96 Memory poems

Some seventy years later your father, sitting at your table over wine he savors, last rays mellow- ing in it, recalls his favorite aunt, Rifka. “Just naming her shoots rifles off again inside the morning square, rifles she aimed into the air for certain customers, the pigeons erupting.” Handsome, clever, but with little actual schooling, she, a Jewess, kept a shop in Moscow, stocking horse- and battle-gear, bustling all day long. Powders, braided with his laboring breath, still prickle inside his nostrils; like the wayward flickers cast by lazily swimming, naked limbs, leathers polished, buckles, gleam; and the oats banked in their bins, heavy August winds drowsed in them, at one glance, a single sniffing, bloom; the harnesses and bells, by gaslight starred, send out appeals, while sleighs collect for midnight junkets. He smitten with it all, like those officers of the Czar who, admiring her wit, her seasoned gaiety, forever jammed the shop. “Even the city’s metropolitan, young despite his full, black robes, took to dropping in on her, his jagged, bushy beard awag with chat. One balmy summer evening, I remember, the three of us, laughter brimming like wine (he turned his glass to the lessened light), relaxed in her snug flat. The next morning at breakfast, talk going on as if we’d never stop”— he, a startled look lit on his face, breaking in upon himself, exclaims, the pigeons crackling through the air— “My God, he spent the night with her!” He, sipping the last drop, sits back, as much as he’s amazed amused to see this special virtue of old age, the oats ripening only in slow time.

When Mrs. McCausland comes to mind she slips through a small gap in oblivion and walks down her front steps, in her hand a small red velvet pillow she tucks under the head of Old Jim Schreiber, who is lying dead-drunk against the curb of busy Market Street. Then she turns, labors up the steps and is gone . . . A small story. Or rather, the memory of a story I heard as a boy. The witnesses are not to be found, the steps lead nowhere, the pillow has collapsed into a thread of dust . . . Do the dead come back only to remind us they, too, were once among the living, and that the story we make of our lives is a mystery of luminous, but uncertain moments, a shuffle of images we carry toward sleep— Mrs. McCausland with her velvet pillow, Old Jim at peace—a story, like a small clearing in the woods at night, seen from the windows of a passing train.

The scent of burning wood holds the strongest memory. Mesquite, cedar, piñon, juniper, all are distinct. Mesquite is dry desert air and mild winter. Cedar and piñon are colder places. Winter air in our hair is pulled away, and scent of smoke settles in its place. We walk around the rest of the day with the aroma resting on our shoulders. The sweet smell holds the strongest memory. We stand around the fire. The sound of the crackle of wood and spark is ephemeral. Smoke, like memories, permeates our hair, our clothing, our layers of skin. The smoke travels deep to the seat of memory. We walk away from the fire; no matter how far we walk, we carry this scent with us. New York City, France, Germany— we catch the scent of burning wood; we are brought home.

A silver watch you've worn for years is suddenly gone, leaving a pale white stripe blazing on your wrist. A calendar, marked with appointments you’ve meant to keep, disappears, leaving a faded spot on the wall where it hung. You search the house, yard, trash cans for weeks, but never find it. One night the glass in your windows vanishes, leaving you sitting in a gust of wind. You think how a leg is suddenly lost beneath a subway train, or taxi’s wheel, some slippery afternoon. The child you've raised for years, combing each lock, tailoring each smile, each tear, each valuable thought, suddenly changes to a harlequin, joins the circus passing in the street, never to be seen again. One morning you wash your face, look into the mirror, find the water has eroded your features, worn them smooth as a rock in a brook. A blank oval peers back at you, too mouthless to cry out.

Memory, hither come, And tune your merry notes; And, while upon the wind, Your music floats, I'll pore upon the stream, Where sighing lovers dream, And fish for fancies as they pass Within the watery glass. I'll drink of the clear stream, And hear the linnet's song; And there I'll lie and dream The day along: And, when night comes, I'll go To places fit for woe, Walking along the darken'd valley, With silent Melancholy.

I strip the porch roof, pick out the used nails, and toss the shingles down onto a drop cloth, remembering when I shingled my grandmother's roof fifty years ago: the tar smell, the brackets, planks, and ladders all the same, but level now with hemlock limbs instead of locust. I lug four shingles up the ladder, kneel and drive the old nails home, slide another shingle into place, pound, toes bent, knees creaking.Miserliness, a friend jokes about the nails, but I call it caring, thinking of the man who gave us this land on the cove, the cottage, the boat- house full of boats. The only time I saw him he was at his work bench, a rich man straightening nails, moving from the bent can to the anvil to the straight.

“Joey, 4th grade, 1992” He’s been on the fridge since it happened, sneaking glances from underneath the cat magnet at our dinners, coffee habits, arguments. We posted him on the database of items found, hoping that someone would recognize his messy hair, Batman t-shirt, blue eyes, but no one answered the post or claimed him. Somewhere a childhood photo album is not quite complete, or a grandmother’s mantelpiece; an uncle’s wallet. One afternoon I got restless, flipped through my old yearbooks, trying to find him, looking to see how he might have aged: did he lose the chubby cheeks? dye his hair? how long did he have to wear braces? But he’s too young to have passed me in the halls, the picture just a stranger, a small reminder of the whirling aftermath when Joplin was clutching at scraps: everything displaced, even this poor kid who doesn’t even know he’s lost.

Green and brown current of river: Reverberant iron bridge: crossing over, Woman and child fixed at the center, Holding hands and both weeping: Because her child is weeping: because His mother weeps: because the river, far Underfoot, glitters through cracks In the wooden flooring that widen Perceptively as he steps. Ahead, heightened by a hill, dwarfed In yellow trees, the house is made ready. All should have been primer-perfect, Including the train rushing headlong Past the station, always in arrears, Never deigning to stop and put down A stepping-stool. Nothing more is given: Except perhaps an assignment of cause: A plank has fallen away to the river. The two figures clasp hands across the gulf, Rocking back and forth in soundless Oscillation there on the bridge Where my mind proposes to leave them In place, my mother and me, On the first day of school, 1921.

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried. As pain after it’s ended stays in the body: A woman moves her hands oddly because her grandfather passed through a place he never spoke of. Making instead the old jokes with angled fingers. Call one thing another’s name long enough, it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer. Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened. Call what branching happened a man whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own. Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples, to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking. Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.

Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in. She sat here in her chair, Smiling into the fire; He who played stood there, Bowing it higher and higher. Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!