Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Christine Perrin. She is a teacher at Messiah College and the recipient

of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including

the New England Review,

Image, and Tricordially. She's also the author of The Art of Poetry from Classical Academic

Press, which is an anthology of poetry for students. The poem that I'm going to read today is from

her 2016 collection, Bright Mirror. And it is called Reading Telemachus. This is how it goes.

Swaddled in sheepskin, the door latched by Euriclaea, all night he takes his own counsel,

weighs wisdom's course. Should he search out the windark sea? At dawn, he summons the full assembly,

Cypress staff in his unpracticed hand, to speak and weep with the men who knew his father.

Next scene, he provisions the ship he will leave on. Each autumn, the brine and measure of this

tailor on my tongue, everyone tells me it's about

fathers and sons, impossible returns, and the immortality of home. But in your 16th year,

when you take my hand across the table, where we are dining late, I read your unswerving face,

your shoulders tilt.

I discover it's about leaving after all.

This is one of the poems that particularly stood out to me from this collection when I read it last year.

I read it the whole collection cover to cover.

And it's quite good. You should pick it up. But I like the structure of this poem because we get four stanzas, each four lines. The first two stanzas are about Telemachus from the Odyssey, about the Telemachus, those first

few books of the Odyssey where Telemachus is trying to decide what he's going to do. You know, what's the next step he's going to take? How is he going to take control of a situation that seems to have

gone beyond him? And ultimately, how is he going to preserve the legacy that his father left behind

and seemingly won't be returning to? So he goes to get some advice from people that his father trusted.

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