Antonyms for Proteus

Charlie Clark

1. The Myth of Proteus

puts all its dynamism in the wrong place.

Let’s make Proteus a stone and the adventurer the one to flash and shudder once he gets his hands on the old god’s body.

When finally Proteus cracks and there’s no miracle, no inner geode glowing, the adventurer mutters an unheard bitter word or two and throws the broken stone into the sea.

There the parts don’t rejoin.

The sea covers them in salt and spends centuries crushing them.

2. Wanting to Know What Words the Adventurer Said, I Try to Get a Better Sense of Him

Here are the synonyms for Adventurer available in my computer’s dictionary/thesaurus:

Explorer

Voyager

Buccaneer

Swashbuckler

Fortune-Teller

Traveler

Entrepreneur

Investor

Reading those, I feel the progress of history, from ocean ropes to white shoes and corporate-sponsored deep-water pollution.

3. The Sound of the Ocean

In every recording of the ocean that I’ve listened to, no matter what the quality, my favorite part is when the surf recedes.

Hearing it, the word I think of is declension.

In Greek the meaning is grammatical.

Something like the way a noun may vary to identify its number or gender.

Revelation through change.

So it’s fitting for the sea, and for Proteus to be a god of it.

In English the word’s far more limited.

It means failing.

4. Antonyms

One antonym for declension is morality.

There’s no antonym for Proteus.

Though Antonym does sound like it could be the name of the Greek adventurer in the myth I guess I’m writing.

The one who, young and eager and not knowing that a god can only be itself or nothing, sought and found the stone Proteus and then threw it in the sea when it didn’t turn to riches.

It was his only quest and he came home with nothing but the sound of the ocean forever breaking failure in his brain.

5. Autobiography

All writing is a reflection of the self.

In this way I am Proteus as much as I am Antonym as much I am dictionary/thesaurus as much as I am salt or corporate-sponsored pollution as much as I am the sound of the ocean and all the declensions it conjures and contains.

In that everything in these words is my own doing.

6. Everything

Everything is a very large word.

Rather than everything, let’s say something.

Something sounds more manageable, like you can hold it in your hands the way you can hold a dictionary or a stone.

What you cannot hold is the sound of the ocean, which is probably why that’s where beauty starts.

7. Now That I’ve Introduced Beauty and the Second Person

here’s a revelation.

I am the adventurer gone out into the world of silence, looking for a way to break it and come back to you rich and well received.

It is curious, wandering so deep into silence and thinking that a word will be there at the end of it.

8. What I Found While Looking for the End of Silence

Nothing but a reflection of the self.

In that something in these words is my own doing.

In that by something what I mean is everything.

In that by doing what I mean is fault.

In that by fault what I mean is I’m the one who’s cracking.

In that I’m a stone, even with all these words I’m churning.

In that the only time I’m certain of a word is when I’m certain that it’s wrong.

In that the best word I’ve said today by far is ocean.

In that you are like the ocean.

In that just thinking of you crushes me.

9. What an Antonym Cannot Undo

I am the crushed pieces of a deity thrown by hand into the sea.

I am Antonym and all of his regret.

I am searching for a miracle of a word that will undo this.

10. Miracle

Maybe miracle‘s the word and my tongue is Proteus.

Maybe that’s why it sometimes feels so much like stone.

When I hold it in between my fingers and whisper miracle the word I hear is marigold.

11. Marigold Has No Antonym

Not swashbuckler, not entrepreneur.

Not declension, failure, or biography.

Not deity or silence.

Not even rose or lily.

All it has are its parts, two separate pledges of abundance the English tongue transforms to one.

Just to think them makes the darkest stone inside me glow.

12. What Flower Is a Synonym For

Let’s let Proteus be nothing.

Let’s leave the divine out of this.

Let’s have you be the water and I’ll be the field of flowers blooming close beside it.

Or you can be the field and I will be the water.

The order of our being doesn’t matter.

So long as there is something to nourish daily,

like a miracle.

Charlie Clark’s poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. He studied poetry at the University of Maryland and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in Austin, Texas.