remembrance
"… only perchance remembrance breaks the heart"
You won’t find that phrase in any Internet search engine – at least not until I post this page. You won’t find it in a book in the library, or on a video clip; buried, maybe, in a tattered notebook in some out-of-the-way cottage, hidden in an attic box or gathering dust under a bed, with pages as weathered as last season’s leaves. Probably the ink will have faded, if that notebook exists, or the pencil-line will have by friction and time been dissipated, so the words once alive in thought will have been undone, like a whisper in the wind.
So...
So they set me at the crossroads where no way crossed and said, Here you go, boy… thus a vast horizon. I admit it attracted me. There I saw a life progress man or woman, who could tell home upon the trackless savanna!
“The Savanna in Sweden” by Erik Tjernlund @ DeviantArt.com
a wind from the north, the sky is clear
| last night I had to close the window, woke up shaking, dreaming ice in a frozen ocean shifted around my bed, that I ran barefoot on a glacier; found the blanket thrown, I was naked in the dark with the first northern night, as it breathed frost into my room |
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| and this morning I swept a few early leaves from my step, sweet maple red, under a sky turned cool, the color of a clean December lake, thinking so it was no dream. there was a letter fallen in my box, my friend in Indonesia asking another fifty I don’t have, she the grandmother whose shoulders like dried sticks no longer carry water from the river. “how is your job?” she writes. “I am almost well again.” she needs the water pump most, but today the poor can spare nothing for the poor. I tell her, “my bills are never paid, in America, the wealthiest nation. I am glad to hear your heart still speaks to you.” I carried the broom to the upstairs closet, knowing leaves would be falling all the next week, the maple gone, last of the elm, mountain ash, the two oaks. |
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| when noon came and the wind came down from the north with its sharp teeth, I was in the street where screaming oh god help me a woman lay on the pavement, was dragged, two men into their car shouting quit lookin’, and we did, not knowing this woman to die for her, not like a sister, not family; doors slammed like fists against metal, the wheels’ scream longer, a curse, the sneer of the city, around the corner, I ran safely after, saw no plates, no police, no neighbor, let my anger shape itself in words, one more swallowed sound, one more inch my heart squeezed smaller as the abduction disappeared; I stood with my brother and as the cry rang like electricity in our heads he whispered what we did not wish to think: she’s still out there somewhere. |
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| there is this wind from the north; I stand against it, both hands raised to hold it back, discovering a wind as wide as a nation, wide as the world, a tongue lashing out quit lookin’ as one woman dies carrying water, another because I did not know her name. |
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| so I have folded newspaper into all the windows, worked extra hours for oil for the furnace, put in a supply of candles, washed the wool coat. it’s all I can do, and I know it’s not enough, the dream of cold still huddled in my walls, waiting the decay of insulation, or the last drop of steam in the pipes, waiting for the earth to lean away from the sun, as it always does: I will wake up naked and alone, hands out, protecting nothing. |
“Shadow Cares” by Samuel Moulin @ DeviantArt.com
Tiger is Tiger
Muscular I took the tiger’s tail in hand As his stripe in terrible elegance flashed Into view, in the sun, in the tall, tall grass Me at my prime – just past my prime – and confident I owned the gift of taming still…
But still
Tiger is tiger, and man is man And man, I did the best deluded can ‘Til he ran away and away he ran. I looked around to reassure me, friends Had each eluded the talon’s tear
Eastern Window
Every day I want to write a poem to you but every day I swallow my song
then every day a small bird rests and every day a shaft of sunlight brightens him why not be alive? and right now? every day he takes a little breath there at the height of the eastern window and every day my song is in his voice and your voice is in my song
villa verdad
One reaches back to draw those memories forward. You catch the hand of the child and when you pull, he ages or she ages, the seasons spin yellow green brown white and those colors light the face as bulbs on a carnival ride, light the smile as well as the fallen eyes, light their delight and their terror, the waves of time washing from toes to ankles, from knees to thigh, until fully a woman or a man they stride into the ocean, confident in their ability to swim, til the tide takes them away.
the emigrant pauses on the hill of mirrors
The world spins and we spin with it. Years ago I was born near here; a year later I moved to there; then there, then there, then there. I changed cities, I changed countries, I changed continents; I walked as far as I could, and took a train when the road stretched too long; I boarded a plane when I ran out of rail; I ended up here.
I each of those places I called my home, I had the fortune to arrive after strife and depart before strife, at least as my heart measured it: others might have called my smallest journey struggle, and certainly the act of getting to know a new culture, and you yourself in relationship to it, is not for the faint of heart. Still, it becomes an art. (As Elizabeth Bishop famously, sadly wrote: The art of losing isn’t hard to master…").
too many names
I was introduced to my first second language in seventh grade, at a particularly progressive time in a particularly progressive school district in Minnesota, where our monoglot heritage – an assortment of Northern European languages cast off, to be replaced by a new, common identity – had begun to feel uncomfortably small against the backdrop of a the rapidly expanding world. Since my parents and older siblings had already studied German, I of course chose Spanish, one year, two (Estaba Susana en casa? Sí, estaba, para la gran parte de mil novecientos setenta-y-seis, en la cocina…) before a change in district, a change of heart. Later, there would be German in High School and at University, then accelerated French, a dash of Greek, a dose of Indonesian, a dousing of Portuguese… but that first ear-opening and tongue-thrilling experience, that was the seed from which all the other flowers bloomed.
five steps to standing up
| 1 | the day begins with stillness, then a bell drops into a pool of the night your sight ripples; you sip sunlight |
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| 2 | dreams are water you leave behind your hands smooth the linens’ sands for tomorrow’s dreamers’ wandering |
| 3 | oh, yes: the metallic chime of saucepans silver spoons, frypans, saucers, porcelain teacups topped with steamed milk, memory |
| 4 | is the morning’s recipe your finger follows inward, traces your childhood table raise this to your lips, yes, first taste best |
| 5 | I remember how many days I remember the same old sun lit the same old skin warming this little room I’m in |
Image credit: Before you wake up, by Darija Blue @ deviantart.com
A Topic of Leisure
The branching of the Arne River is by this hill where its voice grows adult from upstream child, no longer rippling and eager to overflow in this course or that, but gravity-bound for the north and a great flooding finish, a heavy waterfall managed by Verlag dam; were you here to see the ages change? That stone, wider than the rest, severs left from right channel, seems to halve the river while leaving it quite complete, all rush, boiling to be one again; there’s the damage that makes the flow more determined, cuts the deep bed; later on, past three dry fields and under a county bridge, it joins again, but never with this spirit. I watched birds spinning over a pool; I was waiting for wind to blow loose leaves or seeds to turn several times in that water question then head downstream, as everything does. And, listening to a little water over a few stones I imagined a running child, the same light step, or myself in the water, or the water in me; there is sure to be a common language through these things. I would see the ages change, too. Let someone drop a paper boat up by the mill, and we know nothing of the act, but wrapped here in the autumn chill see it float, white and half-capsized, around that bend, over the spill of tangled logs, into the brief frame this view allows – then around again and out of sight forever. So we could be delighted and puzzled for a while, imagine our own fingers bending paper into that shape, how would it feel to be so young, or young-intentioned, and with such faith that two people involved with the current, away downstream would see the boat and know it for a careful gift. Well, someone may yet do that. Or, we may have to be content with sticks and other wood debris that weather slips into the river, a slight downward-casting scene down from treetops, down from hill heights, down the slope of the land, down to the sea.