Burnt Offering

Penelope

22 Penelope If I were a woman working a myth I could make my own – making, unmaking, all that stuff repeating whatever you read about a woman writing what does it matter I could simply say undoing unravelling unconscious – (this sun: leaching all the energy out of me and head aching, sun: I need shape, form, I need dream, sun, I need help). A book, like the bookclub ladies’ books Joan, why don’t you write a book? If I were a woman working who could answer why do you think Penelope pulled out all that knitting every evening creeping, unheard, unweaving every morning back to the first line – do we even know what she was making? The pure necessity – a shroud for the old king what was it, king, what was the image ingrained, what was the feel, the form, the ecphrasis, 23 the work of art, in other words, within the work of art? Imagine it, what was it was woven, woven together as unanswerable riddles? The train went over the bridge What was the driver’s name? Driven by the question Penelope all day at it all night with her handmaid pulling it all out like a nightmare, a dream anyway, where you never get anywhere only eventually over twenty two years… Perhaps, my daughter suggests (perhaps she only imagines it), what she was weaving, Penelope: the story of Odysseus – to bring him back – her own story in other words to make the masculine more secure couldn’t she weave to save her life to save his life she took it all out again – you’ve written yourself and written yourself off a long time – head still aching its head off: burnt out like the modem blitzed by lightning (like a fool I left it plugged in) Head stuck in the fence, will utterly undirected afraid of the hard and strong unable to turn this way or that since Sunday – 24 sheep with its head in the fence or rooikat after you’d eaten forty lambs and my brother finally caught you and caged you – bleeding above your right eye (taken you off to the Tsitsikamma and don’t be a bloody fool and come back). Shall I pull it all out, my knitting, I thought – I woke this morning thinking of knitting: like a picket fence needles pulled out fence of rib with the loops all loose – imagine walking around with that on your back, wrote Anne Sexton – imagine walking around with a picket fence (only I didn’t see it – my head’s been stuck in it since Sunday) Anne Sexton’s letters I’ve been stuck in them since Sunday acting upon me like a misfortune serving as an axe leaking all over the page bleeding to hell and gone – I dreamt a little blue car “whose car is that” I woke thinking, forgetting my own “bloo jool” I thought “it’s Anne Sexton’s” but it was trapped under a timber truck could anyone have got out alive no no no no no it is impossible! get out of there alive! there is a long thin fury whacking a plank fallen from the truck get out of there! she strikes the truck – hits back – 25 I can tell you it wasn’t my weaving that saved me – if you can call this saved sometimes I think I’m finished with that – will I go back, is it finished or not? All that doubt, all that sweat with the fucking suitors – it was my son, it was Telemachus, obviously, going off to parties, yes, and singing in rock concerts and all the girls all round him and always on the phone to his friends who haven’t listened in class and preparing for his last tests and nervous and tired of being the only responsible one and president of the SRC – but I’m his mother after all and I can tell you something (as I told my friend and she said: “isn’t that dependence” but actually this is my odyssey) when I look at him I see he needs me not fussing obsessing counting and keeping calm down, mother, take it easy – what he needs is my faith as the fates say that’s all, really, he needs nothing of me. 26 When the old king lies in...