Tag: memory

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.

In Our Absences

Fractal fragments.

True, you can drift on a euphoria of loss.

Hello, memory.

Say goodbye by sampling tracks of former selves and gather the once-sacred objects, stale talismans now, to us.

Realities may come and go like weather systems. How much harder to lose a fantasy.

Here is a presence so full of absences. What now?

Hesitate, mourn.

The pieces are withdrawing now, withdrawn.

But they leave these ghost traces everywhere, for breathing in.

When you exhale, there they will be again, blended with bits of you.

Stay, friend. Pull up a chair, a stool, an instrument. We can sing about the endless disappearing.

Last Landscape

A choreography of separation and rebirth.

In exile, a body becomes the means for making truth, denied.

The artist’s body a surrogate, the absent and the dead shine through.

In this container of memory, the present is only fleeting:

bird, river, house. Drip, wind, birdsong.

Gather now, impossible communion.

Human form becomes arid field, then a river

running. Witness, can you remember 

the homes of your lives

and your deaths?

The body is the song,

the message, 

the map,

the only home

and the last stranger on earth.

***

Inspired by Last Landscape, choreographed by Josef Nadj, with music by Vladimir Tarasov. 

First Flights

Tracing the texture of a dream.

Here is a book of time, someone told us, to translate a voice in the heart of the sky. It reminded us forward to the hour of the story inside the essence of the dream through which we flew to the beginning of the word on a current of makers.

Sighing creation, we ran, particles of ourselves in waves at the shore, piling sand into a world we could live in, and we admired the work of our hands until the tide took it back. 

We borrowed the insights of distant lightning to hold back the night, and with wet hands we peeled the dawn to eat it raw, dew dripping from our laughing chins.

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