Donald Platt
PROSOPOPOEIA
Because my toilet’s
backed up and I don’t have a plunger, my nervous bladder has filled
one and a half clear, glass
flower vases with urine overnight and throughout the morning. They stand
by the bathroom sink,
one half-drunk and one full bottle of vintage Chablis. My bladder
has always been nervous.
When I was taking doctoral exams twenty-eight years ago, I knew
I would have to piss
every half hour. I didn’t want to waste any moment of the precious
four hours
allotted to each of my three written exams by going down the hall
to the bathroom.
So, when they sat me down in Professor Tatum’s office, I had
my flower vase
ready. It was green and had wavy flutes like sine curves
on its sides. I kept
peeing into it profusely. I liked the way my urine bubbled,
burbled, foamed golden
as Homer’s Aegean at sunrise in the green vase. The way that the vase
in my left hand
grew warm with urine while I held my cock in my right hand.
One of the exam
questions was to write an essay on how the trope
of prosopopoeia
is used in any three of the major epics from the Western
tradition.
Prosopopoeia. Dactyl followed by a trochee. That wonderfully weird
Greek word.
It meant the literary device of having the dead talk to the epic
hero when he
descends to the underworld and asks them for help in living
this tortuous life.
In the eleventh book of The Odyssey, Odysseus—as instructed
by Circe—
digs with his sword a trough as long as his forearm
and as deep.
He pours into it the blood of sheep he has slaughtered. The dead
gather round,
thirsty for the blood of what was once alive. After they kneel and drink
blood so dark
it’s almost black, the dead can speak again. They are eloquent.
Their words hiss
and coil like adders into the hero’s ears. He will never forget what the dead
say. What I wrote
was eminently forgettable. I passed my three exams like kidney stones.
The oral exam did not
go well. I was so very tired from having filled my head
with the spectral voices
of the dead. The chair of my doctoral committee asked me to explain
Roland Barthes’ concept
of tmesis, that way of reading we all practice when we skip the long
boring passages
of landscape description in florid Victorian novels to get
to the juicy parts.
I kept hearing his question, which I asked him to repeat,
as “Would you care
to comment on Barthes’ britches?” I politely declined, explained
that I thought Barthes’
britches—how he wore them, when and where he took them off,
and with whom—
were best left unexamined. I thought my answer rather witty.
Unbeknownst to me,
my green vase full to its brim had a slow leak. Professor Tatum’s
Persian carpet
bore an unmistakable circle, yellow as the sun rising, raging
outside the window.
It stank. I had to pay for Spiffy Jif Cleaners to come
three times.
Finally, they gave up. Professor Tatum was glad when I graduated.
His carpet still remembers
me vividly. Now, my one and a half vases of decanted urine gleam
topaz in the morning
sun. I’ll go out soon, buy a plunger, flush the urine down the toilet.
But before I do,
let Michael, my dead brother, come to me again. I would hug him.
Three times
my arms will pass through the air he is. I will offer him bitter, shining
urine to drink
so he may say, Hello. Here we are. Goodbye. Like all the dead, he is thirsty.
I will give him what I have.
—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
__________
Donald Platt: “I write to shape into some cogent form the random experiences that life has afforded me. The story of passing my written doctoral exams while being handicapped by a weak bladder, only slightly exaggerated for comic effect, has been waiting for reincarnation in a poem for almost three decades. The anecdote of being so tired that I thought I was being questioned about ‘Barthes’ britches’ in my oral exam is, unfortunately, true. But this humorous material needed to discover a serious counterpart to make a true poem. Of course, that ballast was ‘prosopopoeia,’ the universal urge to talk with our dead again and have them reply to us. The turn to my dead brother Michael at the end of the poem came as a genuine surprise, but also—in retrospect—as an inevitability. To be given such an ending is to receive a kind of grace from some source outside the self, perhaps from the dead themselves.”
