The Door

By Thom. Seawell

 

      Have you ever walked into a room with some purpose in mind, only to forget completely what that purpose was?

      Apparently the doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses. Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what's known as an “event boundary” in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the  next. One’s brain files away the thoughts one had in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the new locale.

     Thank goodness for studies like this -- It's not age that causdes such lapses, it's that damned door!

 

THE DOOR

On a sculpture by Ivan Albright

 

     There is a door

           made of faces

faces snakes and green moss

 

     which to enter is

           death or perhaps

life which to touch is

 

     to sense beyond the

           figures carved in

shades of flesh and emerald

 

     the Inhabitant at home

           in his dark

rooms his hours shadowed or

 

     lamptouched and that door

           must not be

attempted the moss disturbed nor

 

     the coiling lichen approached

           because once opened

the visitor must remain in

 

     that place among the

           Inhabitant's couches and

violets must be that man

 

     in his house cohabiting

           with the dark

wife her daughter or both.

 

By Lewis Turco 

From The Inhabitant, Poems by Lewis Turco, Prints by Thom. Seawell, Northampton: Despa Press, 1970. Out of print, but all poems from the series are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007.

 

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