memory Archives

Dust Before Dawn

In low light.

I walk between these low lamps as you sleep, the poorwill’s circled notes outside, inviting recollection of endings that preceded this one, and the sound of this space is a single note, sustained in the once noble ruins of this ribbed house of song and sacrament. The stained glass windows that once made a miracle of your face are now clotted with the dust of a decade of storms, and it may be true that there is never time to clean them, but also that I fear the glass has worn to the point that only the dust holds it here, or perhaps that whoever this is, still waiting for the mass, will shatter if those beams should suddenly descend. Again.

Tell it Slant

What I keep meaning to remember.

Give me only indirect truths, the kind only hinted at; the back parts of God, sashaying away, a hunger no feast can satisfy.

This vessel will hold only the sediments of these, and just barely, porous as it is––and still it’s prone to hairline fractures on impact. They are the kind that won’t kill you, for which the prescription is always “Give it time,” but you will always feel.

Feel what? Only this teasing reminder back to the joke about being the sort of person others call solid, as if there were anything else more ripe for breaking, as if faith, on most days, is anything more than the dogged continuance of this half-blind driver who is forever losing their keys.

***

Reading Christian Wiman this morning, who underscores an observation made by the brilliant Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Herschel, remarking how “faith is primarily faithfulness to a time when we had faith . . . a tenuous, tenacious discipline of memory and hope.”

Bee Dream

Against collapse.

A single wanderer creeps from a hollow to the wild purple bloom, the yellow cluster, to fall asleep, pollen-drunk in what I like to imagine as a kind of ecstasy. But I don’t know how long he has been at it, looking for the others, reading the air for the compass dance to bring him home.

Curve

To frame what moves.

The bend of years is partial, a pockmarked continuum of dropped stitches against the fast-forward spit of a seventh-inning pitcher known for curves.

This made us cling: to the bodies of pets, lovers, the photos of children––ours, the ones we had been, the ones we never knew, could not remember, and the new dead.

We could not name our joys, only the pause between days in which we called our exiled silences back home to hang them on loops of the threads we meant to weave back into place, somehow.

My daughter is sleeping, and I want to cup my hands around her face, to frame for a moment what won’t be kept, to hold inside the curve the stillness of an original praise song, the only one with any bearing and still it won’t quite hold. Look at you. There you are. Come here.

Signs of Life

What trembles.

Consider all this a precursor, the artist was saying, to work in another medium. I wanted to begin with some questions, she told us. I was talking to a friend, she said, as I am now––and the friend, these friends, had certain questions. These questions encouraged me, she told us. To keep looking, you know. With these hands.

I was trying to make something, to see it. There is a way to thread a map of layered memories so that knots are formed at the points of collision. There is a way to see the knots as what hold the web together.

Of course, they won’t hold still, so it is not clear yet, but I can see how the tendrils of these maps might thread together, suspended in ropy intricacy as though in branches above us. How we might assemble beneath the canopy, looking up.

It would be so much that we would have no choice but to return to a preverbal state with sounds and textures and smells and a sense of being in one place expanding out and then back between carryings, and no one can ever describe what happens in this state, when the tremble of memory is soul.

Nightswimmers

Liminal play.

When we were children of the sun and our play was a running banter with shadow and shine, I remember how you laughed to catch his spray in your teeth and our skins would carry it back inside when we were called in twilight hours.

Our shapeshifting forms morphed and when we were children of the moon, we knew our skins to slip like the bellies of jumping fish, winking light just to feel it swallowed by an original sea with night waves lapping whispers to return.

Seaglasses

Our tumbled shards.

sounds called what we would not say

until the shadows in our ears besieged

our remainders we screamed

for their release but they stayed

laughing into our wet faces

we could not see them

or our faces where we stayed

the stank breath of death rot

creeping through our breaths

stopping the songs

we meant to sing

of how we flew

after scratching our snakeskins

we were removed and outside

we could not hear the songs

in the street as the dragon still

spread the photos called

our monsters out

to hush them back

Time ran off

we had the babies’

toothless mouths looking back

lining their faces in half-moons

on our beds and with them looking back

we kited from the cells anchored

by the buds of lost mothers in our teeth

to one day fit ourselves back

into homes we had once carried

on our backs before we left

the sea

before the after

we left it

back there for the

sea

What Counts

On seasonal records.

I’d love to tell you, but the words become ghosts, choking intention.

Once, they showed their insides, breaking open.

Meaning tends to expand at the site of the cut.

The next attempt reminds: what is necessary is also impossible.

The space after time’s vanishing has a way of losing its contours.

To compensate, you can try cross-mapping histories to create an architecture of memory.

Now we are inside the stones, now we are their erosion.

By exposing matter, you can revisit its secretive nature. Some colors don’t happen in paint.

The synapses around a single sentence can curl a face into the face of another time.

10.

We pierced the soft flesh of old monuments.

11.

A child makes bricks of debris, each block a memory.

12.

If each of these haystacks is another time of day, seeing is what happens between them.

***

Inspired by Monet’s Haystacks.

Feats of Becoming

In mythic memory.

In the days when we knew forms were only provisional, you called Leap! at the sight of the next star. Our metamorphic world buzzed with a panorama of possible and the hours were a cyclic series of somersaults.

We read by the myth from inside its closed shell, unlike the heavy-headed beachcombers trying to recover something lost. From inside, we dissolved selves well enough to forget our tired, temporary names and donned instead originals of dark dimension. In these we splashed back to the undergrounds where the Mothers knew us, to restore the old tales to their first beginnings. We chased the slivering prints of angels’ bare feet to catch them only long enough that they would whisper again the small verse assigned to each of us. This one is yours to bring forth, they told us, one at a time.

In dawn’s purple flame, the branching capillaries of eons swelled our skins, and Time’s wild clowning made us know ourselves at once alive and dead, ending and beginning, never and again. By this light, the world’s creatures seemed to know us, looking back as though waiting to be named.

Collect Me

A reunion.

I found you where we were children, and you found a way to bend a certain recipe toward the collection crowding my pockets, slowing my chase. In surrender, I removed the lot of it in pieces and placed each on the table. Tell me, love, I asked you. What is it?

You took a stamp and sewed it to your shirt, held a button to your reflection, and the shard of a mirror you pressed into an album to save the memory of someone looking back. We chased to catch ourselves back to running from what teased our terrors, tempting catch me! and you can’t!

I feared the years would fell me first, but you did, and from the rest of what is saved if you wait I can still make you a meal and we will raise a glass to the hour of these signs, from this shelter of broken time.