“… she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream.”
- Vladimir Nabokov
Lentor, a poem
lentor, a poem
Blubbery, viscid mud you sink into;
forces larger than you
that tug at your descending boots
and pull them from your toes
with a resounding swoosh;
natural inner contradictions that slow you down;
mathematical errors too delicate be be perceived;
burning infections, spasms, but only just below
the threshold of perception;
an increase of reverse action
that frictionlessly resists cohesion;
acrimony as an animal process –
the diminution of you
lost in your own magnified chaos;
all of it, a carefully balanced stagnation.
by matt at shadow of iris
If you enjoyed this poem, perhaps you might like this one as well, a river runs dry, a poem.
Thank you for reading lentor, a poem.
“… he was ‘infested by a kind of drowsihead and lentor,’ to which he gives ‘that direpubtable name, Stupidity.”
- Alice Gaussen referencing Thomas Percy
“These images are not the language of reality, they are the symbolic language of metamorphosis, or resemblance, of poetry, but they relate to reality and they intensify our sense of it and they give us the pleasure of “lentor and solemnity” in respect to the most commonplace objects.” — Wallace Stevens
Thanks for the vocabulary addition, and especially the Stevens quote–my fifth grade french reminds me that ‘lentement’ means slowly, so in the revival of that lyric language, the word seems especially rich and languid. Your poem uses it deftly, speaking of a spiritual state that has little to do with physical movement–my favorite lines(to me the most evocative ) concern the frictionless resistance to cohesion that bespeaks a troubled psyche, and that alliterative ‘acrimony as an animal process,’ that may explain how if not why.
I came across the word lentor and it really struck me as a neat term. I love going through Google books – you can specifically request only books from the 1800s. That is, I went there and typed in lentor and was just overwhelmed by all the neat uses. For this poem, I specifically copied phrases that caught my attention from a very old medical text book that described lentor as a kind of disease that affected the blood. I then played around with all the phrases until I got what I wanted! I’m glad you liked it!