Eugene Mahon
Welcome back from vacation, everyone, and Happy Labor Day! Given what has been happening to labor lately, there’s too much to say about that here, so it will have to be left to the editorial pages. Meanwhile, here is our September poet, Eugene Mahon. Many of you who know Eugene Mahon professionally may not realize that he is also a published poet, playwright and literary critic. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Irish Times and in an anthology of poems by psychoanalysts, Between Hours, edited by Salman Akhtar (Karnac Books, 2012); his plays have appeared in Art Criticism (SUNY Stonybrook). One of his poems, “Steeds of Darkness,” was set to music by the American composer, Miriam Gideon. Among his professional books are two on psychoanalysis: A Psychoanalytic Odyssey (Karnac Books, 2014) and Rensal the Redbit (Karnac Books, 2014, in press). He has also published more than fifty articles on a wide variety of analytic and literary topics, including “Dreams, Memory, Mourning;” “The Oedipus Complex” and “Play and its Vicissitudes,” as well as Shakespeare, Sophocles, Coleridge, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. Eugene Mahon, M.D., practices adult and child psychoanalysis in New York City, where he is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He is a member of the Contemporary Freudian Society and the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a pleasure to welcome Eugene Mahon to our pages with the three poems below.
Irene Willis Poetry Editor
ICARUS
Icarus,
Your father was a fool.
He could not see
The legacy
Of your exorbitant flight:
The wax
And feathers
Of your broken wings
Washed up
At Kitty Hawk.
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?
LAKE GARDA 1984
Committing Catullus to memory
We swam at Sirmione,
The lake contained, yet sea-vast
As any ocean.
Soles occidere et redire possunt
You said, your body’s reflection
A mosaic in rippled water.
As waves translate the past anew
With ever trembling motion
I said:
Suns can fall and rise and fall again.
For us, when fails our briefest light
Sleep wakens nevermore from vastest night.
And then you with a swagger of your head
Like a wave’s swagger or a seal’s, said
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda
And our sudden tears, contained, yet sea-vast
Were a challenge to the griefless motion
Of the lake
As sun began to seep like blood
Into the evening
Unaware of other dawns
Bursting on the scene with redder blood
No more than half a world away.
( The lines of Catullus translated literally would be: Suns can rise and fall again/ But when our brief light fails/Night is a perpetual sleeping.)