Chris Jennings

Eumaeüs sleeps to the sound of rivers

and wakes to the sound of the rain

smashing the puddles and mud.

Spring means a few stormy days before heat

reclaims rock and scrub.  The swine are quiet.  Eos

struggles against the clouds.  They are still gone.

 

Soon the fields will fill with old men and slack-minded

boys ploughing shallow, wandering furrows

or chasing farm girls rather than wide-ranging sheep.

Last year's unharvested olives rotted

on the ground and wild grass reclaimed hard-broken

land uncontested.  Ten breach-born lambs died.

 

Work is hard.  His body will not let him forget

this.  First to wake, he lies in

the dark and traces hard ridges of scars,

old and new, like turgid worms burrowing

through a wet mixture of manure and mud against

his sun-cured, swine-brown skin.  

 

Laërtes was never gone so long.  Nor did he

export twelve shiploads of able-bodied men

and leave behind an infant son.  

                                              Such ungoverned

morning thoughts trouble Eumaeüs often

these days, mixed with his still-clear childhood memories

of Syria and the father he lost.

 

                                            Cuchulain stirred,

            Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard

             The cars of battle and his own name cried;

                    And fought with the invulnerable tide.

                                 - W.B. Yeats, 'Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea'

 

First in, I'm still leaning into the chain link,

stretching two-a-penny bubblegum muscles.

 

Helmet rocking on his too-small head, he snaps

a bat off the racks and bounds into his cage,

 

pumps quarters into the machine and digs

hand-me-down spikes into hard-pack red shale.

 

Twirls the bat a few times like Stargell (too young

to know that though) while the machine hums.

 

A hole in the wall spits the first raggedy cage ball.

Its shallow arc rings the links behind the plate.

 

When it hits, he's still gesturing toward

the wall he imagines down the left field line.

 

I reach for my toes when he glances around

to see if anyone noticed this minor defeat

 

before he digs in again.  Swings from his hips.  

His head jerks back to counter the weight of the bat.

 

The fence rattles worse than a jeering crowd.

His next cut topples him into the shale.

 

You can't see the ball before it bursts from the dark

hole in the padding that protects the machine

 

and the sun's just high enough now to shine

into the box, hiding the central column in shadow.

 

You have to listen for the hollow plunk of air

the ball pushes through the drive chute.  Experience.

 

We're face to face for a moment.  I say

'Can't hit it if you hate it' and as he glares at me

 

his eyes fill with horses and the cars of battle

and the sea, though he won't know what they mean.

 

I climb into my cage, fish for quarters, watch

him flail at his futility, each swing driven

 

by concentrated, purposeless rage.  Balls pile

at the back of the box, immaterial, forgotten.

 

I dig in, and when that first pitch comes,

I close my eyes and punish the morning air.

 

Say

there are other universes

very much like this one

 

in one of them there's a planet

very much like ours

 

it knows it's an island

alone in its own sea

 

its continents support divers life

 

but they're separated

by uncrossable seas

 

so life on each continent is unique

alien to the life on all the others

 

one of these continents has grand mountains

whose peaks get lost in the clouds

 

even when sun blurs refractions

of ice and rock into a cloudy haze

 

hidden somewhere in these mountains

there's a lake so protected from the wind

 

that its surface looks frozen in summer

 

that it reflects more precisely

than the lakes in amateur watercolours

 

somewhere near the centre of the lake

there's an island with a stand of trees

 

where a species of insects gnaws

this singular bark for a particular chemical

 

necessary for their reproduction

 

their hard, black carapaces

turn sunlight midnight blue

 

except one the colour of evergreens

under a crescent moon just different

 

enough to blend in with the others

from a yard away but shine green

 

like an emerald next to a leaf

and though even the other insects

 

don't notice its peculiar hue

it does and it fucking hates itself