Yarn (January)

[For Katherine Barnett] Penelope works the yarn night and day, unfretting fretting by turns. They are yearns and spurns, the yawns and torns, yangs and inevitable ying-things. Hills are that July colour cicadas intensify with cliché noise. The suitors are rubbish. Imagine what they'd be like at home. Unlike Odysseus. Altogether elsewhere, he lives the yarn hour by hour, shacked up with a witch or curling past whirlpools. His every third thought is home, more tears than trials, more pangs than ineffable siren singings. Sea is that January colour snow clouds darken. But first he must blind the monster, oblivion.