Nobody

“Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me.’”

Homer. The Odyssey.

 

My great eye like a roving sun saw a ship— 

the double-eyed men. 

Each morning I waited for them, my flock 

white-green unspooling down sloping hills, 

brushing their surging bodies under my monster’s hand, 

their cloud-cover lanolin on my skin. 

 

Then the nobody-men—my soft hands 

reaching for them, then their teeth tearing at my animals, 

me popping their ribcages between my molars 

like a blood blister. Me shutting them in the cave, then blindness, 

then ovine eyes glowing.

Everything going so wrong so fast. 

 

I could leave the cave closed and kill us all. 

But I am a gentle monster, so I roll away the stone, 

and the glowing sun stings my eye again and again. 

These men, with my animals’ meat 

already knitting into their muscles— 

they think I do not feel 

 

their clinging hands. 

Then they are away on their kill-boat. Nobody-man 

shouts his name from across the sea. I throw a boulder; 

I knock it down. And then I throw another—and another— 

and there is nobody to stop me, 

 

nobody, nobody, nobody—