96 Memory poems

Start this with the invocation: a seventy-seven Pinto, an eastbound freeway, two boys a few months from their driver’s license. It happens again because you’ve said it. You sit in the back seat, a ghost of red vinyl, to listen to these boys—one of whom was you, the one along for the ride—talk brave about cheerleaders and socket wrenches as they pass a stolen cigarette between them. They don’t know you’re there, wouldn’t believe in you should they look backstage, backseat. The boys are driving back from an October orchard where they’d gone to see leaves change. You remember:orange, brown, as though you’d just seen those leaves, because in this proximity to yourself—the boy in the passenger seat—you are thinking the same thing, and each of your in- carnations feels like they’ve thought this before. Your ghost, your present tense thinks that maybe this isn’t right. Now you’re along for the ride. These boys haven’t cuffed up against their own mortality yet, though one of them is sick. The other one, driving and picking at the thin hair falling from his scalp, will die soon, because what lurks in his dark blood can be cured by medical science. And that cure is what will kill him, as it leaves him weak, unable to fight off infection in his lungs. But that comes later. You are here with them now to find out what you owe to whom—your life, mortgaged to one of these boys and you’ve never been able to rectify that debt. You are the stage direction, a ghost backstage, wanting a spotlight, a soapbox a soliloquy. Dissolve back into your life, like sugar in tea—exit this scene now, stage left. * You are the apparition again in your mother’s house. You follow yourself down the yellow hallway to the ringing phone in the kitchen. You already know who’s calling, the way you knew then—when you were the self you’re haunting. Your friend is dead. You know this even before his sister tells you—but because your ghost is too close, the boy can feel your grief, but can’t feel his own. And you did know then, didn’t you? You knew that morning, that the earth awakes closest to the sun—four days into every new year. And Lazarus, dead now, four days. Roll away the stone. Believe in something besides the past. Awaken from this dream like a man called out from a cave. It happens this way each time: a bourbon breakdown in January rain—weeping an invocation, cursing corollary. * Can you go to Tom’s grave today and mandate him back to this life? Should you cue him from the wing like a stage direction? Would he damn you—a sadness, a gravestone on your chest, for calling him into this mortal suffering? If you had been in Houston that day he’d have died anyway. You’re a fool to think you can bargain across the river. Haunting the past won’t stop it from happening each time, exactly the same way. Won’t stop your heart from breaking like a glass decanter, brown whisky sliding mercury across the tile.

In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift, there were words for cover which ripped them off, there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed, promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice, that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn’t unsee and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs of this time, and I can only go by what others tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate, I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls were under siege from smaller men who called themselves heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world. I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it as around my fortifications one man pulled another man behind his chariot. If they say that’s how I was, that’s how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror who apes me every morning. She’s not the one I remember imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall, which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear, and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers, and he turned from my beauty and said my name.

This must happen just after I die: At sunrise I bend over my grandparents' empty house in Hazelwood and pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River. Copper tubing and electric lines hang down like hairs. The house is the size of a matchbox. I sprinkle bits of broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack needles in the open door of the porch. I scratch a Blue Tip and blow vowels of fire through the living room, the tunneled hallway. Flames run up the wooden stairs. I put my ear beside the hot kitchen window to hear the crackling voices of cupboards and walls. I flip the welder's mask: Sun off the rectangular glass, a rose glint before the white torch.

If on your grandmother's birthday you burn a candle To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra To honor the memory of someone who never met her, A man who may have come to the town she lived in Looking for work and never found it. Picture him taking a stroll one morning, After a month of grief with the want ads, To refresh himself in the park before moving on. Suppose he notices on the gravel path the shards Of a green glass bottle that your grandmother, Then still a girl, will be destined to step on When she wanders barefoot away from her school picnic If he doesn't stoop down and scoop the mess up With the want-ad section and carry it to a trash can. For you to burn a candle for him You needn't suppose the cut would be a deep one, Just deep enough to keep her at home The night of the hay ride when she meets Helen, Who is soon to become her dearest friend, Whose brother George, thirty years later, Helps your grandfather with a loan so his shoe store Doesn't go under in the Great Depression And his son, your father, is able to stay in school Where his love of learning is fanned into flames, A love he labors, later, to kindle in you. How grateful you are for your father's efforts Is shown by the candles you've burned for him. But today, for a change, why not a candle For the man whose name is unknown to you? Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home With friends and family or alone on the road, On the look-out for no one to sit at his bedside And hold his hand, the very hand It's time for you to imagine holding.

