96 Memory poems

how this time is a fact of shared space looking to pass through, undifferentiated memory always has a back door no one word settles me or rather than resist rather than resolution such that lists fall from one

One last time I unlock the house where they lived and fought and tried again: the air of the place, carpet with its unchanging green, chair with its back to me. On the TV set, the Christmas cactus has bloomed, has spilled its pink flowers down its scraggly arms and died, drying into paper. At the round oak table, ghosts lean toward one another, almost a bow, before rising, before ambling away.

We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture. Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence, popped it right in. That frog song wanting nothing but echo? We used that. Stirred it widely. Noticed the clouds while stirring. Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer. Dropped in their names. Added a mint leaf now and then to hearten the broth. Added a note of cheer and worry. Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder? Perfect. And once we had it, had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup, placing the pan on a back burner for keeping, the sorrow lifted in small ways. We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared. We washed that pan.

Trying to see the proportional relation Of one memory to another One is so strange, and then To try and see what looms And doesn’t for the other person Who was there, it gets stranger, Especially when you’ve read His email. I don’t know how people Understand their lives, measure Their sensations against “objective” Or so-to-speak democratic estimations, Whether people accept the externality Of events, “events,” as things That happen to them. I refuse To accept some coagulate Of other people’s Impressions in exchange for this Privacy, no matter how flawed it is. This is lyric poetry. It has to be. It has No other hope. What was it About you and me that made whatever Happen to us. In New York Everything fell apart. What I dreaded And expected. But still. Tonight It is dark and the weather is cooler Than it’s been. It has taken A while for Fall to break; the global Warming kept me in summer Love with you like I was under a Fermata. Now that the times Are changing, I feel Even more for you; or I feel nothing. I can’t tell; it’s kind Of scary. I was sick of thinking About you this morning but I was listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen in order to think about You for literary purposes. When I feel nothing for a person I get scared I’m losing my humanity And that turning cold means My heart’s been botoxed: we’re All fucked. I watched a movie on YouTube Called Ladies and Gentlemen, Mister Leonard Cohen that was made when He was still just a poet and only Famous in Canada. He’s a pretentious little nerd In it, self-important, teacher’s pet wit. I think that, making music, he became So much nakeder, much more desperate. The talent, real, even pure, even Natural, had to ripen in The artificial man. Alain Badiou, on the day Of his class, said, “Because an event Is pure rapture, an event disappears Immediately: it does not exist Objectively, but only by appearing And disappearing.” This is both Precise and vague; it is attractive I guess. I guess since you and me did not Disappear immediately, it was Not pure rapture, not in these Terms, but my smile Was real each time I swallowed Your cum. Getting Fucked by you was great; I could Feel it in my organs, but You didn’t make me go insane Except for maybe once Or twice. Actually maybe I am Being unfair. Maybe the fucking really Was that great. In this moment I Can’t remember. I just read a poetry Review in which the reviewer States that a certain book Made his cock feel as though It were tall as a tree. That’s Nice. I have no idea What it feels like to have A cock. Sometimes I feel As though I’m getting close To understanding and then Something happens to make Me have no clue again. When Sinan Fucks me, we lose our individuality So severely it’s like we’re both Gasping after an animal that’s his Cock that is beyond us and I lose All sense of the world. His cock’s Not even him, and he’s not him either And we aren’t anything. It’s strange, the possessive. Didn’t Thomas Mann write a book called Herr Und Hund or something like that? Man’s best