The River Lethe

Hades, the land of the death for the ancient Greek, was crossed by 5 rivers. One of them, the River Lethe, was the river of forgetfulness and the dead, as they prepared to reincarnate and return to the realm of the living, drank from its waters, forgeting their previous life and experiences.

Alethea, the Greek word for truth, means the opposite of forgetfulness, something like unforgeting, bringing us to the platonic concept of knowledge as rememberance.

My personal Lethe takes often the shape of a narrow and shallow unamed Wiltshire river as seen by the faint light of a Winter morning, covered by that sort of low, thick fog that we can see from above and feels like something almost solid. The fog only covers the water and is a living creature, waiting for our consent to envelop us, guiding us through the memories we don't remember and then returning us to ourselves.

We look around with a vacant stare and the same feeling that we have when we try to remember and keep a dream that has already faded.

Lethe, the river

You leave the car by the bend of the river,
where the mist hovers like a dream of a stream.
You see scattered fragments from a thatched house
peeking through the still maze of branches,
behind a hedge withholding the silence.
You smoke a cigarette, a last one,
and listen to this dead quietness
that is made of breathed embers,
like you turning into void.
You ask yourself whether you are alive
when you leave the road of the dead pheasants.
You look at your own hands,
they are thin and pale, about to vanish.
You gaze the river as if it kept a secret,
but it is now that all poetry turns into dull prose.
You ask yourself from what strange wound
has your will been drained for so long
and you feel too empty to cry.
You are alone, you left your car
as if it never existed.
You have nothing, you face the water,
the sacred water that makes forget
and start again, fresh and with no name.
There is an island, but no boat.
There is another river, but no path.
You take off your clothes and start crossing.
You hold secretly my fading image,
as seen from the other side of the mirror.
And you go.

Note

Performance and Delivery

After finishing reading some poems at a poetry cafe, a friend told me "Good delivery" and that simple comment remained for some strange reason in the back of my mind while I drove back home.

I guess that what that comment made me realise was a significant difference that exists between what we usually call performance and delivery. Delivery is, of course, a form of performance, but it represents both offering the poem we deliver to someone who is listening and setting the poem free. By delivering a poem, I'm inviting the audience into something that is intimate and, in this sense, invites participation in an inward movement, setting the poem free from my own view of it; by performing, I'm the source of an outward movement, taking as a mission to impress my view of the poem upon the audience and thus not setting it free. I realised, thinking again on my friend's comments, that my concern has almost always been that of delivering poetry the best way I can.

Is it the only right approach? I don't think so. It depends on the interactions between poem and reader. Me? my purpose is to deliver poetry.