The Left Side of the Bed: A Penelope Poem from The Vow

The Left Side of the Bed is a poem from The Vow, Lucas Varro’s poetry publication for compressed, image-led poems shaped by pressure, restraint, and afterlife.

The poem returns to Penelope without placing her in the usual posture of myth. It does not announce fidelity, endurance, or grief. Instead, it lets the years move through ordinary things: sandals, cloth, a cracked jar, a cup, a knife, a dog, a cloak, a hollowed stool. Time is not explained. It is worn into the house.

The poem begins:

The first winter after he sailed
I kept his sandals by the door.

Not as a sign.

They had dried badly in the salt weather,
one strap gone stiff,
the heel dark with his weight.

At night I stepped around them
with the lamp held low.

Later, the years have become harder to deny:

In the twelfth year
I moved his knife.

Only once.

It had lain too long
beside the breadboard,
its handle polished
where his palm had held it.

A servant cut figs with it
and left the blade wet.

I took it from her gently,
dried it on my sleeve,
and put it in the chest

with the cedar comb,
the bronze pin,
the belt he wore
before Troy became
a word in other men’s mouths.

The poem’s final movement does not offer the expected reunion scene. It remains with the domestic gesture, the object kept ready, the side of the table that has not lost its place.

Continue reading: The Left Side of the Bed at The Vow on Substack