friend. What belongs To him. Me and Sunder Talked about how scary and arousing It is to watch men masturbate, cos Everyone relates differently to his. Like dicks are always almost but never Quite another.Je est un autre, Said that brat Arthur Rimbaud. I am definitely in love with you As I write this. You are so petty And superfluous I cannot stand You. Sinan is definitely In love with me. I know, because I saw him tonight. I love Him too. You are gracious To accord me the space and time In which to develop, or to elaborate Upon, as the French say, these Extreme emotions I am, despite The odds and certain lapses, So capable of feeling. It was good to slap Your face and to admit That your asshole Made me nervous. Your eyes had a way Of going soft and shiny When you said the really Tender things. We admitted It was intimidating For us both to hear each other describe People we’ve fucked and been In love with. I’m proud of what We accomplished together. Alain Badiou Ended his class with a reading Of “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” which Is an opera by Paul Dukas. You And me had gone pretty far By the time this day came, and Something very fragile in me breaks When somebody says my name, or Even a variant of it. I was tired. I think Badiou discusses “Ariane” In Being and Event which I have not read. In class he said That the story of the opera is About the relationship between law And freedom, and that it shows That the desire for freedom is not So simple. Ariane experiences an Event That causes her to demand freedom, Badiou Said, but she is unable to convince anybody Else,any other women to want freedom; she ends up alone. She genuinely falls in love with the wicked Bluebeard at the beginning. Bluebeard Who previously got women by having a castle To lock them in. This woman Ariane Does not have to be taken By force. When she enters His castle he hands Her seven keys, six Of which he gives her permission To use, and leaves. She hears the cries Of his other, imprisoned wives, Coming from behind a door. So she uses The forbidden key, releasing them. Meanwhile Bluebeard is assaulted By the local peasants, who want To free Ariane, fearing her fate will turn out like That of the women who came before her. But Ariane is already free In herself, and proves this freedom By bringing the wounded Bluebeard Home, caring tenderly for him, and then Declaring that she’s leaving him for good. By the end Bluebeard’s shattered, sobbing, Bleeding. Ariane Invites the other wives to leave with her In a wrenching aria, pleading With them one by one to taste With her the freedom awaiting Them,The World. But they all prefer confinement Even though they had longed For freedom before Ariane opened Their door. Once liberty arrived they were no Longer capable of it, preferring to serve; even a gutted, Hollowed-out power. Ariane exits Alone. The end. Badiou narrated This with emotion and I cried. Maybe cos I was tired and That thing about my name or because I am not heroic or free. I had missed half of Alain Badiou’s Lectures messing around with you On the couch by the fire; in the women’s Toilets; up on the hill. If this were a suitable parable, And it isn’t, I would try to tell myself That those very early mornings in Brooklyn when I sat Up in your bed feeling wrong and Got dressed and walked away, I should Have stayed away cos I don’t need you. Maybe I don’t need you. But I want You. Maybe I don’t love you. But I am getting to know you. Maybe What made me cry in class was how tired I was and how sad and hard It is, and how rare, to undertake an act That’s truly free, and not just a response To a confused surge of drives and  fears.

Let’s say it’s half a century later. Let’s say it’s never too late. Let’s say Skull Valley. Let’s say. Let’s say it’s half a century later. Let’s say it’s never too late. Let’s say Skull Valley. Let’s say. Time has no mercy. It’s there. It stays still or it moves. And you’re there with it. Staying still or moving with it. I think it moves. And we move with it. And keep moving. Eleven years old and soon to be in fifth grade. That’s time. Boys’ time. Who knows what time it is but them. Eternally. No one knows time better than they. Always and forever. Our family. Mama, me, Angie, Gilbert, Earl, Louise. Kids. Daddy working in Skull Valley for the AT&SF RY. Mama just packed us up in New Mexico and moved