Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

ithaca, on the landing

89 ithaca, on the landing Wendy Barker How was it Penelope waited upstairs all those years, before he finally found his way back? Every night unravelling the weave, her fear of fixing to the wrong one knitting her nerves. But the wool kept the shape of the warp, she could not straighten the strands after so many nights. All day weaving with more and more wrinkled skeins, all night pulling out threads with her fingers, all that winding and rewinding, back and forth across the loom after breakfast, the sound of the soft contact betwen wool and wood, the rhythm, meshing color upon color, and then at night the whole thing in reverse, everything pulled apart until blue and silver strands turned dull, lost their sheen. 90 Risk, Courage, and Women Sometimes she would stop, try to see beyond the window’s flat shadow. She could not know him through that space, she could not know who he would be becoming in those years of sailing, slipping into fern— lined coves, dashing his prow against headlands so splashed with sun and spume that at first he couldn’t even tell who lived there. And who was it he would come home to after all her nights unravelling? Sometimes during those unfinished years, sometimes under the weight of a blunt moon, she thought she heard music, one of the men on the ground floor singing, so softly singing, and once she leaned down over the upstairs landing to see how they lounged in her chairs. She travelled their faces: not brutes, not swine, but men, beards curled across their cheeks. Some young, smooth as the rubbed wood of her loom. And the lean one with the flute, faith in the unknown 91 long thighs relaxed in sleep, smiling in his sleep. What if, at night, she left her weaving alone? Let it grow, become whole? What might the tapestry become if she stopped saying no over and over, refusing the downstairs of her own house? Penelope, faithful wife of Ulysses, was courted by many men during his absence. They were asked to wait until she completed her weaving, but each night she unravelled that day’s work. Reprinted from Way of Whiteness (Wings Press, 2000). ...