96 Memory poems

About what’s past,Hold on when you can, I used to say, And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge — metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un- knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously, a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child whom I gave some money to and told no one about, having promised ...You must keep what you’ve promised very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget

Such are the little memories of you; They come and go, return and lie apart From all main things of life; yet more than they, With noiseless feet, they come and grip the heart. Gay laughter leading quick and stormy tears, Then smiles again and pulse of flying feet, In breathless chase of fleeting gossamers, Are memories so dear, so bitter-sweet. No more are echoes of your flying feet. Hard by, where Pike’s Peak rears its head in state, The erstwhile rushing feet, with halting steps, For health’s return in Denver watch and wait. But love and memories of noiseless tread, Where angels hovered once, all shining fair, To tuck you in your little trundle bed, Kneel nightly now in agony of prayer.

Little tin key lost somewhere in my memory, returned to me in a dream. Like the blue-burning match blowing over the surface of some drunk girl’s sweet, flaming party drink.Happy birthday.

We kept only the keys, letters, and photos — everything else stayed behind when we left the house. That can happen when a nation changes overnight, when those you know turn into a gate of feathers — and the thing about feathers is, they know what's been missed. For years I watch my neighbor's house from others' windows— different countries, various homes, some of brick, some of stone. Some never imagine what a home can mean when an unfinished tune traps the ceiling. I pretend never to have seen a body midair, a father's hands planted on the ground— after all what we don't admit to never happened. But I couldn't change that day in Murcia, when water brought light to the door: I am seven it is the day before our departure, the day my father gives me a notebook, and I tell him, this is where I'll keep my country.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight; Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.

Here comes the powdered milk I drank as a child, and the money it saved. Here come the papers I delivered, the spotted dog in heat that followed me home and the dogs that followed her. Here comes a load of white laundry from basketball practice, and sheets with their watermarks of semen. And here comes snow, a language in which no word is ever repeated, love is impossible, and remorse. . . . Yet childhood doesn’t end, but accumulates, each memory knit to the next, and the fields become one field. If to die is to lose all detail, then death is not so distinguished, but a profusion of detail, a last gossip, character passed wholly into fate and fate in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.

for Gra'ma There was always fabric in your lap and a whistle in your heart. A sweet sap to be sucked waited in the garden. Nymphs of newts nestled under rock, your role as She Who Brings the Waters intact. Between the trilling of the crickets educating into the night and the sad sack of cans in the mornings something grew, flourished in the dark — vines as sturdy as telephone wire writhed in the breezes. You patched together a blanket of us, sewed together the mismatched and lopped off edges. And anger grew a twin, ripped through the bermuda grass, something stubborn and determined: Me, in a leather patchwork skirt, the bitter lemon song returning to its beginning over and over on the Howdie Doody phonograph, a handful of bandages, a faceful of ghosts delivered from the mirrors. How did you stand it? All of it. Us crunching through your set life, kids scuffling through the mounds of leave. Always making do. Your sunshine eyes, those stenciled memories where we still live.

Go north a dozen years on a road overgrown with vines to find the days after you were born. Flowers remembered their colors and trees were frothy and the hospital was behind us now, its brick indifference forgotten by our car mirrors. You were revealed to me: tiny, delicate, your head smelling of some other world. Turn right after the circular room where I kept my books and right again past the crib where you did not sleep and you will find the window where I held you that June morning when you opened your eyes. They were blue, tentative, not the deep chocolate they would later become. You were gazing into the world: at our walls, my red cup, my sleepless hair and though I'm told you could not focus, and you no longer remember, we were seeing one another after seasons of darkness.

I’ve been writing this since the summer my grandfather taught me how to hold a blade of grass between my thumbs and make it whistle, since I first learned to make green from blue and yellow, turned paper into snowflakes, believed a seashell echoed the sea, and the sea had no end. I’ve been writing this since a sparrow flew into my class and crashed into the window, laid to rest on a bed of tissue in a shoebox by the swings, since the morning I first stood up on the bathroom sink to watch my father shave, since our eyes met in that foggy mirror, since the splinter my mother pulled from my thumb, kissed my blood. I’ve been writing this since the woman I slept with the night of my father’s wake, since my grandmother first called me a faggot and I said nothing, since I forgave her and my body pressed hard against Michael on the dance floor at Twist, since the years spent with a martini and men I knew I couldn’t love. I’ve been writing this since the night I pulled off the road at Big Sur and my eyes caught the insanity of the stars, since the months by the kitchen window watching the snow come down like fallout from a despair I had no word for, since I stopped searching for a name and found myself tick-tock in a hammock asking nothing of the sky. I’ve been writing this since spring, studying the tiny leaves on the oaks dithering like moths, contrast to the eon-old fieldstones unveiled of snow, but forever works-in-progress, since tonight with the battled moon behind the branches spying on the world— same as it ever was—perfectly unfinished, my glasses and pen at rest again on the night table. I’ve been writing this since my eyes started seeing less, my knees aching more, since I began picking up twigs, feathers, and pretty rocks for no reason collecting on the porch where I sit to read and watch the sunset like my grandfather did everyday, remembering him and how to make a blade of grass whistle.

the Venetian blinds I dusted off for my mother on Saturday mornings, closing, opening them with the pull cord a few times just to watch the outside universe keep blinking, as the flock suddenly rises from November stubble, hovers a few seconds, closing, opening, blinking, before it tilts, then vanishes over a hill.