James Butler-Gruett: We Don’t Google It
On First Looking Into Karen’s Homer
and so we’re
in an argument now
about what color they mean
in Homer, what Homer means,
I guess, if he existed,
if his body were one man and
not agglomerate from
centuries of speakers, or
a woman, as I read somewhere
that Samuel Butler said
the author of the Odyssey
must be—
about what color the wine
Homer/they/she is referring to
when writing “wine-dark sea,”
Karen saying that there’s no way
the sea could look claret-colored
and me counter-arguing that there’s
no way there’s such thing as
green-blue wine
we don’t Google it because there
are some things it’s best just not to have resolved
in our argument—which we’re
not in the same room for, by the way,
it happens online, when
I’m unshaven and eating cucumbers
if you can believe it, I know
and she’s probably alone
doing something beautiful
the jigsaw way we talk
there’s something there
and we cut each other up
because it’s hard to differentiate
the dark pieces
sea-dark, like the wine.
James Butler-Gruett is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Arizona. He is from Nebraska and was raised by opera singers.
