David Kirby: Penelope’s Suitors

Honestly. Not the brightest guys in the world, are they?
Her husband sails off to Troy, and beautiful Penelope’s there
just ripe for the picking, only she keeps putting them off,
putting them off, putting them off: every day, Penelope sews
a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, and and every night
she takes the stitches out. For three years. “Not making
much progress, is she?” say the suitors, who just sit around
all day like low-level mob guys in a Brooklyn social club,
clucks too dumb to run numbers or shoot anybody,
so the boss has them make coffee all day and rack pool balls.
Only in Ithaca, Penelope’s the boss. Then again, isn’t life
always a challenge? Don’t you wish that everything
important had a star by it like the ones they use in elevators
to show you where the lobby is? Usually it’s 1 or G,
but in your tonier hostelries it can be 2, and look at you,
you haven’t had your coffee yet, and all you want to do
is find the complimentary breakfast buffet that isn’t really
complimentary, but who cares? It’s where the coffee is,
damn it! You don’t want the fitness center or the pool,
you want your goddamned coffee! Or look, here’s
a package of hot dogs. “Our hot dogs are fully cooked,”
it says right here on the package: “Simply heat
and serve. Sauté, boil, bake, or grill over medium heat
for 5-7 minutes.” Wouldn’t life be better if more things
were like hot dogs, if our sweethearts arrived crazy
out of their minds in love with us but also gainfully
employed and our children appeared, not as squalling
brats but cheerful adults with their own residences
and no student loans? Statistics help: did you also
know that 70% of crimes are committed by people
under 40 because they don’t have anything—
house, spouse, car, family, future—and that 54%
of adult Americans, or about 135 million people,
are functionally literate at the sixth-grade level
or below, meaning they have difficulty understanding
he directions on a medicine bottle, can’t answer
questions about a newspaper article they’ve just read,
can’t say what a simple graph or chart means?
Statistics can actually make you a better person
and not a dumb cluck if, for example, you are over
40 and say to yourself I’m not going to commit
a single crime, much less 70% of them. Genghis
Khan said conquering was easy but that getting
down off your horse was the hard part, by which
I think he meant that it was no fun to bury your dead
as well as the dead of your enemies and then
set about managing diverse populations, maintaining
order and justice, setting up such infrastructural
niceties as taxation and public health systems,
and quashing rebellion among those of your enemies
who aren’t dead. But I also think he just meant
it was more fun to keep moving. That’s the suitors’
problem. They just sit there, thinking about how
bored they are. If you’re moving, you don’t have
to think. You can’t think, really. You just can’t.

~~~~~

Copyright 2026 David Kirby

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University (FSU), where he has also taught at international campuses. He has published over 20 books, including poetry collections and literary criticism, known for a distinctive mixture of lyricism and wit.