This nation is in the midst of an unprecedented opioid epidemic.

That being the case, it seems to ol’ UD that the Halloween poems she features this year might as well display that element of the Halloween mood which is drift, dreaminess, creepiness, trance, immobilism, morbidness… UD‘s commentary is in brackets.

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OPIATE

Gottfried Benn (translated, Francis Golffing, 1952)

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Opiate, aconite
beckoning lust and cadaver
Lernaean fields
that my soul drinks
as its elements press forward,
hear its flute-song, its cry:
“As you infuse your poison
restore the self, past itself.”

[Lethe beckons. One wants to make an end of it, to cancel consciousness, if not through death and if not through sex, then through taking one of the many poisons that get the self past itself into a condition of twilight sleep, the self “restored,” fulfilled, in stasis. (“The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment...”) Lernaean fields feature streams to the underworld, to oblivion, and one’s soul drinks that up.]

Cosmogonies, spirits
in the smoke of Hyoscine
atomizations, syntheses
of change, Heraclitean:
These are the very same rivers
but not the Ποταμοί,
opiate, showers of rain
driving past river and self.

[One wants to make an end of it and enter new worlds – cosmogonies. One wants the opiated air to summon metamorphosing spirits. Opiates offer you a way out of not merely the self, but the trivial changes of earthly life, the dull sublunary differences that after all only hasten you toward suffering and extinction. Opiates shower a cleansing rain that takes you past earthly rivers and an earthly self into “river god” (potamoi) worlds that transcend the human.]

Amphorae stand and tables
Before shades, dream-drugged,
thorn of sleep, fresh poppy calyx,
welling white to our lips:
here, too, is the threshold
from which comes a sound of flutes
and as the garlands unfold,
wine and ashes subside.

[The final stanza begins and ends with opiating wine. Amphorae for millennia have been containers for wine, and here they stand in a dark room, a dream chamber into which we’re descending via the poppy’s needle, the heroin’s hypodermic, the opiate’s white (deathly) liquid “welling … to our lips.” Again, as at the poem’s beginning, we drift toward the seductively tuneful threshold of nonexistence. The poppies open up to us draughts and draughts of their white wine until the wine itself – life itself – and death (ashes) subside. Lust and cadaver – the fever and the fret – both go up in smoke.]

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