LAKEPORT, IDAHO

1972–1995

Zeno

Supper is boiled beef. Across the table looms Mrs. Boydstun’s face, haloed by smoke. On the television beside her, a brush strokes the upper eyelashes of an enormous eye.

“Mouse poops in the pantry.”

“I’ll set some traps tomorrow.”

“Get the Victors. Not the garbage ones you bought last time.”

Now an actor in a suit testifies to the miraculous sound of his Sylvania color television. Mrs. Boydstun drops her fork trying to bring it to her mouth and Zeno retrieves it from beneath the table.

“I’m done,” she announces. He wheels her into her bedroom, lifts her onto the bed, measures out her medication, pushes the TV cart and its extension cord into her room. Beyond the windows, out toward the lake, the last daylight evacuates the sky. Sometimes, at moments like this, as he scrapes the plates, the sensation of his flight home from London comes back: how it seemed as though the planet would never stop unspooling below—water then fields then mountains then cities lit like neural networks—it seemed to him that between Korea and London he’d had enough adventure for a lifetime.

For months he sits at the desk beside the little brass bed with the first verses of Homer’s Iliad on his left and the Liddell and Scott lexicon Rex gave him on the right. He hoped that vestiges of the Greek he learned at Camp Five might still be embedded in his memory, but nothing comes easily.

Μῆνιν, the poem begins, ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος, five words, the last the name Achilles, the second-to-last identifying that Achilles’s father was Peleus (though also suggesting Achilles is godlike), yet somehow, with only three words in play, mênin and aeide and theā, the line bristles with landmines.

Pope: Achilles’s wrath, to Greece the direful spring.

Chapman: Achilles’s bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse.

Bateman: Goddess, sing the destroying wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.

But does aeide fully suggest “to sing,” because it’s also the word for poet? And mênin, how best to translate that? Fury? Outrage? Vexation? To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.

Tell us, Goddess, about the wild temper of Achilles, son of Peleus.

Not good enough.

Speak, Calliope, about the outrage of Peleus’s boy.

Worse.

Tell the people, Muses, why Peleus’s kid Achilles was so fucking furious.