Category: memory

To Say the Word

In time.

What bears the clock’s repeating to fold a blanket again, soft on the back of the chair where yours just was, what names the length of time to your return? I was and I remember once collecting names and meaning it my mission to hold every noun of a single tongue. I wrote them one by one on cards. How young then with so little time for waiting. Did the project last a year, three weeks, a day? Not until I ran out of cards, I can tell you but you can say I am still at it, minus the cards, minus the gathering––and I’ve slowed. I spend so much more time repeating, turning over the few I have: tongue, memory, hand, fold. Collection, I––You. What bears the name’s repeating, to fold its vowels between lips and hold them as if to absorb a promise till it takes. What names the way a body learns that name is just the first sound of the word that holds the door open for a moment where the flesh of form may enter folding body over threshold to bear time by letting go to gather names as leaves of leavings and the word was to begin and the what was folded wing and when it opened it revealed a new name for the next place not yet known–– I go

Dream Melt

From the last ice age.

the imagination is where it rains paint onto frescoes
of figures to crowd the divine comedy clubs where we
come and go every evening, no ID, no cover at the door

carrying our huddled masses of memory on backs
crunching shells of peanuts and empires on the floor
the strobe light pulsars keeping time with unborn stars

first wears the crown––it is the chicken or the egg,
but who can say is on the mic now, to proclaim
in a language unknown to whomever has ears

no tears need translation and what is the time?
it is lost and what is the point? only a moment
and where did it begin? in the beginning

was the word and the word rained down where
we gathered here to catch it back to the mouths
of us speaking all at once in the land where

the constant rain is coming
from the vision at the bottom
of the iceberg where it

melts

Lakebeds

And the life of water.

I rode a bus in the desert and the woman beside me had plastic bags on her lap and must in her coat. My face turned toward the window taking it in––the pleasure of being a passenger, carried. It was a drought year. We passed the scar of a long-gone lake and then the gash of a former stream and she gave a little huff, rustling the bags. Yep, she said, me too. I was too tired to ask, so only nodded. Then I looked out the window again, wondering about the water before it was gone, the lives it must have held until it couldn’t anymore before it gave itself up, back to sky. 

Viscosity of Memory

And the problem of meaning to make it.

If I were really up to something, you would think I would have an answer to the question of where any of this starts, but no. It’s just this ledge again, and gravity, and my desperate grip. Meaning not to forget to remember, I stretch the web of impressions, meaning to stick somewhere. But whatever I am made of mostly slides, and sliding, what tends to stick to me is never quite the stated destination, but everything beneath its arcing aim. What tends to stick rarely unsticks and I do not forget it. And yet, I still mean to reach what I hope to remember.

What Might Otherwise Fly

Except for the weight of this form.

When you found me, I had been waiting, writing, for some time. Writing, I had been waiting behind that wall where the things that pulse at my neck are not what I tell because they are not the sort of thing that, as the saying goes, are up for discussion. One learns, as so many have, not to draw attention to what pulses, beats, flushes in speech or laughter, passion, or tears. My face gives me away. My troubling body gives me away, pouring me through the crack in this voice. I meant to be a formed thing, smoothed and polished for an admiring public, as instructed. The purpose of my upbringing, as far as I could tell, was for this, but in this I have utterly failed. I am instead a porous constellation of trembling orifices, dripping with overflow, and all of it is always too much, and as long as I have been, I cannot remember being otherwise. Perhaps there was a time when it was not too much, when I was a child not yet girl, not yet future woman, not yet in training. But it seems that the knowledge of girl came hand in hand with the knowledge of self and I cannot retrieve my prehistory so long as I am one, even if I would like to lay down the heavy weight of being anyone in particular. The atmospheric particle, absorbing, can collect moisture while continuing to float in the company of other atmospheric particles, until it is time to be rain.

That All May Hear

Words of the unseen world of an unrecognized people.

This morning, I am careful in the hours before I am ready to be awake, when I am still in the first sips of coffee, and still with a full week ahead, where I let my eyes rest when I click open the morning paper. As one learns to be, depending on the day, calculating the risk of sliding into an abyss. Head at an angle, I slid my eyes quickly to the fringes like someone sneaking into a room, and down the right column, to rest on the image of a living face. He smiles, but not in the way people smile when they learn to leverage the image for gain. He smiles with puzzled amusement, like he is looking for the face behind the lens. His face, deeply contoured above the caverns at his neck, is a landscape unto itself, framed by an old man’s large ears.

His name is his language means dog without an owner. Dog in his language means something other than an insult. He is in his late eighties when he writes it at the table with his daughter, as his mother taught him. His mother was a memory keeper.

The language his mother taught him was the language of her grandparents and it was long considered extinct. It is the language of a people who had lost the land they lived on but not the words by which they had loved her. 

We had learned over time, Jaime explains, not to speak to those who could not hear. But I exist, he says. I am here. 

***

Inspired by Natalie Alcoba’s New York Times article about Blas Omar Jaime of Paraná, Argentina, who recently decided to speak Chaná, the language his mother had taught him, which had long been considered lost.

O Valiant Now

Remember the ancient tragedies.

Careful, hero. You are sometimes too sure. It may be said that your ancient predecessors, the ones you often mock for their backwardness, were in fact possessed of virtues you have yet to learn to recognize, glutted as you are on delusions of progress. These knew at least––or learned to see (sometimes after the eyes were gone) in the (tragic) end––the danger of confusing what would save with what would destroy. They understood that they were understudies to passions, the lead actors preceding their entrances and following their exits––and how none of the worst crimes could have happened unless they were believed to be good. To go on acting anyway, without becoming paralyzed, in full knowledge of blindness, leaning into doubt well enough to hold loves close. For protection, and to protect.