Innocence Blog

Then Lethe awoke and stood before his bed,

or if the shadows on the floor meant night.

he looked and saw that all was ruinous

here sulked an unfed plant and here

the milk for the cats, licked to the last

drop, like a plate of steel burnished with neglect,

like a bowl that remains empty for weeks,

and the carpets collected parts of insects,

wings, antennas, torsos, trapped

by monstrous dust while brown stems

grew along the wallpaper and made a map

of bifurcations, and looked like a deserted

territory some poet once dreamed up.

And while he waited in the living room,

the voice of Rosalind, Lethe's mother, spoke

directly from the pencil drawing he hung

on the wall beside the door, and the voice

confounded him, as an unprotected child

whose parents have marooned him in the night,

becomes startled and thinks what other person

could be trudging through the rooms, whose nerves

begin to quiver with the slightest noise he hears,

so the voice of Rosalind shook Lethe;

and made him like a prisoner who jumps

at the sound of keys rattling when the guard appears

and lifts him out of a cold, unwanted bed,

so the shock passed through Lethe, who thought,

"Here is my dead mother."