the old days

twenty years is a long time
but sometimes Odysseus thought
back to even earlier times

next to groves
carrying sage green
the silver slant of olive leaf

bricks to bake
bread
a thriving business he owned

the bakery
a co-operative
began by the elders

in their younger days
laertes, mentos, nestor
with their children

agamemnon, odysseus, orestes
their dogs, their sheep
all it took to bake

and now, in the boat
adrift
those who remembered anything
bantered their stories:

you would never
lubricate the oven with graphite

they were using
suspended graphite

pasta and wine
might have been involved

you have to grease the
chain after every shift

laertes pushed my face into a pan
of hot dough in the steam room then called me an oaf

he was tough that laertes
knew how to run a business

how dare you besmirch laertes
you shirker of important responsibility

agamemnon would drink
full mixing bowls of coffee

he ate
coffee beans all day

i once crewed a ship with a guy who
got a large iced coffee made with 16 shots

of espresso
everyday - he ordered a "quad quad"!

he also ate raw
cloves of garlic

mentos ran the store
easy fare

he was of the bourgeoisie mind set
merchant like instincts

counter revolutionary
deserves observation

nestor was something
i once saw him throw a pan of bread

against the wall
because it was all sticking

his brow was thunderous
murderous bolts of dough

what about the ferret souled Manx
of Eumaeus

i had forgotten
human art in near equilibrium

back to those graphite
misses

misses should be documented
laertes would say

O stopped the conversation suddenly
as you, reader, may have already
stopped reading

i remember
even as a kid

telling my father
we should slice the bread

father, and then
they wouldn't have to

he laughed
like Dionysus

we could put it in bags
for them to keep fresh

he laughed
like Dionysus

O looked
from the middle of that sea

he thought of those
good days

his father
strong, happy, almost king of ithaca

he remembered the release
of bread pollen from the bricks

the mesmerize of fire
the blaze of the bricks

the smell of the chain
as he graphited

the golden grain
the black molasses

all this he thought
there in the middle

the wide wide sea
bluer than the rye label

he colored one night
for the introduction of a bag

he would make his father so proud
he would missed his father

in this ridiculously wide
wide sea

Eurylochus
raise the beams

lets set sail
before sunset