D____ L____’s

Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with “It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ...” etc., etc. —Charles Dickens There might be a planet. Before that, though, there would have been a gas that coalesced into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux and energy that hadn’t yet declared themselves in concert. There’s always “before”: there's more each minute, more each person, yes and every one of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name the “beforeon”—is exerting force on us that’s surely time’s own version of gravity: its purpose is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages, it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised they never would: one night while she’s asleep, he snoops her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr. Number One. And why, or even what he hopes to find, he couldn’t clearly say: a letter? photo? sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment when our neural linkage first began to form, as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we’re all amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe’s earliest being, is a “phantom limb” with the faintest mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, although her search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars, of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes, one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody else is waking up this morning with the need to be detached from any history, to stand here like a person in a play who enters onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then, of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero, unbesmirched. We could have told him that he’d be this anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (who doesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but illusory. We can’t unmoor ourselves from linearity, no more than any one of us can be a human being unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own twelve million years of Big Bang “background radiation” so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere. No; there isn’t any“elsewhere.” When we sleep or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur, a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . . a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers, knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather, D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers’ shifts in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens, union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He’s walking through the tobacco aroma; he’s setting his text on his easel; and the story—the only story we know, the story of Before—is recited.