I like to watch a plea compile between the furrow of a brow,
like the indents of age that shot across the forehead of Odysseus
as he stood before his father and asked:
This place I've reached, is it truly Ithaca?
On the face of Laertes' child,
longing stung like a bolt from Zeus
wishing to belong within a home once overrun by memory,
now ruled by the shell of a war-torn son.

I see this look as your body drapes over mine,
skin honeyed with pleasure and fatigue.
Your eyes darken into a question you never ask,
tracing the remnants of the pain I felt a year or so ago
scarred into skin sweet only to your touch.
It does not take a sword to wound, and the mind can feel the blood-thirst of a thousand men.

Frequently, I have felt akin to the battleground of Troy,
not the warriors themselves, but the soil beneath their feet
the ground that saw hope die with the sting of metal.
I would be a fool to believe the war does not silently wage on, years after the last sight of a blade.
We lie side by side, and I will try to not disturb you as I toss and turn,
I reach for you but your body, in its coldness, awaits the pyre I pretend is not there.

In their eternal bed carved from life,
I imagine Penelope
wide-eyed and hungry. As the man she waited for
recalls the one-eyed giants
or that sweet, tempestuous song of the Sirens.
And I wonder how he musters the strength to sail by untouched,
forced each night to face the ones that did not return
and worse; the parts of himself he will never feel again.