A Lament for Seneca
When the fog returns, it remembers who we were before we woke.
Author’s Note
I grew up near places where fog felt almost sentient - where mornings seemed to breathe before we did. The Fog Upon Seneca came out of that sensation: the way certain landscapes hold our echoes long after we’ve left them.
Seneca, for me, isn’t just a lake - it’s memory made physical. It’s what happens when grief takes on weather. The poem began as a simple image of mist rising from water, but I found myself returning to old streets, to houses that still exist but no longer belong to me. The voice became one of reckoning - not with ghosts of the supernatural kind, but the quieter, heavier ones: memory, loss, time.
I wanted to write something in conversation with Edgar Allan Poe - not to mimic him, but to follow the emotional architecture of his work, where atmosphere and soul collapse into one another. What remains, I hope, is not a story of horror, but of inheritance - how we carry our own hauntings forward, and how they, in turn, carry us.
The Fog Upon Seneca
The hour was late, the sky a throat of ash,
and Seneca lay still beneath its dream -
that wretched mirror, cracked but glass,
where shadows leaked through every seam.
No moon. No cry. No wind, no star…
just fog, that pallid funeral cloth,
descending slow from heavens far,
as if the world had earned its wrath.
It came not drifting, but with will -
a mind behind its spectral pace.
It touched the lake, the water still,
and shamed it with a ghostly face.
I stood upon the brittle stones,
the child in me half-heard, half-dead,
where laughter once had filled the bones
of summer’s now-remembered thread.
Lincoln Street … do you remember?
The porch that leaned, the maple’s sigh?
The breath of jam through amber embers,
the sweet July that would not die?
But time is cruel, and space deceives.
The doorframes split, the swing unchained.
My mother’s voice through attic eaves
returns in dreams - unhoused, restrained.
Now I dwell at Southern, Kenosha’s end,
where ceilings weep and shadows breed.
The nights grow thick. The clocks pretend.
The silence hums. The hours feed.
And always then - I hear the bell,
not church, not ship, but deep as bone.
It tolls from where no light can dwell,
and bids the waking die alone.
Last night it came…the cursed boat,
its mast a gallows, deck a shroud.
The sails were flesh. The ropes, a throat.
The wind itself had wept aloud.
The figures lined its railing low,
their mouths sewn shut, their eyes like glass.
And one began to row … and row.
with bleeding arms through seams of gas.
I turned to flee, but feet sank deep
into the stones that once were shore.
They held me fast; they would not keep
my name, my breath, my form, no more.
For what am I, if not the child
who vanished from a mother’s scream?
A ghost that drifts through Seneca’s wild,
a ripple in its drowning dream.
O Seneca, O mirror stark,
you show not truth but grief disguised.
Each night I hear you call the dark,
my name returned - unrecognized.
The house at Lincoln rots with moss.
The rooms still hum with broken hymns.
And now the ship drifts back across
each dusk like blood in chalice brims.
I’ve seen its crew. I know their names -
some mine, some hers, some long deferred.
The bell tolls once. Then twice. Then flame.
And all the rest - no longer words.
GBS
1995
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