us. Suddenly. A surprise. To me anyway. To join Daddy. Who was away most of the time. Arizona. California. Sometimes Colorado. Sometimes Texas. Always away. Railroad work, labor, heavy machinery. Rails and sun. Trains always moving. I remember the war. The 1940s. Soldiers. Tanks. Cannons with huge guns and wheels. Time does have mercy. But it doesn’t enumerate or wait. It moves. And we move with it. Though for boys, maybe? I wanted to wait. So things could happen more gently. A boy misses his father. A boy watches younger sisters. And younger brothers. All growing. And he’s growing. And he misses the times his mother is happy, laughing. Who knows time as well as boys and their young worries? I was a boy growing within a family, community. And dreams. And girls. Girl teenagers. I adored them, their pretty ways. In the fourth grade at McCartys. Made a bookshelf in shop. Proudly. Sanded. Varnished. Shiny. For my Mama. With love. I wanted to be a good carpenter like my Dad. Dad drank though. Dark moods. Dark scary times. Danger. And words hurtful, abrasive, accusing. Anger, pain, scorn. A boy wonders. About time. About forever. When it ends. I loved my Dad. Wonderful. Skilled man. Artist, singer. Precious and assuring. Yet. Yet. Unpredictable moments. You can never tell about time either. Like that, it is. It is. We farmed. Corn, melons, chili, beets, carrots, cilantro. Onions. Even potatoes in little mounds but they died. Corn fields at night. Irrigating. June nights. I loved forever. My grandpa I loved very much. Time was soothing then. We didn’t really need time when days and nights were safe. And with him they were. A healer and respected kiva elder. Herded his sheep. Along with my uncle Estevan. And Roy. Roy was a strange one. Chinese manner. So people said. From Chinatown in California. He had a gentle soft smile. And a storyteller he was. Yes. About his horse. Lightning. Fast and nimble and quick. Lightning, his horse. He’d ride. Yes, ride to see his girl to call her outside. Estella! Estella! Stories. I’d listen. The boy I was. Seeing my uncle riding. Riding his fast and nimble horse. I’d listen and he’d smile. Memory and time. It doesn’t count all the time. Listening. And because mothers are always loving. Alert. Ever caring. Mama decided we must go to Skull Valley where Dad was. Up to Grants, the depot there, we got on the westbound train. Sacks and boxes, a trunk, suitcase or two. Clothes, things. What did we have? I don’t remember. Not much though. We never had much. Poor. And lonely for Dad always away. I wonder. I wonder. Too often that’s been the Indian story. Father gone. Mother and kids left behind. Is it like that? Yes, too much. Dad didn’t like working for the hard railroad. He’d complain and rant about the crude and mean whites. The slave rules. The company. Trains powerful, unending. Time I thought was in the trains. Fast, loud, dangerous. I was afraid of the powerful trains. Like I said I’d see them. Soldiers, army troop trains, going east and going west. Unending. I wondered where they were all going. Where? Lightning and thunder trapped in the train power and steel. Yet I yearned for blue song. Hollow and lonely long tone. Coming round the bend, and something beyond the horizon. Far away maybe. Travel. Some other dream. Youth. Yes. I liked songs. Music I heard on the radio. Hank Williams. And stories that rang through the air. Talk and listening. It was the first time ever we were leaving the reservation. Only one world till then it seemed. Acoma community. Ours. On the edge of another world though, something strange. And fearful too. The dark moments. Like when Daddy drank. When there was fire from another world. An unknown. Yet fascinating somehow, oddly, something on the far horizon. I didn’t remember riding the train before. Ever! Until then. Like riding thunder. The horse, Lightning, Roy talked about. Riding off somewhere into the dark night. Fast, fast. Fast. Riding toward night. We watched the land speeding away. Far across the land, along the edge of it was a highway. With cars and trucks. Moving, moving. Only slower. Time speeds, like you speed. Only not an awareness. Or any way to tell what is taking place. When young. And you’re trying to furnish your own answers, solutions. To mysteries you’re anxious about. When all’s uncertain. Youth is not the time when time is apparent. Too slow. Or