Telemachus did well, I think, to stay,
in spite of what his father might have said
about the promise written in the stars.
The island was all right, nothing fantastic,
but he called it home, then made it home
by taking on himself the fond discharge
of homely duties—taking out the trash,
deciding which of nature’s green-leaved things
one should call weeds and separate to mulch,
accepting that it’s infinitely harder
to stay put than rush away. Ulysses would have
loved the grand illusion that adventures hang
on precipices, passions, clashing rocks:
the crude near-misses of the manly life;
he went off to war, as men still do,
for reasons the community allowed
were just and not just his. But once the Trojans
had been done to death: What then? What then?
“Boys will be boys,” they always say.
Think of him, Telemachus, who loved the stars
no less for watching them from where he stood.