A poet talks of time

 Stephen Dunn’s book Different Hours is about time. It’s also about how different human beings can experience it differently.

Take Odysseus, for example, whose trip home after the war took time. Odysseus sometimes thought his life was with his family back home. But he dallied quite a bit, living an interesting life along the way.

Dunn says Odysseus’s secret is that “this other life had become his life.” He always thought of home.

            But after a few years, like anyone on his own,

            he couldn’t separate what he’d chosen

            from what had chosen him. …

            A man finds his shipwrecks.

            Tells himself the necessary stories.

The poem has a dimension that strikes me as religious, or almost religious.

The poet asks: What are the gods? Our own fears? Intimations from the unseen order of things?

Whatever they are, they finally released Odysseus, and he zipped home.

Source: These lines are from “Odysseus’s Secret” in Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002, p. 32-33.