too fast. And you don’t really have clear reasons. Yet. At Ashfork we got off the train onto the depot platform. I sensed being lost. Lost mother and lost children. Dusk. Where was this world? Where did home go? Children? Lost at the edge of a strange world with a gray green depot. Large letters painted. Little sister is hungry. She whimpers. Mama says, “Hold my hand.” We walk, up street, walk, walk. It could be Indians. A family, mother and children. Lost? Where are they going? Up the street I think. Looking. For something to eat. My mother held only a little money. Hamburgers we split. Water and water. Self-conscious. Moment is time. I looked out and saw a train passing. Our train! I thought it was our train. But it wasn’t, just fear! Wait. Then a train down Chino Valley. Long-distance night. Stars vanished in too much night. Long day into night. Where does time go? Does it go nowhere but into night? Then at the sudden edge. The horizon. A vast bowl of light. And only at the far end, trees. And still far ahead of us. The train engine light. Always a light showing the way. My brother and I excited. A deer stunned by train light. Stilled. Stark. A cut stone. The dazzling moment held us. Youth and time. Nothing like it. Thrilled. Never until then. Years later I tried to tell about that moment to a love. But love is time too. So. Can’t do anything but live time. The horizon and beyond. Full of stars. Even unseen. Always belief is firmer than faith. With and without dreams. We arrived in Skull Valley early in the morning. Three-thirty? Where were we? On the other side of the moon from Acoma. A mother and her children and assorted bags and boxes. Dreams. Time. Horizon. Farther from home than belief. It felt like that. Within moment when you can’t turn away. A train depot on the other side of the moon. Deserted. After the train pulled away. Only the rails and starshine. What’s a boy say to his mother? Earlier than anything. A man whose picture I’d seen. White man. With a cap. With a visor. Sitting at a tall wooden desk with shelves. And a metal puzzle thing making clicking-clacking noises. Who spoke with Mama. Who smiled. Who wondered at us. An Indian woman with Indian children. Who were strangers. Like we just came from the planet Acoma. The other side. Of day. Of the present early morning night in that moment. The telegrapher with the visor said. I think. I think he did. He knew my father. Knew where he lived. Two miles away. So we took a road. Early, early morning night trek. Time. Shimmers in an odd amazing way. Within what might be. A boy and a story. The dawn coming. Horizon ever so near. When we knocked on his railroad worker housing door. Daddy was shocked. In his underwear. Shadows upon. And the background of his and Mama’s and our history. We come to discover each other. All failures and gains. Counting and mattering, no matter the time or sequence. We laugh and hug and cry. Daddy. Daddy. We’re here. Once again together. Family, history, travel, time, love. To say what time is, even fifty years in the past to now. In this moment, Skull Valley is just as real as it ever was. Memory we cross and cross again. Treks, trauma, and on. We do know what time is. It is loss and gain. A lingering. Within discovery we come to ourselves. Finding. Destiny. Moments recalled like friends. It was that way or another. We’re fairly certain either way. Stories. They are with us. Time doesn’t forsake. It doesn’t soothe or decrease. Never. Skull Valley. A time for a boy. History engulfed beyond. When I went back. Recently. I ate with friends at the cafe. By the railroad track. I was fascinated by photographs. Of the mountain lions in the mountains nearby. Ever there. No matter what. And the stories of bones. Tall tales or truths. They’re told. Apaches, it’s said. Wagon trains. Lies or no. Our history is more than here. We know more than realize. We realize what we don’t know. Or want to know. Truths. Stalk us, just like they found. A boy. More than fifty years ago. He discovered a world beyond Acoma. A world apart. And a world together as time, memory, as story. As his own. We seek and are found. Secure. Actual. Safe. And serene. Last summer near Prescott that boy fifty vast years later. Found carved images on stone walls that fit his hands. Carved in time. Eternal as stone. Past and present. Ever. Let’s say it is ever an ongoing story.

