Day of Disembarkation
It would be odd to call them Odysseys,
being outward, not homeward, bound,
lives made over by landfalls in strange cities
in spaces of magnitudes beyond magna.
Submission to a cyclopean physician
on an island more foreign than Phaeacia,
though penultimate stop of the passage,
certified the transference of homeland
and relegated Peloponnesos or Crete
to a recessive future in memory's eye,
despite a parenthetical return to bring
a woman away, not come back to her.
The couple married America and planted
a tree that would branch and burgeon into
complexions and tongues not seen or heard before
that momentous day of disembarkation.