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In this poem, Patricia has: In this poem, Patricia has given us an epyllion, a poem that feels like an epic, and yet does not require the large space that most epics occupy, or the verbosity that most epics present.  I figured this out when I reached the poem's center of gravity, which is the line "on your way to Ithica."  This is allusive not only to Homer, but to Constantine Cavafy's poem, Ithica.  The poem's implied speaker is advising the poem's reader, almost as if Homer had written the Odyssey in the second person voice in order to help Odysseus on his journey.  (I am not a big fan of Odysseus, so I am glad he is actually not the primary character in Patricia's poem,)  "Fossilized stories" and "keychain gods and monsters" will be met on the way to Ithica; thus forewarned, the reader will know how to deal with, or to avoid, them while moving toward Ithica.    The poem has two different mechanisms that work very smoothely together, and very efficiently, to convey the poem's message:  the use of metaphor and simile; and the sense of forward motion which is maintained by an unfolding catalog of descriptors (which is where the metaphors and similes function).  Momentum is also maintained by the shortness of her lines.  During my reading of the poem---and I was certainly bedazzled by it---I thought of the images moving upon the screen like a kind of kalaidoscope.       Here I must confess something:  although I admire Cavafy enthusiastically, and many of his poems have touched my life exquisitely, I do not enjoy his poem, "Ithica."  I think----and I am not writing this simply to curry favor---that Patricia handles the same sort of poem with much more success.  Cavafy's poem sounds like an invocation; Patricia's is, instead, a conversation.  This makes the poem more credible and more grounded in the quotidian experience that each of its readers bring to it.