Most of the past is lost, and I’m glad mine has vanished into blackness or space or whatever nowhere what we feel and do goes, but there were a few cool Sunday afternoons when my father wasn’t sick with hangover and the air in the house wasn’t foul with anger and the best china had been cleared after the week’s best meal so he could place on the table his violins to polish with their special cloth and oil. Three violins he’d arrange side by side in their velvet-lined cases with enough room between for the lids to lie open. They looked like children in coffins, three infant sisters whose hearts had stopped for no reason, but after he rubbed up their scrolls and waists along the lines of the grain to the highest sheen, they took on the knowing postures of women in silk gowns in magazine ads for new cars and ocean voyages, and, as if a violin were a car in storage that needed a spin around the block every so often, for fifteen minutes he’d play each one— though not until each horsehair bow was precisely tightened, and coated with rosin, and we had undergone an eon of tuning. When he played, no one was allowed to speak to him. He seemed to see something drastic across the room or feel it through his handkerchief padding the chin board. So we’d hop in front of him waving or making pig noses the way kids do to guards at Buckingham Palace, and after he had finished playing and had returned to himself, he’d softly curse the idiocy of his children beneath my mother’s voice yelling to him from the kitchen That was beautiful, Paul, play it again. He never did, and I always hoped he wouldn’t, because the whole time I was waiting for his switchblade to appear, and the new stories he’d tell me for the scar thin as a seam up the white underside of his forearm, for the chunks of proud flesh on his back and belly, scarlet souvenirs of East St. Louis dance halls in the Twenties, cornered in men’s rooms, ganged in blind alleys, always slashing out alone with this knife. First the violins had to be snug again inside their black cases for who knew how many more months or years or lifetimes; then he had to pretend to have forgotten why I was sitting there wide-eyed across from him long after my sister and brother had gone off with friends. Every time, as if only an afterthought, He’d sneak into his pocket and ease the switchblade onto the bare table between us, its thumb-button jutting from the pearl-and-silver plating like the eye of some sleek prehistoric fish. I must have known it wouldn’t come to life and slither toward me by itself, but when he’d finally nod to me to take it its touch was still warm with his body heat and I could feel the blade inside aching to flash open with the terrible click that sounds now like just a tsk of disappointment, it has become so sweet and quiet.

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember what it was like in the spring of 1950 before the burning coal entered my life. I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels and one crooked broken masculine one and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain with skin wrinkled up like a chicken's beside the razor and the silver tap. I didn't live in Paris for nothing and walk with Jack Gilbert down the wide sidewalks thinking of Hart Crane and Apollinaire and I didn't save the picture of the two of us moving through a crowd of stiff Frenchmen and put it beside the one of Pound and Williams unless I wanted to see what coals had done to their lives too. I say it with vast affection, wanting desperately to know what the two of them talked about when they lived in Pennsylvania and what they talked about at St. Elizabeth's fifty years later, looking into the sun, 40,000 wrinkles between them, the suffering finally taking over their lives. I think of Gilbert all the time now, what we said on our long walks in Pittsburgh, how lucky we were to live in New York, how strange his great fame was and my obscurity, how we now carry the future with us, knowing every small vein and every elaboration. The coal has taken over, the red coal is burning between us and we are at its mercy— as if a power is finally dominating the two of us; as if we're huddled up watching the black smoke and the ashes; as if knowledge is what we needed and now we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge. The tears are different—though I hate to speak for him—the tears are what we bring back to the darkness, what we are left with after our own escape, what, all along, the red coal had in store for us as we moved softly, either whistling or singing, either listening or reasoning, on the gray sidewalks and the green ocean; in the cars and the kitchens and the bookstores; in the crowded restaurants, in the empty woods and libraries.

That we go back to life one day, the next, Some other century where we were alive, When music spelled itself out to us, often Incomplete, and nothing was more vague Than the banality of  whom to love and lose In line, the doppelgangers in rimless snow, Or even now, in summer, at day, by night, When something oblivious, replete, turns Back at us in idolatrous quiet, so we see Who in nullified particulars we really are At a desk of our own making, filling in for Someone else’s life sentence, blots drying On a silk tie having no meaning but today’s, When the loner puts his insomnia to rest.

