The Stingray's Telegony

An outsider poet, feverish with influenza, blurrily dreams of the ‘Telegony’, a lost Classical poem detailing Odysseus’s post-Ithacan wanderings and their consequences… “fever dreams of splinters and blurs, murmured / from a bed of half-sickness, half-awake, half-dream…” Hazily picturing himself as a stingray following Circe on her voyage across the sea to her famed isle of enchantments, the poet reimagines her not as a sorceress, but as an archaic Sun eclipsed by gods and men… “once I was the sun herself: a blazing eye, / a body of fire: once I was a woman all my own…” As the dream unfolds, Circe conceives a son, by Odysseus and by magical incantation, the last of his kind. It is this boy who will bring the curtain down on Epic Time through a tragic quest to find his father, in which the stingray is intimately involved… “as Circe sets herself into the earth, let the son / be born snowdrop-drunk, let the father be forever / entwined to the soul of the sting…” Probably the strangest treatment of the final episode in the Trojan Cycle you’ll ever read, this narrative thread formed of surreal marginalia moves through myth and meaning, time and history, gender and cosmos, towards the moment when blood is spilled, and a goddess’s hidden rage is avenged… “because the whole point / of a midnight sun is that it dies…”