by Cliff Beck.
Sailing eastwards under a clear sky
towards yet another day that once seemed so far away
we follow the stars we have always known to steer by.
I stand motionless at the prow
between the bow wave which,
like the treasure trove of memories saved
from my journey to now,
grows ever larger behind me;
while ahead the wind in the rigging,
the cries of the gulls and the spray in my face
herald a future
which I needs must embrace.
I ponder the things I remember and those I forget,
the regrets consigned to an oubliette
buried deep in my history
as we continue east
into tomorrow’s mystery
watching dolphins leap across the swell
on a journey they know so well
they neither remember nor forget.
Life presents us with so much,
most of which is left untouched, unnoticed, unretained
while we shape our private domains
with what we choose to keep and choose to lose,
choose to remember and choose to forget.
But what to let go and what to hold?
Should I remember drinking coffee in Padua,
or that the train to Venice left at half past one,
or that we almost missed it and had to run
without seeing Giotto’s frescoes.
But did we discover anything
about how the time goes?
Or should I let the detail disappear,
remembering the essence, the shades of meaning
that echo down the years,
forming the present and shaping a future
with its roots and its destiny in the past.
We sail on cutting through the waves,
through time zones, through our lives
developing closer ties
with these shadows and echoes
as they rebound and resound
between what’s been, what’s here and what’s to come,
well aware that we should take care lest we forget
not only the past, but with it, the future too.
I look up at the crows nest
and wonder if I could see
the present in its entirety?
Would I see how a sequence of now
grew from memories of then into impressions of when?
An albatross passes on its peregrination
which began at its final destination.
Winds strengthen, waves grow
as we voyage though the age of screen machines.
Relentless torrents of information
flood the decks with anxiety
and a maelstrom of digital debris
swamps my mind with superficiality
making the memory blind
to the echoes and leitmotifs
that bring reality into sharp relief.
The storm clouds coalesce
into banks of fog which dispossess me
of these intuitive, guiding beacons
leaving me lost, feeling distraught
and I wallow in oblivion, an abdication from thought,
barely aware that everything is stored in those clouds,
ready for AI to retrieve, manipulate and use to deceive,
shaping me, my past, my present and my future as it feels fit.
Ignoring Orpheus’ exhortation,
to drink of the Mnemosyne and find liberation
from the curse of too much forgetting
I drank too deeply at the Lethe Pool
becoming a hapless, shipwrecked fool
drifting in a slow-motion vortex
with no idea of what to do next;
my mind entangled in the threads of a web of shrouds
and the last shreds of my memory lost in the clouds.