Poetry & Portraits: Ephesian

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Ephesian
By Eric Meub

The stream was dry the day John brought me here –
A bony, dusty waning of the year –
But now I faced a flood to be traversed
Without upending on the slithering stones
I knew were underfoot, but couldn’t see —
Beyond a shifting blur of serpent tones.
(You’ll fear a fall when you’re as old as me.)
Relinquishing my sandal, I immersed
A foot, and felt again that second skin
Serenely calling forth the calm within,
Where momentary courage is rehearsed.
It’s strange that flowing water always stirs
The dregs in me to rise as mariners,
Indifferent to the lineage of kings
Upstream, whose royalty of rocks and springs
Conspires to trammel me in heavy things.
Instead, my resurrected fleet prefers
To float upon the sky-reflected sheen
Down advents of the broadening ravine
In eagerness to meet, at last, the sea:
To pierce the vast inscrutable marine,
And drain each delicate identity
Into a universal you and me.
We make a changed and buoyant water then:
The bitter half is reconciled to die,
The sweetness lifted up into the sky
Until it overflows on life again.
With currents sinuating round my toes,
I stood there balancing opposing wills:
Of time which bleeds away and time which fills.
But even as I paused, the water rose,
Engorged with rain and saturated hills,
And urging me ahead or back: I chose
To totter on, too meaningless to grope
My way back up the heavy-hearted slope.
I’m no one’s mother now. I’m not that strong
Nor eager, any longer, to belong.
I’d rather perish, make the rabble cope,
And prove the popular assumption wrong.

Copyright © 2019 by Susan C. Price & Eric Meub Eric Meub, architect, lives and practices in Pasadena, the adopted brother of the artist, Susan C. Price. They respect, in their different ways, the line.