96 Memory poems

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family, speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive, their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s, mercy shining from their comprehensive faces— this is one of my favorite things. I like it so much I sleep all the time. Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed deep in the dreams where they appear. In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids, before the empress with the melting face, under the towering plane tree, they just show up. “It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.” They are diffident and polite. (Who knew the dead were so polite?) They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes. They don’t want to steal my body and possess the earth and wreak vengeance. They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides, why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it. One of them shyly offers me a pencil. The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster. Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music, the right Reverend Al Green is singing, “I could never see tomorrow. I was never told about the sorrow.”

Herodotus says the king made a bowl to leave behind the memory of a number. We don’t know the number. We don’t know if it was divisible by two or three. I want, at the moment, the number to indicate a ratio, part of a proportion, because the measurement of the earth depends on this, the balance among things, the snow at the bottom of the hill, the gold garage light caged in a tree, my love for my friend and the distance between us, which I can’t bear. I made a pinhole camera to demonstrate proportion, and everything bright hovers on its milky eye, and here is the catalogue of what hovers there smaller than itself: the blue horizon and the dash at the stoplight, a shell night-light, the gazing ball of the sun going down against the white back fence, which made it look like night in the woods lit from underneath on the wax. I held these things yesterday, along with two pearls that are spheres hanging from my living room ceiling. My friend is smaller now, and if I held my camera up to her, she would give off enough light to hover pocket-sized in my hand, and grand in the world.

In those days I began to see light under every bushel basket, light nearly splitting the sides of the bushel basket. Light came through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles congregated like well-taxed citizens untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one underneath the basket. I was certain I had nothing to say. When I grew restless in the interior, the exterior gave.

1 I wanted out of the past so I ate the air, it took me further into air. It cut me, an iridescent chord of geometric light. I breathed deep, it lit me up, it was good. All these years, lightning, rain, the sky, its little daisies. Memento mori and lux. 2 And you can’t blame me. This daisy-feeling. I was a poet with a death-style of my own waking. I occupy the rest of it. A blue-green leaving feeling. To no longer belong to a body sometimes open to air. In rain, in early morning rain. 3 Today was the day of the amphitheater in mind. The day of a dreaming speech where the light is dope and that’s all you can say. When a feeling degrades and evolves into thought like 2 a.m. dilated, revealed a star. It will say this long agony is great being awake. It is being lovely now. 4 All the stars are here that belonged to whatever was speaking. I built my life out of what was left of me. Sky and its procedures. A romanticism of clouds, trees, pale crenellations, and poetry. A musical joybang. Touching everything. 5 When the words come back their fictions remain. Thunderheads and rain, lexical waters raking gutters, carving a world. The stylus will live in the flash. A daring light from pewter to whatever. Now discrete observations produce undramatic sound, like I am a bubble, make me the sea. O, make me the sea. 6 For a long time the names of things and things unnamed. For a long time hawks and their chicks, fox and their cubs, mice and their mice. For a long time bunnies and boojum, and a name for every bird in me. I am native to feathers — their netherside. 7 The sun was a goldish wave taped to a book. A wavy diagram in a fusty book. Foxed old wave. A soft electro-fuzz enters the head. A soft fuzzy opiate lightness. What could be the message in this pointillist masquerade. What use memory. 8 I came from a different world. I will die in it. Someone saw it, I love them for seeing it. I love seeing it with them. Love watching it die in me. It wasn’t behind or beside me. Finding it wasn’t it. Being it was everything. That was the thing I thought as I fell. 9 I am that thing in morning, whatever motors in the skull, something is claimed. Sudden rain keeps it real. Rooftops from the window look stunned. Cleansed. Looking out over the day, the pale performing day. I always consult the air before composing air. 10 And what have you been given, the blue nothing asks, who are you under clanging brass? Who are you, Saturday; sing to me. See the crows thread summerismus. Afternoon shade mirrors an issuelessness. A perfection of beetle slowly treading summer’s blade. The leaves broadcast color. I was born in summer, my conqueror, breaking into wisteria. 11 The sun was a golden rag nailed to a ladder. And here the marigolds grow down to the banks. The mayflies drowse above water. How then the dazzling surface and its dictions under piled clouds, and clouds sitting there by place and sound. One thing. This thing and sound glitters. Indicative transitive particular battles the void. All afternoon a green-gold silent light on the spotted grass, sprung. 12 I know it’s summer even if I can’t decipher the call. I believe in the birds haunting me. I held on. I’m full of bluster but also full of vision. I’m not ready to put the book down. To stop singing bright spots thrilling the quicksilver over my torrent. I make sounds, forget to die. I call it living, this inhuman conch in the ear. A pewter sensation and wind. 13 The sun remains a yellow sail tacked to the sky. I am climbing air here. I am here in the open. The kestrel swerves. Its silent kerning. A stunning calibration of nothing. I’m left to see.