“endlessly making an end to things” —Celan I must have left a fingerprint, a molecule of oil, a seal, a slick when I took my hands away from her throat—the way she liked in loving to have her pearls exchanged for the torque of my fingers and so kill her eminence for a second. The queen is dead. Long live the queen. The evidence was volatile, was fugitive, was a story told in menstrual blood and glycerines, Chanel and boss sauce. It failed in the telling to be events and sequence, the spell of water and bridge, and became rain and distance, the first faint smell of rose dismembering, masking the rigor mortis of the coyotes. I took my hands away as from the child sleeping or from the hot stove, and I was no longer I. I saw the sky in the windshield of another city. The sky an empty karate studio, the sky Route 95. Because she saw herself everywhere, The sky a fugue, the folds of a gown where the dragons are. there could be no other. A film was her darling, the sky Artists’ Supplies, the sky six-thirty darkening. a mirror of her hair—fixed or deranged Sky of correspondences, the color of G minor, the taste of gray. She thought, from the audience: I should be up there. February sky a copy center, relocated elsewhere. I loved to go out into the audience, the bebopist said, and walk in the crowd to feel what they feel. Jumping down from the bandstand, I broke my foot, lay there, had to blare it from my back. The sky nineteenth-century smoke, the sky a drum, then here comes the bass solo. Vote Hoffa , the sky says, labor sky, the dollar soaring with the yen. The sky popularized, blue-red, the access and the factory. I take myself to the movies—the romance of sheets, the dustup of things and her magnificent face: stylish, the sky inside her eyes, chlorine and glass. I tithe to the darkness and I’m glad for the dark two hours where I undo her, where I remember the eye I indulged, the opposite of sacrifice, the lamb’s throat uncut, the woolly body kindled in the green like a dream of Lorca’s, betrayed in the telling. The sky Repairables, the sky Pony Rides. Some nights in the house by the river, I walked out into a collective dream of home—an overstory overlooking a body of water—where I found the horse like smoke or luck, a muscled earth, an avatar, and I held him, face to flank, and felt the skeleton under the skin and the fear of the human touched back by hunger. The great white eye another moon. It was a lesser and a greater form of the feeling after fucking, if it has a form, if its past is present. Sky an empty shelf in the Salvation Army Thrift Store. A few fine hairs like her lashes on my hands The sky a white peony, the sky a paper life. when I came back and found her bound in the sheets, the opposite of spectacle, not absorbing the gaze but giving off light like night water, giving back the gorgeous I had inscribed there, a fallen form, small, fursheen, film still, a body suddenly small enough to fill a tear duct. The sky a shell, a lull in the shelling. What was it like, the loving? Like Sarajevo under siege, no electricity, no gas, no water, and yet the dance goes on in which a bathtub is filled, and, although the theater is twenty degrees, the dancer of the god-kissed tendons for her finale jumps into it—the leap that takes away the breath and rations it to everyone, and it’s the only bath for anyone in two months. The sky orchestra and karma, the sky Gold Bought and Sold. The windows of the house I won’t live in held light and the island fires on the river, held hawk and heron. Under siege in dream, the panes slash my face when they shatter with difference, inside, outside, with distance, what was not. A second dream: kids go by on bikes and big wheels, their faces grown up and disfigured, scabbed, hydrocephalic with sadness. Finally the whole body The sky a gray whale, the sky magnanimous and cruel. and not just its parts, wants to be unloved, beginning The sky Purgatory Road, the sky a god mouth, a crow. with its parts, the fetish of her: a cell from the lining, spit, a follicle, the thousand ships of her face, the torso and ratio, rib whittle, unbound feet, beginning to become vast, nothing you can touch, a taste, The sky a copper pot blackened, picked clean of puchero . a smell, familiar and far away, unlocked by thaw, feral and essential, like a language lost, like night illuminated by the night.

Past the fountain out of repair And the boarded diner A small studio You’d never told anyone about Where old clothes have remained Right where you’ve dumped them Side by side With random notes and sketches When someone close to you Has a different idea of what you represent He insisted You’ll write a check for the loan There were other misjudgments As well. Exits were being blocked Down every hall I walked Until a sort of muscle memory— Well, I knew it all along, of course, But thought it was in the future, It rested like a memory— This desire For a place respecting anonymity Oiling your .38 Special, Like a criminal readying for benefits A bottle of Jack Daniels— This and more Shaded by echoing buildings With a glance toward the harbor The water rough with small debris Today