In Medias Res
Poems by Sean Bentley

Soup | What is, what was | Persistence of Vision
According to legend, | Moon, moons | In medias res

Soup

Waking, or barely, from one dream
yet another’s overflow soaking through, 
fragments like portions from yesterday’s soup 
blended in today’s recombinant recipe,
a chowder everlasting added to nightly.

The Hunterian Museum is topped up
with bell jars and vials where float morsels
of flesh, the fetus of a walrus, an armadillo,
a human (or five of them, Victorian quintuplets
who didn’t make it). Organs whole, sliced, 
yellowed in their decades of pickling—
elephant brains, avian spinal cords—
a warthog jaw embellished hellishly
with a tumor like a misshapen cholla.
And skeletons in every state of twist and gnarl, 
bullet-punctured skulls, mis-healed limbs, 
bones simply ancient, or fused like badly grafted trees, 
as bulbous and lobed as the sycamores in Russell Square
weirdly limbed like primordial creatures trying 
to decide which genus to adhere to. 

In Sir John Soanes’ house-cum-museum
the rooms are drawn and quartered
into huge vials brimming with relics
of stone, plaster, paint and wood
from age to age—busts and torsos,
urns, sarcophagi, a progression of style
from Assyrian to Greek to Renaissance.
Lessons in how to build and decorate to fit 
one’s needs and fancies, where and how 
to nestle yourself among the centuries.

In Marseille too, and Arles, where the bay or Rhone 
harbor Roman treasure long sunk in muck,
museum vitrines like transparent carapaces
show off the bones of past lives (not always 
treasure, not always bones: pottery
and tools, fish hooks, knives, whole boats 
loaded with stones destined once 
for city pavings—mere rocks; capitals, volutes, 
cornices from columns pillaged
and dumped overboard in disdain
as one regime ousted another, civilizations 
evolving through versions of corruption,
dead-ending like saurians or advancing
like eohippus to equus—here together
now under fluorescing light
in one gathered swirl of history
complete with explanatory panels
in three languages. All part 
of a gumbo not quite endless―just not over 
till it’s over. Our and the dodo’s rickety bones,
the Moors’ and the Cathars’, roiling together.

I wish my dreams had as much explication
and wayfinding assistance: context
and code-breaking, the reassurance
of underlying clarity and order
and the knowledge that certain strains,
certain timelines, won’t repeat—
or cautions of what to watch for
next: what are we doing right
this time, or wrong, and how
might we wake up.

What is, what was

What is (always) versus what is (now, 
afterwards). Now
the world without end (once we had 
hubris enough, or blindness 
to say that without doubt) could end, 
although yes, there will be the clouds, 
which look the same here as in France,
in ancient France, or the forlorn
hoots of ring-necked doves
the same here as there—what is,
despite miles and passed time. Sand 
being sand on the Costa Brava or Haida Gwaii, 
despite Roman plinths or totems.

Petals from our backyard dogwood
drift over, settle onto the koi pond, 
above and below
as they were in the beginning
and ever shall be.
We and our obsessions drift too
and melt into the earth
that truly has no end.

Persistence of vision

     In memory, Richard Alan Smith

          “[E]vents ... catch my attention for a moment as they happen. 
          Why, out of a thousand possible perceptions, are these the ones
          I seize upon? Reﬂections, memories, associations, lie behind them. ... 
          So it is not just Seventh Avenue that I see but my Seventh Avenue, 
          marked by my own selfhood  and identity...”

                    — Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

Do I have the right to say “My Eugene”? Mine,
amongst all the retired hippies selling pottery
or herbs at Saturday Market or ambling emblematic 
in tie-dye and wild hair, college kids jay-
walking or scootering in packs, embillowed 
in vape smoke, among shoals of the homeless 

crashed under bushes and bridges, and neighbors 
of all stripes, not to mention my wife, returned 
after half a life away, with her memories 
of friends who live here still? I’m a newbie, 
how can I say “mine”? The same way 
Oliver Sacks describes “my Seventh Avenue”:  

my perceptions and associations irreproducible, 
colored by everything else I’ve ever seen, strung 
invisibly together. A persistence of vision. Like 
how our brain turns a strip of still frames 
into a blockbuster. 
Today as usual I share the coffee-shop 

with other regulars, try to block out the same 
Spotify soundtrack and clattering baking trays 
and chit-chat, but my bakery has an alternate 
and equally viable reality to theirs — 
more real, even. To me.  
Another example… an old man. (And yes, 

I still say that, despite my own turning 
a gobsmacking seventy.) Relocated here after 
decades away, in his last years, his memory 
a fraying veil of lace. The Eugene he’d known 
persists so indelibly, despite the flickering nature 
 
of his day-to-day, that he insists there are 
two Eugenes: the one he says we say he’s in now 
not the same as the one in his head: palpably 
unlike — not just evolved but altogether 
other, in perhaps a different state, although 
occasional throughlines surface:  the houses he owned 
back then, one of which he built, that he thinks 

he still owns; good old campus buildings 
holding their own beside the incursions 
of new construction; his old dive bar now 
a new dive bar. Someone broke into his life 
and stole everything.... and replaced it 
with a not quite exact replica.

                              Apologies to Steven Wright

According to legend,

there was a sun that would warm your back
pleasantly in the morning, and your shadow
would look up at you from the table
where you sat. It is said
there were tables.

