Memento

    by Stephen Maurer

Bonded by a climbing rope long ago,

my old friend,

who soars in academic circles,

sends a surprise invitation

to his seaside estate.

I'm welcomed inside,

mirrored walls multiply a fortune.

In his garden a shadow strokes his chest,

he touches my arm, confides:

At a colleague's last rites,

a light refracted by an irony of eulogy,

showed him buried alive

by an insatiable need

to be certain he'll live

in the resurrection of lasting honor.

Relentless challenges

by those in disciple's disguise

threaten the death

of an anonymous grave.

We walk along his beach, the tide low,

a rocky outcrop uncovers

a memory we share.

At the top of our first ascent,

he fumbled his camera,

it tumbled free, a thousand feet,

triumphant photos falling, vanishing.

We feel our old bond again,

resurrected by a trust and love

born long ago,

forgotten,

but never dead.

© 2011 Stephen Maurer

Certified in psychoanalysis by the American Psychoanalytic Association, Stephen Maurer has practiced and written about psychoanalysis for over 20 years, recently from a Lacanian perspective. A desire to be more fully engaged with poetry prompted his partial retirement from Seattle to a small college town. His poems have appeared in Boston Lit. Magazine, Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, Tiger's Eye, Darkling, Blueprint Review, Desert Voices, Switchback, and Deronda Review.  His first chapbook, Side-Effects; Poems of Remedy and Doubt, from Big Table Press, appeared in October 2010.