96 Memory poems

a poem in seven parts 1 convent my knees recall the pockets worn into the stone floor, my hands, tracing against the wall their original name, remember the cold brush of brick, and the smell of the brick powdery and wet and the light finding its way in through the high bars. and also the sisters singing at matins, their sweet music the voice of the universe at peace and the candles their light the light at the beginning of creation and the wonderful simplicity of prayer smooth along the wooden beads and certainly attended. 2 someone inside me remembers that my knees must be hidden away that my hair must be shorn so that vanity will not test me that my fingers are places of prayer and are holy that my body is promised to something more certain than myself 3 again born in the year of war on the day of perpetual help. come from the house of stillness through the soft gate of a silent mother. come to a betraying father. come to a husband who would one day rise and enter a holy house. come to wrestle with you again, passion, old disobedient friend, through the secular days and nights of another life. 4 trying to understand this life who did i fail, who did i cease to protect that i should wake each morning facing the cold north? perhaps there is a cart somewhere in history of children crying “sister save us” as she walks away. the woman walks into my dreams dragging her old habit. i turn from her, shivering, to begin another afternoon of rescue, rescue. 5 sinnerman horizontal one evening on the cold stone, my cross burning into my breast, did i dream through my veil of his fingers digging and is this the dream again, him, collarless over me, calling me back to the stones of this world and my own whispered hosanna? 6 karma the habit is heavy. you feel its weight pulling around your ankles for a hundred years. the broken vows hang against your breasts, each bead a word that beats you. even now to hear the words defend protect goodbye lost or alone is to be washed in sorrow. and in this life there is no retreat no sanctuary no whole abiding sister. 7 gloria mundi so knowing, what is known? that we carry our baggage in our cupped hands when we burst through the waters of our mother. that some are born and some are brought to the glory of this world. that it is more difficult than faith to serve only one calling one commitment one devotion in one life.

In every dream of a room the first room intrudes. No matter the years, the tears dried and forgotten, it is the skeleton of the first that protrudes.

Linoleum and half a dozen eggs In 1960 Many towered Ilium A brand name and a shopping list too Memory distinguishes all things from Only nothing I was born and grew Rooms stacked up into houses A few trees (maples) welted in their seasons Wildly like sea birds in crude oil What amazes Me now amazed me always but never Often eyesight is prophetic instantly Seeing broken eggs on the linoleum In the kitchen 1960 I saw a broken lifetime further On as I see now my happy sister

The brain forgets but the blood will remember. There, when the play of sense is over, The last, low spark in the darkest chamber Will hold all there is of love and lover. The war of words, the life-long quarrel Of self against self will resolve into nothing; Less than the chain of berry-red coral Crying against the dead black of her clothing. What has the brain that it hopes to last longer? The blood will take from forgotten violence, The groping, the break of her voice in anger. There will be left only color and silence. These will remain, these will go searching Your veins for life when the flame of life smolders; The night that you two saw the mountains marching Up against dawn with the stars on their shoulders; The jetting poplars’ arrested fountains As you drew her under them, easing her pain; The notes, not the words, of a half-finished sentence; The music, the silence. . . . These will remain.

It is the great arguments we are proud of, over a nibbled peach, hair in the comb, a faulty lube job; the reconciliations were always naked in borrowed rooms, sometimes in Queens or Staten Island, we touched each other shyly—we reminded each other of loneliness and funk and beautiful pigeons with oil-slick necks, cooing bitterly— but there we lost each other in forgiveness; keeping score, being wounded even in triumph, walking home down leafy avenues etched with the faint double line of extinct trolleys, caressing carved hearts under a sheen of sap with a ragged nail, sleeping alone, choosing the dream of betrayal, entering by the wide door and waking dead—there we were superb. In Brooklyn we held our own.

You have forgotten it all. You have forgotten your name, where you lived, who you loved, why. I am simply your nurse, terse and unlovely I point to things and remind you what they are: chair, book, daughter, soup. And when we are alone I tell you what lies in each direction: This way is death, and this way, after a longer walk, is death, and that way is death but you won’t see it until it is right in front of you. Once after your niece had been to visit you and I said something about how you must love her or she must love you or something useless like that, you gripped my forearm in your terrible swift hand and said,she is everything— you gave me a shake—everything to me. And then you fell back into the well. Deep in the well of everything. And I stand at the edge and call: chair, book, daughter, soup.

It happened to me once. Winter came, and snow quilted every inch. I stood on the soapbox, as I was told, and made staggering accusations. The public ignored, so I retreated behind the potted yew. I was waiting for a moment I was supposed to have on a balcony overlooking the giant, gridded landscape. The sounds I made underscored what I meant. The potted yew was the face that I wore. It was a metaphor for what could be. The public endured. I put the potted yew behind me. I made staggering an art. That wasn’t the truth though. Winter comes and negates all it covers. It doesn’t matter where I stand. The balcony is a floor without walls. The yew is a hurt that shadows. The instance lives beneath us. Not just us, everybody. The shadow hurts us. I make sounds like the truth. Fate and theft are involved. I think I told you this before. The floor is a wall that obscures. The yew is quilt without color. Shadow is a fate you involved. The yew on a balcony negates. I told you this before. I was left undone. It’s what I meant. Underneath everyone.

It seemed those rose-pink dishes she kept for special company were always cold, brought down from the shelf in jingling stacks, the plates like the panes of ice she broke from the water bucket winter mornings, the flaring cups like tulips that opened too early and got bitten by frost. They chilled the coffee no matter how quickly you drank, while a heavy everyday mug would have kept a splash hot for the better part of a conversation. It was hard to hold up your end of the gossip with your coffee cold, but it was a special occasion, just the same, to sit at her kitchen table and sip the bitter percolation of the past week’s rumors from cups it had taken a year to collect at the grocery, with one piece free for each five pounds of flour.

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. “That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction? ‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.” I tell you, something went wrong there a while back. Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject. No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong? I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel with the other. And then something like braids will stand out, on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious. We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house, talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean. I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

This is the place it happened. It was here. You might not know it was unless you knew. All day the cars blow past and disappear. This is the place it happened. It was here. Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear. Look at the highway marker, still askew. This is the place it happened. It was here. You might not know it was unless you knew.