Click here to read about Eugene Mahon
Freud 1939
“Talking about the past is like a cat’s trying
to explain climbing down a ladder”
Robert Lowell letter 3.15.58
With half a mouth
In his final years,
Wholeheartedly,
Sun and retina
Aligned with tilted
Manuscript,
Lightning and silent
Thunder of thoughts
Flashing within,
Pen on paper
Correcting,
Revising,
Bearing witness
As jack-boots
Clacked
On the cobbles
And history
Held words by the throat,
The voice poured
Out of the cracked vessel
Like a prophet’s curse:
“Death is not inside you
‘til you stare it down.
The dream is only yours
When you awaken.”
Eugene Mahon Sept. 2005
Freud
Was it his greatest feat
Perhaps
To make a science of listening,
As if he knew a scream
For what it was,
A storming of deaf ears,
A deafness not of others’ making
But our own,
The worst indifference
A self in flight,
Not from the locked out wind,
The banished rain,
But from a wind within,
The heart startled
By its own insistence
Beat after beat after beat?
Did silence,
Like a sobbing child
Bring hidden words to him,
And did he hear them through the tears,
And even find a word for silence,
A word to calm the screaming?
Was it his greatest feat
Perhaps
To call this silence
By its name,
To call it out of its own dreaming,
And lead it home?
Eugene Mahon 6.03.04