ROUNDABOUT

9 3 R R O U N D A B O U T C H A D D A V I D S O N As Odysseus finds his portal to the underworld, delivers his libations, I kill time just down the shore, a page or two away, in the blur the book becomes after taking o√ my glasses. Such trouble seeing, Tiresias must think, and why Odysseus goes there. Once I almost killed some folks is not a known beginning to any passage of the Odyssey, though in Anzio, just south of Rome, I almost did. Rental car. Mist and night. I had been drinking is sort of how the Greek bard starts his tale, and how I almost ended everything. You don’t come back from that, is probably what, watching Odysseus set out, Circe thought. 9 4 Y I thought the guy would kill me. He earned that dispensation, I suppose, from whatever held my car a second in the roundabout. Not one blemish on the bright red scooter ferrying them right up to the edge of my last night in Italy, and far beyond. I cannot see beyond that bright non-tragedy, and yet return again, again in mist, unlike the hero, man of many turns, who beholds his mother’s shade in Erebus, and three times tries to grasp her, to earn his passage home. ...