Tag: memory

first teachers

toward remembrance

This week I have made useful things: calendars, notebooks, discussion protocols, pages students will soon fill with questions I hope matter. By Friday my eyes are bloodshot, nerves down my arm burning again. Every note in my notebook begins, “Remember to make…” And yet. In the stillness of the rare breath, a returning question reminds me: remember what first taught you, love. To look. 

I have had a touch-and-go relationship with standing inside my own truth. Whatever I was as a child seemed to make for easy killing. I wanted not to die. I wanted to become better at living.

My teachers were shorelines & trees; stones & beneath them; beyond the beyonds, where whales surfaced & disappeared again. I followed the tracks of dead writers, looking for clues. 

This week, Heschel offers three things I need. He says, Always we are chasing. And then: Recollection is a holy act. He uses the phrase “Sublime grandeur…” & I cannot remember the rest.

I write each into the margin beside reminders to photocopy poems & order hanging file folders. Also, ear drops for the cat. I do not think she is drinking enough water.

Imagine the composer whose music, too long for the market, sings just long enough for strays to inhabit. Whose reviewers ask politely, must it be like this? 

Thank you, love. For running ahead, then stopping. Waiting until the rest of us catch up. I chase you, passing wooden bodies behind bars. I wait with them, my mirrored selves. Whose arms reach where our trunks may not follow. At the terminal, a woman waits half inside shadow. Maybe to board, or else forever.  To leave this furniture-piece of the self.

To return to the humiliating glory of flesh. Tomorrow the bells will ring again, and my eyes will return to their watering ache. To close & listen to morning birds. Somewhere beneath asphalt, distant roots will continue their epistolary. Further still, whales carrying songs. The stubborn composer refuses to hurry. A sculpture continues waiting in her cage. I follow behind these, in their tracks. To walk as I wait.

the carrying back

on being read

Sing to me, Forest, of your undergrounds
where I wait, hungry, attention on
your warning sounds, willing myself
to root into reading with my feet
your songs, coded in chemical notes: C, N; I
lean in, root to root.

Yours is the song I mean to hear & hold,
to carry back by this vessel
to the others of my kind where we meet among blocks
of concrete, warning bells & sirens
to remember birdsong, heartbeats, susurrations
of our mothers’ wombs

by these waters
at this shore
against these feet, to see
the sea, la mer
ma mère, my mother

to better remember the taste
of being tasted into life by an octopus
whose arms around me whispered before i knew
to wonder what she was by name

to say come here, love. i devour you.
& go, my tongue’s first song meeting hers,
song fleshed back into
this thin-skinned cup
all i have for holding

deep time liturgy

at peat bog

they rinsed us from you & we came to
beneath harvest of smoke & our tools

of part memory, part dream & the dead
where they slept beneath our quilts

the peat bog will not forget, so holds
a dropped awl & still-opened hand

of at least one distant ancestor
having never met

dream leaves its memory
on the raw side of hide

& we gathered foxglove
at eventide from hills that bore

its crash, folding fields
to stitch a robe for moons

to outlast where we held the flood
until it remembered us

by settling remains in the moss
of that moor

where only the listening
from here on out is left & now

the feathered chest-dweller
coughs beneath the ribbed rafters

& we wait with low hum of estuarine mud
in our mouths

where round howls
too sharp to keep where

she gathers them
& us

still holding
that flood

by ripple marks in stone
her song remembers

the weight of our collected
bones to whisper back

o water,
where did your flood
last end?

undocumented gravities

what bends the fabric

One physicist told me: picture a bowling ball in the fabric,
the fabric caving in—why bodies fall toward one another,

spinning. How spacetime curves. My grandmother spoke of weight
in other ways: the hush between names in an unread ledger of losses.

I finger that line, the jagged edge of scab, the raw grain Ellison heard
scraping every blues. What do I do with this mass of memory

now bending every moment into its warp? She lost her mother
to fog-lung at nine, crossed alone to a house with chandeliers,

quiet corrections. Her eyes went dark when I asked about the war.
She kissed me once, called me her lost sister’s name,

then whispered into the rosary beads drawn from pocket to lips.
A song she didn’t teach me hums in my sleep.

Here is a shape made of silence. A dark bloom:
cells within cells, watched by a thousand quiet endings

spreading? Grief is such a mass, perhaps, when left unspoken:
a metastasis of memory in a land that names the stranger alien.

I am trying to reach mine, cannot find where it begins.
It arrived before language, encoded in the spiral of blood,

older than my name. Like starlight long gone, still arriving.
I squint into the most distant layer of stars: fine dust.

Some of it shines from bodies long dead,
their last emissions only now arriving

here. Their light arrives always without their names
like a jagged, cracked-open ledge,

this brief flesh against it,
struggling to sound.

*

This poem recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Issue 35.

Hang On

what comes in whispers

The problem is always remembering, but some have none of that. They are the sort to wonder out loud where the time went. Those of us who remember well enough to be pierced every time by how thoroughly everything goes when it goes, cannot do this. But some are so convinced of their centrality that they wonder aloud about the interpretations of dreams, as if a congregation of gods had gathered to watch them sleep, leaving little dream notes to their chosen one. The rest of us went around, pulsing with the leaving of it when it had been so close. Interpretation was the enemy to that sort of charge. What it was wouldn’t stand for being caught in a goblet for drinking; at best it could be absorbed like mist into skin, to leave you feeling chapped whenever you walked anywhere drier than a cloud. Meanwhile it galloped before you, a herd of wilds never to be saddled, running the secret that would lose its legs in the telling. Hush child, intimates the dust in that wake––not a direct address, mind you. Only by not understanding may you receive anything worth knowing, even by thirds. It is like that most of the time, except for the moments when it isn’t. Being entirely unprepared for those, these tended to floor me. The way it comes sometimes, that vegetal speech cracking in husks, and me too dumb to leave my fascination. What? I’ll be asking, as it all goes dark again.

Skyfall

Driving home.

Grit over teeth, ash of last trees on concrete and I remember shade, limbs reaching and how the reach itself was still good and the want had yet to creep its vining hold and too far was still an abstract. It’s all moon tonight, all tides, and I’m reminded back to your last question, the one about where I went. The way I am still there but not with an answer. It’s a big yellow face, less definition than some and yet the humor of it shines through, demanding at least a wry twist of the lips even at this edge. Hello, Moon, and Goodnight and Good Luck and when my daughter was born the nurse said, she can smell you better than she sees.

Little Dream Bird

Questions of memory.

Now, where is the little dream we had before the fire? Thoughts like this always precede those of flight. There was a little bird among us before the fire, jumping from shoulders to heads and one arm to the next, like we were branches. Which of course we were, although we never noticed the tree. Do branches, usually? There are none to ask.

Anyway, you would think the tiny bird would have been the first to vanish, but it wasn’t. I can see it now as it was near the end, bright body against the dark. As if waiting, with a question. We left and the bird did not follow and then came a long road. It is the same as this one. I think I hear it, sometimes.

Waters

In the intertidal zone.

After time and weather have eroded a vision to sand, its attendant body may be found standing with wet feet in the remains, facing the invisible tide. There is substance here, too, but no name. We pour our loaded attempts to define it into the sea and she absorbs them, one after another metaphor, including this one now, until it becomes possible to say that the one with their feet at the edge of a lapping wave is actually long gone, adrift––waving, or not, and we hold cupped hands above our eyes, saying back and forth, Look, look out there, squinting.