As always, there were obstacles
To her acquisition of such maps,
But she liked challenges, liked obstacles,
And was willing, patiently, to wait.

II
She had been told
That when Odysseus returned from his years of travel—
From his encounters
With Calypso and Nausicca,
With Circe
and the Sirens,
With Charybdis and Scylla
and the Lotus Eaters,
And from his journey into the land of the dead—
He could not sleep, and instead had carved,
Slowly, obsessively,
A map of his travels into the great wooden bed
He shared with Penelope.

That at dawn, the Chief Librarian had been told,
Odysseus would fall asleep,
Only waking, still exhausted, in the afternoon.

III
The Chief Librarian had been told
That Penelope—
After so many years of independence,
Of amusing herself with her Suitors,
And of bringing up, just as she wanted, her son Telemachus—
Was disturbed by the return of her restless husband,
And that she had begun to dream nightly,
Of voyaging into the future
In a strange ship
To Mars.

And she dreamed, too,
Of the history of earlier sightings of Mars.
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/online.bks/mars/chap02.htm

She imagined what it might have been like
To have seen Mars for the first time,
For Christian Huygens, on November 28, 1659,
And for William Herschel, on March 13, 1781,
Who, while looking at Mars through his telescope,
Discovered the planet Uranus.
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/online.bks/mars/chap03.htm

In her dreams,
She heard voices
Speaking of the Red Planet
And of a search for water
Beneath its frozen surfaces.
http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html

At last, unable to escape her dreams,
Penelope had begun work on another tapestry,
Weaving into it the most intricate and detailed map
Of the planet’s landscape.
http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola_pole2560x1920.jpg

IV
The Chief Librarian had been told, too,
That upon finishing the tapestry,
Penelope had laid it upon the bed,
And that, on the same day,
Odysseus had carved the last stroke of his map.

That in this night, they had both
Briefly shared the same dream,
And then had gone their separate ways,
He to the past, and she to the future.

V
In the Library of Maps,
There is an old bedstead and a tattered counterpane
Upon which the Chief Librarian beseeches
Each pair of visiting lovers
To lie.

Yet search as they may,
Lovers are never able to find the bed’s hidden maps.

by Moira Roth
Written 4/13/2001