Envy of Other People's Poems

In one version of the legend the sirens couldn't sing.

It was only a sailor's story that they could.

So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed

By a music that he didn't hear -- plungings of the sea,

Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds –

And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,

Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing

the awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever

On their rocky waste of island by their imagination

Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.