Little soul, do you remember? You once walked over wooden boards to a house that sat on stilts in the sea. It was early. The sun painted brightness onto the water, and wherever you sat that path led directly to you. Some mornings the sea-road was muted scratched tin, some mornings blinding. Then it would leave. Little soul, it is strange — even now it is early.

If I close my eyes now, I can still see them canopied by the visor of my sunhat: three children islanded on a narrow rim of earth between the huge crack-willow that they squat before, hushed, poised to net a frog, and the pond the frog will jump to (it got away) a glass its dive will shatter. The unbroken image pleases my mind’s eye with its density, such thick crisscross of tree-trunk, earth, and tall grass I see no breach, no source for the light that steeps it but a blue burning in the pond’s green glass. The grass withered, the tree blew down, earth caught the frog, the children grew. Sky’s ice-blue flame teased along the wick it would consume.

In a cerulean ruckus Of quilts, we played house Off the big room where They laughed & slowdragged Weekends.The eagle flies On Friday.

Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember As time W. C. Williams dies and we are Back from a hard two years in Guatemala Where the meager provision of being Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones Of two coffee plantations has managed Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in Horror of bank giving way as she and her Sister and their friends tunnel in to make A cubby. We live in an old cement brick Farmhouse already inside the city limits Of Albuquerque. Or that has all really Happened and we go to Vancouver where, Thanks to friends Warren and Ellen Tallman, I get a job teaching at the University of British Columbia. It’s all a curious dream, a rush To get out of the country before the sad Invasion of the Bay of Pigs, that bleak use Of power. One of my British colleagues Has converted the assets of himself and His wife to gold bullion and keeps the Ingots in a sturdy suitcase pushed under Their bed. I love the young, at least I Think I do, in their freshness, their attempt To find ways into Canada from the western Reaches. Otherwise the local country seems Like a faded Edwardian sitcom. A stunned Stoned woman runs one Saturday night up And down the floors of the Hydro Electric Building on Pender with the RCMP in hot Pursuit where otherwise we stood in long Patient lines, extending often several blocks Up the street. We were waiting to get our Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack Of Molson’s. I think, I dream, I write the Final few chapters of The Island, the despairs Gathering at the end. I read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America but am too uptight To enjoy his quiet, bright wit. Then that Summer there is the great Vancouver Poetry Festival, Allen comes back from India, Olson From Gloucester, beloved Robert Duncan From Stinson Beach. Denise reads “Hypocrite Women” to the Burnaby ladies and Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Margaret Avison are there Too along with a veritable host of the young. Then it’s autumn again. I’ve quit my job And we head back to Albuquerque And I teach again at the university, and Sometime just about then I must have Seen myself as others see or saw me, Even like in a mirror, but could not quite Accept either their reassuring friendship Or their equally locating anger. Selfish, Empty, I kept at it. Thirty-eight years later I seem to myself still much the same, Even if I am happier, I think, and older.

Memory is flotsam (yes) just below the surface an eternal city a heap of rubble debris smaller than your fist an animal with- out a leash organized wreck- age ghost net or one hanging silence on the phone— she's gone, my sister said, and we wept and wept over my grandmother while my sister sat with her body and me in the static and the rabbi they sent told her to recite psalms as comfort so we listened to each other breathe instead and my sister's breath was a tunnel a handful of pebbles a knotted Chinese jump-rope         her breath was the coiled terrycloth turban our grandmother wore when she cooked or walked the shallow end of her condo pool for exercise— our grandmother still somewhere in her white turban sewing Cornish game hens together with needle and string or somewhere in her good wig playing poker or somewhere in her easy chair watching CNN while cookies shaped like our initials bake in her oven O memory how much you erased how many holes         we punched in your facts since who knows the stories she never told about the camps there are no marked graves just too much food on holidays diabetes my mother's fear of ships and the motion of some suspension bridges O memory you've left us trauma below the surface and some above like the fact that I can't shake the December my sister's red hair caught fire from leaning too close to the menorah's candles, our grandmother putting her out with a dish towel with her strong arms.

At times it is like watching a face you have just met, trying to decide who it reminds you of— no one, surely, whom you ever hated or loved, but yes, somebody, somebody. You watch the face as it turns and nods, showing you, at certain angles, a curve of the lips or a lift of the eyebrow that is exactly right, and still the lost face eludes you. Now this face is talking, and you hear a sound in the voice, the accent on certain words— yes! a phrase . . . you barely recall sitting outside, by a pool or a campfire, remarking a peculiar, recurring expression. Two syllables, wasn’t it? Doorknob? Bathroom? Shawcross? What the hell kind of word is shawcross? A name; not the right one. A couple of syllables that could possibly be a little like something you may once have heard. So the talk drifts, and you drift, sneaking glances, pounding your brain. Days later a face occurs to you, and yes, there is a resemblance. That odd word, though, or phrase, is gone. It must have been somebody else. Yes, it’s like that, at times; something is, maybe; and there are days when you can almost say what it is.