of a ship
that has been
at sea
so long
it has forgotten
which answer
it was
sailing toward.

[Verse 2 — Chronos]
You gave Odysseus
twenty years
to get home
from a war
that took ten
because you understood
the man who left
could not come home
as the man who left
and needed
ten more years
of the sea
refusing
to let him land
before
the prefrontal cortex
that had learned
how to sack a city
could be
replaced
by the one
that remembered
how to sit
at a table
with his wife
and not
reach
for a weapon.

[Chorus — all three voices]
Nobody knows
what you looked like.
The tradition says blind
and the tradition
may be a metaphor
or a fact
and the poem
did not need
your eyes
to have worked.
The poem
needed your ear
and the ear —
whoever's ear
it was —
heard
the wine-dark sea
and the sea
has been
that color
ever since
and the color
tastes
like the last
hour of light
on the Aegean
when the water
is not blue
and not red
but the exact thing
a cup of wine
does
when you hold it
to the fire.

[Outro — Chronos]
The sea
is still wine-dark
on certain evenings
and a man
on a boat
is still trying
to get home
to a woman
who is still
unraveling
the day's work
every night
to buy him
one more day
on the water.

Whoever you were
you heard that
right.

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