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The title of Kristine Ueyeda’s Penelope Instructs Her Husband on the Nature of the Sea establishes an authority for this weaving-wife not borne of experience but of imagination. In the very first lines, Penelope admits:

I am not a sailor, Odysseus,
and what I know of the sea,
if folded in half, could live
in your palm like a splinter

Admits, however, may be the wrong term, for these lines show no indication of apology. We are not to take this as making her knowledge of the sea worth any less, small as it may be. The key to its value may be found in the very simile used to indicate its smallness. A splinter intrudes upon the skin and the wholeness of the body; even so does Penelope’s knowledge and way of knowing, external to that of sailors, intrude upon their understanding of what the sea means.

The sea becomes saturated with her meaning: “my name echoes beneath / the wavecrest like birdsong”, though the exact nature of that meaning is difficult to grasp. We cannot turn away from this poem to easily paraphrase the “nature of the sea” she is said to be describing, but we learn that emotion is as much a danger to ships—and presumably other things that can be joined—as the waves are:

A heart’s dull thrum, in time,
loosens the shipbuilder’s
surest union.

It is the very way the body reacts to knowledge as much as any external factor that dissolves what once went together. This makes a counterpoint to the Odyssey with the faithful Penelope and the struggling-homeward Odysseus, though it is tame compared to Molly Bloom.

This is followed by a refusal of silence. There is no true isolation even in the middle of the sea:

. . . A gull’s call
awaits no answer. Silence
is refused even in moonlight.

Notice how the line breaks lend emphasis to the contrast of the gull’s call that persists no matter how answered and the silence that is denied. The brief wait as the eye returns to the left margin makes the reader wait for meaning as the gull’s call does not.

There can be no isolation because the self is always present and

to be delivered whole we must
first survive ourselves.

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