Don’t be fooled: he liked to travel.
He had a pattern, and always a woman
woven into his art. Even Athena spelled him at the helm,
kissed up to Zeus, and so on. His strength, he thought,
was courting temptation—the time he had his men bind him
so he could look the irresistible in the face.
He liked the romance in saying no. As he unbuttoned,
unzipped, he’d mumble wrong, so wrong . . .
the dance of that back and forth excited him.
And so I served the progress of his journey—
he fooled even me, small story
within his bigger story, just another way
to get himself home. Ready for his desk,
he could put down the details
of a ravishment, ever-penitent,
as he wove the threads of loss into a telling:
useless I was in the face of her tears. . . .

all that grand wrenching
played out in an agony of ego. It was like this:
he had to eat the peach down to its seed. He needed
to break the pitted husk, get to the kernel’s half
milligram of arsenic. He needed the right poison
to make a proper lament, served by wife, child and dog,
the waiting and ripping. Even so,
it took the gods to intervene—to make me want to let him go.