Before the Door: On No Man Comes Home
There are stories that appear to move towards home.
And there are stories that discover, very late, that home is the severest place of all.
No Man Comes Home is a twelve-canto literary retelling of The Odyssey from The House of Cadmus: a poem of concealment, recognition, return, and the cost of surviving long enough to come home.
The Odyssey is often remembered as a tale of wandering: islands, monsters, enchantresses, storms, songs, shipwreck, disguise, vengeance, bed, reunion. It contains all these things. It is generous enough to hold adventure, marvel, danger, humour, grief, cunning, recognition, and the dark intelligence of household law. It has crossed centuries because it can be read by children as a tale of return and by adults as a study in what return requires from those who have survived too much.
But beneath the voyage lies a harder wound.
Odysseus survives by concealment.
He lies, brilliantly. He hides, patiently. He becomes Nobody and escapes death. He listens while others are sealed against hearing. He enters his own island as a stranger, his own house as a beggar, his own marriage by way of a test. He withholds in order to continue. He survives because he can make himself difficult to know.
Yet home asks another thing.
A house cannot be restored by a man who remains only strategy. A wife cannot receive a legend in place of a husband. A son cannot be healed by a name. A father cannot embrace a method. A dog knows by scent what a hall refuses to see. A scar speaks before speech is safe. A bow remembers the hand. A bed proves what fame cannot.
Into this world Odysseus must return.
Not as a simple hero.
Not as a restored king.
Not as a man whose sufferings cancel the sufferings caused by his absence.
He returns as someone who has survived by arts that intimacy cannot wholly trust.
The twelve cantos are not episodes arranged for ornament. They are twelve surfaces on which return becomes visible and less simple: absence, sonship, captivity, nakedness, naming, displacement, the dead, command, disguise, recognition, marriage, morning.
Each canto advances the story.
More importantly, each canto advances the reader’s capacity to feel the final silence correctly.
For this is not a poem of easy restoration.
Continue reading: Before the Door: On No Man Comes Home at The House of Cadmus on Substack.
Also in House of Cadmus
No Man Comes Home II — The Son Sent Out
Telemachus leaves Ithaca not as a hero, but as a son forced into motion by a house that will not correct itself. Seeking news of Odysseus, he discovers that a father’s absence can become larger in other men’s mouths than in the life of the child who has carried it. He wanted certainty. He received scale.
No Man Comes Home I — The House Without the Man
Before Odysseus returns, Ithaca has already become a battlefield. Penelope rules by delay, Telemachus grows beneath the weight of absence, and the suitors corrupt hospitality from within. The first canto of No Man Comes Home begins not with the hero, but with the damage made by his absence.
Bellerophon and the Borrowed Height
Bellerophon begins not in triumph, but under sentence: renamed by blood, purified beneath guest-law, and sent east carrying the sealed order for his own death. This House of Cadmus Greek myth retelling follows the man who rises by Pegasus — and mistakes borrowed height for possession.
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On The Lantern Chronicles, I gather writings from Angkor, myth and legend, contemplative essays, and poetry — works shaped by silence, beauty, wonder, memory, and the deeper questions that follow us through the world.
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