As I hear tell, men came,
came close enough to see their eyes.
As myth would have it,
you would not flinch and would not 
have already gotten up and left.

They say that there were lions,
not here but somewhere,
like the ones that are said to have
been painted on cave walls 
in olden times.  Reportedly,
there were walls, there were
caves somewhere. Not here.

As myth would have it, there was sound.
Not this blanket of silence, but music
made by things that flew,
or rolled or ran.  The story
is that once there was sweetness
and bitterness, and what we call
the moon passed above like a cold eye
and saw that it was time for us to go.
.

Moon, moons

When I saw Moon of Stone Flowers
I withdrew to my warm place
and considered the belling of the wind.

Then Yellow Stick Moon called
the first ranks of bentgrass,
who brought their tiny arrows.

Moon That Dances in Pines
sweated and spat until rivers
crested and rioted.

Wherever Owl Pellet Moon rolled,
burrowers thanked the tall weeds
for shelter and went mute.

Tattoo Moon blistered the sky
but sent its messages as far as the sea,
farther, to the back side of the sky.

What did Simmering Moon have 
in its copper kettle?
Egg of the sun.

          Each embryo uncurls in the dark, 
          rounds to brilliancy, hunches 
          toward death, and joins its ancient cousins.

When I heard Moon of Cackle, of Din, 
of Fuss, I turned to the chiming trees 
and laid out my nets for what might fall.

Moon of Hungry Smoke sat still 
and red night after night,
but then was gone like the rest.

Tumbling Moon tumbled,
and with it, gold faded in the alders.
Crows squabbled about it.

How did I not see you, 
Fish Come Home Moon?
I was in the canyon waiting for you.

Soon Moon of Shells washed up
broken and bleached, but
still treasure in the box of night.

Why did Questioning Moon jostle the stars 
and stamp the earth? Moon of Stone Flowers 
was already on its way back.
.

In medias res

It starts in the middle,
any story you start. 

You scoot onto a stool at the bakery,
chip away at a scone and fancy coffee,
haul out the pen and little notebook,
scrawl. But wait…

          TEN MINUTES EARLIER

Here’s today’s stroll in the sun. You call it 
the turkey trot, for the dithery flocks 
that roam your neighborhood. You’re 
killing time while your wife swims.
You have this idea for a poem.

          TWO HOURS EARLIER

Lulu’s meows pull you from sleep, 
and the subplot (or mere leit motif),
minor but insistent, kicks in:
the care and feeding of pets and wildlife 
that bumps along like a paper boat
on a stream all day every day.
Chesterina the squirrel must have her nuts.
Although “kicks in” isn’t right, 
it’s the return to the regular program
already in progress — 
the special bulletin dream
wrapped up for now, thanks
for tuning in. It was, as usual, 
odd as all get-out. For starters, 
there was this strange house
full of familiar faces, some ghosts…

          TWO WEEKS EARLIER

A quick trip up the serpentine 5
for a birthday lunch with your daughter
somehow feeds the fires
of what would (you see now) surface 
eventually in dream, thoroughly 
disguised but carrying an aroma, 
dim reference of time and place 
that makes for near-sense 
down the road when you’re deep 
into a more urgent or at least 
in-the-moment plot device. But…

          TWO YEARS EARLIER

Well, now you’re getting
somewhere: parents dying
complicatedly and in their own
not-so-sweet time, this explains
what? You haven’t quite put it
together yet but it’s definitely not
the red herring department
(no such things as red herrings, 
you decide, everything is relevant) 
— there are clues, details that will gel 
only later (which to you, 
reader, is earlier), enlighten
what might happen still further on
or certainly what happened
further back, the illumination
shining fore and aft 
through years, how

          ONE HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER

your great-grandparents and their hot-head daughter
informed the prickly childhood of your mother;
grievances heretofore hidden might well
color how she raised her own children. 
That long story, that serial of episodes, 
tableaux of emotion and action, character, 
dialogue, a semblance of plot, 
flashbacks. Unending. Unbeginning. 
Now, about that poem…

Author’s Note: Sean Bentley’s work has appeared in Chiron Review, Mudlark, Crab Creek Review, The Literary Nest, Seattle Review, Third Coast, Painted Bride, Northwest Review, Bellingham Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Coe Review, and many other magazines, as well as the anthologies Pontoon 3 (Floating Bridge Press), Iron Country (Copper Canyon), Intro 6 (Doubleday), Island Of Rivers (Pacific NW National Parks Assoc.), and Darkness and Light: Private Writing as Art (iUniverse). Bentley has published three collections: Grace & Desolation (Cune Press 1996), Instances (Confluence Press 1979), and Into the Bright Oasis (Jawbone Press 1976). From 1986 to 2006 he coedited the print poetry journal Fine Madness. In 2023 he edited Missing Addresses (Pleasure Boat Studio), the posthumous collection by renowned poet Beth Bentley. In addition to his writing, he is a photographer; you can find his work on Instagram and Eff-Stop Local: Small-Radius Travel. After a long career as a technical editor, he has recently retired to Eugene, Oregon.

In Medias Res Poems by Sean Bentley

Soup | What is, what was | Persistence of Vision According to legend, | Moon, moons | In medias res