by Jimmy Neenan
Is there a way to archive
this for eternity?
To hold it to my chest
until absorbed?
So that when I need it again
it’s easy to proffer
without breaking bones.
I’ll keep it as a letter
holds a sound.
Or a wheel
a circle.
Drink deep
from Mnemosyne*
and color my insides
with shades.
Is there a way to delete
this forever?
To get this feeling
gone from the
possibility of memory?
To scrub
beyond marrow and
banish cells to the darkness
of Lethe.*
To drop
like flame
scorched palms
windborne ash.
A footnote:
*Mnemosyne is the Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the nine muses.
*Lethe is one the five rivers of the Greek underworld. It is the river of forgetfulness.
Image by Navneet Shanu via Pexels
Jimmy Neenan’s excellent poem, “Archive and Exodus” prompted me to think of the ways in which reading widely can make us better writers. The poem’s references to Mnemosyne and Lethe might lead inquisitive readers to other poems containing these allusions. For ‘Mnemosyne’, for example,: Keats’ “Hyperion”, Tennyson’s “The Princess” or, more recently, a poem by Pascale Petit called “As if I Were Winter Itself”, which I read for the first time last year.
For ‘Lethe’ there are references in other poems by Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on Melancholy”), the Pascale Petit poem mentioned above, but also Alan Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”, John Ashbury’s, “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” (a difficult but amazing read), Sylvia Plath’s “Getting There” and “Two Campers in a Cloud”. Oh, and Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost, line 583, where we find: “Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls”, though I doubt many readers, having read any of the poems mentioned above, will forget them, as I am sure they will not forget “Archive and Exodus”.