Chapter One: POLUTROPOS/THE ODYSSEY OF OTIS

"Cyclops, you ask me for my famous name.  I will tell you then, but you must give me a guest gift as you have promised.  Nobody is my name.  My father and mother call me Nobody, as do all the others who are my companions."  So spoke I, and he answered me in pitiless spirit:
"Then I will eat Nobody after his friends, and the others I will eat first, and that shall be my guest present to you."                                                                             
                                                                   -THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER/Book IX

 

Invocation To The Muse

O my willful muse, assist me in the tale of the New Odysseus.

  A sad moon silently rolled the light it borrowed from the sun across the night like a great hopeless eye that never expected to see love again.  The Redondo Beach breeze struggled to lift and lower the royal palm boughs but only made the fronds twitter like lashes on dreaming eyes.
  The tradition was ending.  Penny watered the violets on the kitchen window sill.  She looked out to sea, then took her Blackberry from her sweater pocket.  She unfollowed him on twitter without looking at any of his new twitpics or reading his updates.

  Penny cleared the kitchen and made the shopping list for the last poetry party.  They had been having these monthly shindigs ever since her husband, Otis, the beach cities' beloved poetry professor, became the poet laureate twenty years ago.
  Generations of budding poets had written their first poem in his class and spilled wine on his carpets the last Saturday of each month in joyful symposiums.  In recent months the potluck of poets had become an unpleasant, thankless ordeal for Penny.  The guests no longer contributed.  This crop did not know the meaning of the word "xenia".
  The tapestry of rich memories was torn.  A tear rolled down Penny's face when she looked out the kitchen window and for a moment mistook a shadow on the shore to be Otis.  The host had missed so many of his parties that the hostess decided tomorrow night's would be the last poetry party and the last Valentine's Day she would spend alone while her husband was reading love poems to strangers.  She unfriended her husband on facebook.  Pretending they were still together had become a crushing weight.

- to be continued -