Tell Me, Which Is The Way To Ithaca? Poem by NORMAN ROSS

Love:
My love is as the love of Heroes
For I have conquered the World
And moved the Stone of Sisyphus
And my house is the house of the High Tower
I am not an anachronism
On the running heel of Time:
For Today and Tomorrow
I am the wind of Camelot
The rain of Troy
Flooding you with a hero’s love.

Are you not Isolde of the White Flower
Whom I, as Poet, reach out to touch with my wild kiss?

Do you rather turn majestically away
From dreams
And burn the Poems behind you?
The sun you love is at your back
Behind the window of your house
The shadows fall across the soil-white pages
Of non-words
And there, chained upon the Hearth
You busy yourself
Waiting, waiting…
A Penelope out of Time, living
Not Poetry, but
The news of the day.


Ah! My love!
On the beach
Where the never ending surge of water
Changes
The face of earth again and again
Each minute of the day, night, and always
Then and there when I recall the change in this thing called
Me…
The new sides, new forms, new shapes of me
Which came when you washed across my being
Like a wave retreating to the wine-dark sea
I will think of you.

For you disappear in the mist
Around a far corner
In a green Impala
And you are not of my house
The house of the High Tower
And I who have been touched by the eternal spark—
A Tristram, a Leander, and Odysseus
For me there is nothing left to do
But return to my house
There to lie in the street
And toss grapes at the moon.