Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Functional Forgetting" by Stephen Dobyns is an evocative exploration of desire, memory, and the inexorable approach of death through the lens of intimate, sensory experiences. The poem contrasts moments of passionate forgetting with the broader, inevitable forgetting that comes with age and the proximity of death. Through this juxtaposition, Dobyns delves into themes of temporal pleasure, the fleeting nature of life, and the potential for renewal even as one faces the end.

The opening lines introduce the concept of the world's forgetting as a space of detachment created by intense, immediate sensations—specifically, the erotic act of one lover running his tongue up the inside of another's thigh. This act of forgetting is a deliberate unmooring from the broader concerns of the world, a surrender to the immediacy of physical pleasure that momentarily eclipses all else.

However, Dobyns quickly complicates this image with the passage of time: "But that was yesterday." This shift underscores the transient nature of such moments of forgetting, suggesting that the potency of physical sensations to obliterate the external world diminishes over time. What once required a mere touch to achieve now demands progressively more intimate, more visceral experiences.

The poem suggests that this progression mirrors the process of aging itself: "How these confessions age us." The increased difficulty in achieving this state of forgetting is linked to the accumulation of memories and experiences that weigh down the individual, making the oblivion of desire harder to attain.

Dobyns proposes a provocative metaphor for the approach of death: "Death's envoy must be Wonder." This line posits that as one nears the end of life, the capacity for wonder—and, by extension, the ability to be wholly absorbed by a moment, to forget the world—returns. This reawakening to the "electric" potential of touch, to the "world rich with opportunity," frames the approach of death not merely as a process of loss but as one of potential rediscovery and renewal.

The poem's concluding invocation of death, "Ah, Death, unloose your thighs," is both a surrender to the inevitable and a defiant claim to the pleasures and wonders that remain accessible, even in the shadow of mortality. It suggests a fusion of erotic desire and the acceptance of death, highlighting the interplay between life's sensory experiences and the omnipresence of its cessation.

"Functional Forgetting" thus offers a nuanced reflection on the cycles of desire and memory, the ways in which the immediacy of physical experience can serve as both escape from and reconnection to the essential truths of existence. Dobyns crafts a narrative that is at once sensual and philosophical, inviting readers to consider the role of forgetting in the constitution of self and the human capacity to find renewal in the face of inevitable decline.

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