The Myth of Memory: an Ode

I

How strong it is, this feeling of regret,
You long to see the lands and loves you've known.
(For Eden's flowers fade if you forget)
In dreams you may return, but wake alone.
Yes, now I know why great Ulysses wept
While searching for his love, his home, his throne.
Back where our timeless isle of time is kept,
Each moment you've remolded to renew.
When sailing back this new tale you accept,
For though you can't touch it, it touches you.

II

Not being, but becoming life was then.
Yet with our hindsight pain need not return.
In gilded tales we don't recall again
How bonded rough our souls we had to earn.
A natural instinct makes all quick things thrive.
But mortals also grow from strife to learn
That caustic conflict each one must survive
Ere parents' loving lessons have begun.
Much is betrayed and lost ere we arrive
Where we are briefly wise and round and one.

III

The past is purged and saved forevermore.
(Regret like hope sees what it wants to see)
Yet, while our painful past we still ignore,
From grief our great romance is not set free.
For chance, which forged us one, tore us apart.
Alone we drift as on an empty sea.
Except for dreaming, no course can we chart
To bring our Eden isle back into view.
And worse, the rumors rise to pierce my heart:
No longer are my friends the friends I knew.

IV

The dreams that drift us close to Eden's shore
May tug us to the Island of the Dead
Where men must face the darkness they abhor.
There great Ulysses took a young ewe's head
And severed it in two with his whet blade;
Just so my brain is lanced, pierced to the core
As conscience stabs and churns my memory.
From that appears a gathering of shade.
The nightmare of my mind is now set free.
Before me fearful faces form and fade
Whom I can't touch, but chill as they touch me.

V

From cloudy apparitions made of mist
Arise the countless souls I never knew.
Those wronged (by chance ne'er righted) can't resist
To drink the blood still dripping from the ewe.
Next icy spirits form to taunt and scold,
Past foes they are who hurt me and still do.
Yet worse the silent figures I behold
Whom thoughtlessly I harmed by act or slur.
And frigid shadows round my form enfold:
My friends as they are now, not as they were.

VI

But none of these can help to ease the strife,
When ghostly visions of myself appear.
Evolving emblems of each novel-life
Torment my mind. For in each one I fear
To see the tender souls I did betray,
The clinging flaws that even now adhere.
The foolish dreams and deeds will not decay,
Not if they hold a truth that I can see.
While others drink from river Lethe and stay
I taste the bitter Pool of Memory.

VII

A natural numbness eases all the pain,
Like waking from a dream no more afraid.
Preserve the tales if memories still remain
(Then never will the rose and lilac fade)
But when the ghosts come, listen as they speak:
"At home a sailor never could have stayed.”
“New lands, new bonds, new moments each must seek.
And if it need be conflict to induce.”
“To learn, to grow, to strengthen what is weak
And always with oneself to seek a truce."