The Lethe
Is the Lethe soft and warm,
Smelling of lanolin
Sufficient to wipe clean a lifetime
of wrinkles?
Does it cleanse the soul?
Or do they lie?
Is it only a cheap cosmetic,
Or a plastic surgeon yanking skin,
Wielding a razor-sharp scalpel
Marred by nicks and burrs that rip
and tear?
All that matters is gone:
Names to match the half-remembered
faces;
Memories to match those faces who
know mine;
The taste of spaghetti (just as
rich once rediscovered);
The flavor and the smell of mucus
(just as powerful);
The warmth of life (chilling until
found again).
To begin as a corpse rising pale
from a grave,
Sweet and cherubic as a piece of
chalk
Destined to write on a poorly-erased
slate
--- Is that fair?
Spaghetti came early;
Mucus late -- too long after hormones
set me mad;
Love even later;
Do you toy with Destiny, great River?
You've not cleansed trauma from my
dreams,
You left me wondering if all that
blood
Came from a dying animal
Or another sort of death, entirely.
Like a quack surgeon's scar,
Red-streaked and ugly,
Knotted like a mountain range on
a contour map
Threatening --
A buried splinter,
A shard of glass,
Or a forgotten surgeon's knife --
To break the surface,
Or just to fester, incurable, beneath
the skin.
You've left rivers:
Other rivers,
Flowing soft and brown in dappled
springtime,
Smelling of trees and full of singing
Like a disorderly gardener's heaven;
Rivers running gray and sluggish
As they backflow past the barbed-wire
Into woods and fields called swampland
In even drier days,
Offering mud-soaked travelers
Sparse rewards;
Rivers flowing large and wide,
Tumbling and spreading over broad
and narrow valleys,
Filling the flatter lands between
the hills
-- For the emotion is uncontrolled,
Uncontrollable,
Greater than the adolescent knowledge;
"And the deer bled,
Staining red the fur of the fox
And the beak of the buzzard;
Staining the hands of the inhuman
human crew
Who claimed its beautiful pelt"
And left it, naked muscles
twitching,
To drain its blood into the forest
loam,
To feed flies and maggots
And such petty scavengers as would
be drawn
By the odor.
Lethe,
Why do you leave me with such memories?
When you have stolen all that's
pure
And all that's rich
And sent me chasing over forty years,
Tearing my skin, building fresh
scars
To damp my years of pleasure
As I searched the world for lost
promises?
Why?
You've hinted at rivers.
I've never learned to swim.
I'm at the mercy of the bargeman
And know not if I'll carry the requisite
coins
Nor even if I wish to
-- I do not desire that crossing;
I'd rather stay.
Dare I think of rivers,
When they would leave me searching
For all their flood has washed from
my door
And scattered in some distant, downstream
field?
Dare I think of rivers
Which leave behind those fly-infested
carcasses
Of upstream drownings,
And worse?
Why may I not hide,
Steal past the Lethe,
Or over it on a bridge of my own
making,
A Prometheus of memories,
Warming myself by my own fire?
12-11-99
