The Butterfly Song of Odysseus in Three Cycles - David Luntz

I. Adagio

Sometimes he wonders why he stays with her. It’s not just that he’s her captive. Perhaps it’s because she crowned him king the moment he washed up naked on her beach. Or lets him have his way with her whenever he wants. Or maybe it’s the way she strums a star-cranked dulcimer and sings the same songs his mother sang while the stars’ choral hum fill the pauses between her breaths and strokes. In those pauses, the roots of his being press down against the surface of the world and wind along the edge of his unformed thoughts. Sometimes those roots pierce the world’s surface and siphon away the residue of his dreams while he steps outside himself and watches the world dangle from a silver thread that weaves the minerals to the stars. At such moments, her voice recedes and slings his coiled quills and blazing feathers far past her dream- spun clouds. It’s then he senses she’s turning him into an owl, hawk, osprey or eagle.

And learns at last what his native essence is.

Perhaps, it’s for all these reasons he stays with her.

For so many days he loses count.

But each morning his bones say “no.” They tell him they will never rest here. Not in this charmed soil. Not once he dies. They tell him about a keening dog waiting by an empty shore and a wife stuck fast to a loom whose frayed fingers work all day to weave him home.

Yet each day love strangles obligation.

Until one night, after he’s pounded all his pain and longing into her, when she lies on his chest and says, “I know what you’re thinking, but, really, it doesn’t matter what you think, you know you can never leave me.”

Then he smiles at her and thinks:

Just watch me.

II. Allegro è Presto

Because he sees how he can use her power against her but knows also he has to time it perfectly. Because his mouth is hardening into a beak, his gums creeping over molars, toes bleeding from teething talons, and skin itching from pricking feathers. So, at midnight, when the island dogs’ howls and the sea-mews clang drench all sound at the exact moment the moon loams and dews the soil, he takes the gamble of his life and leaps straight off the top of an aerie-scavenged cliff, nine-hundred feet high, briefly suspended in the gloaming above a full moon’s raving current. Directly below lie shattered vessels on saw-toothed rocks waiting to impale him, tingling for his blood. But she’d put enough bird in him, as he’d wagered she had, that he soars far past those rocks. And when her spell breaks, he plummets into the safety of the ocean’s deep-vaulted keep. There, her handiwork is washed away, and when he rises to the surface a wherry plucks him off the swollen swells just as the sun seals the sea’s dark rim.

And he almost allows himself to think he’s made it home.

III. Grave è Lento

But he should have known better. Because now there’s only still grey sea and the weariness of silence. Silence so thick, should he press an ear to it, he doesn’t wonder he hears Chronos’s dull metronome. He mounts the prow howling at the drowsy air: Aeolus, give me some fucking wind. But who’s he kidding? It’s the nature of the gods to ignore you when you need them most.

With nothing else to do, he lies back against the mast and thinks back on the night before he left her.

What are they? he asks, pointing to the images churning across her chest like phosphorous in a ship’s wake.

Signs by whose combination you can write words, she says.

His eyes combust in cunning.

Would knowledge of these signs give him the power of prophecy?

No.

Would they let him see the thoughts of other men?

She shakes her head.

Then what use are they?

You won’t know until you decipher them…but I caution you not to.

Why?

Because they are just a way to make the same thing seem different. The knowledge is cursed.

Now those images seem so close. Yet so far away, too. Gleaming like lost amphorae, coins and oil lamps at the bottom of her skin, crying out to be rescued. As if he could dive into her chest and scoop them up, rub and restore them, put them back to use. Then he grasps their true shapes and meaning. But he’s been tricked. This knowledge cannot be forgotten or ignored. Like tissues spooling a cocoon, it winds through him slowly, separating feeling from thought. For days, he watches thousands of butterflies float across the still mocking sky. He remembers when he too could fly like that, spoiling in that unthinking knowledge.

Then the wind came.

蝶

Originally published by The Lumiere Review 2001

Work is forthcoming or appeared in Pithead Chapel, Bull, Vestal Review, Best Small Fictions, trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit, Rejection Letters, The Bureau Dispatch, HAD, and other print and online journals. @luntz_david