Later, lying on the lawn of the big house someone asked could we remove our jackets. No one had taken charge we were young officers and I took mine off. And then (or earlier) we were in the battle zone taking cover behind parked cars postboxes, phone booths and in abandoned trams when my friend took one full in the chest and went down without a word. “Way to go,” I thought and imagined the sniper reporting “I got one” and being doubted but I could have attested to it the perfect shot. And then the shelling and the strafing began. Later I wrote a report (I was good at that) and I remembered lying out on the lawn of the big house that was called “Mandalay” in the hot sun and Barry asking about our jackets and I removing mine and Ian saying “In the enemy army you could be shot for that.” The battle zone wasn’t always a city sometimes it was jungle where our first foes were mosquitoes who took our blood and flew away with it like bees, Barry joked taking pollen from the full flower of our youth.

i. Awake Each entry consisting of the statements I am awake or I am conscious entered every few minutes: 2:10 p.m.: this time properly awake. 2:14 p.m.: this time finally awake. 2:35 p.m.: this time completely awake. At 9:40 p.m.I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims. This in turn was crossed out, followed by: I was fully conscious at 10:35 p.m., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks. This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry. ii. Passport How large it grew, that first kiss, until I could board it each night, a raft drifting out into the quiet lake. After twenty years the great amnesiac HM never recognized his doctor, and after lunch gladly ate another: Time for lunch, they would tell him again. You must be starving. God, I am starving. Without a body, collection cannot precede recollection: recollect a tongue, that skilled swirl of its quick tip, a mouthful of familiars: smoke, strawberry candy. Memory in the web between dumbstruck and dura: dump and dune, duplicates. What kind of game is this? I’m no longer a boy, HM would say to his reflection, the surprise on his face genuine. What kind of game is this? The mirror a passport like any other, its picture out of time, a foreign shock of untamed hair even the photographer declared beautiful then. Then: the word smiles like a stranger on your first day at school, sitting on stone steps, worn with use. iii. Taxonomy “Red but not bird comes to mind.” Only the kingdom of living names was missing there—bank, flagstone, sofa remained, but not the blur at the feeder, the undersea creature on the card— it’s a danger, a killer swimmer, they coaxed him—it’s called a (waiting for the word to stir from its depth; how could he forget the ones who dressed, fed, taught him word by word the order of the world? What noise does that loss make?) (They looked suspiciously like his parents, he thought: strangers posing unanswerable questions)— “It has no name, it has no need.”

These brown discolorations on a faded black- and-white photograph are not at all like a defect In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of “Crystallization” as Stendhal described it, in One of his more eccentric books about love. In truth, my childhood was cast down like a twig Into an abandoned salt mine near Salzburg From where it emerged, of this I’m certain, As something much richer than my own life, A jeweled branch of living history, now Retrieved by my mother from the well at Twig Bog Lane. I’ll never know who it was, and anyway Why would I want to know who it was, Who slid the black hard plastic button to On One late summer afternoon in nineteen fifty-seven, So that not only did some kind of shutter flick open In my head, but the full force of color saturation Hit my brain. The effect was high-speed Ektachrome And life as it is now, that studio of constant poems — It’s just that as my mother hauled the metallic Home Assistance milk gallon from the deep well In Twig Bog Lane, the light of deprivation reflected Back from her face and got lost in me, and I knew How biography is the steadying of only one kind Of lens, how memory offers different iterations; How, somewhere, a paper was being coated with Such chemicals that even deeper colors would form Over time. During that summer, a world away, The first International Color Salon was organized In Hong Kong and, while restrictions on dollar Imports meant that Ireland couldn’t reach a speed Of 100 ASA, faster colors kept rushing in. There Was no holding life back once it swarmed; biography Was ready for color, our brains were marked That year for realities more personal, realities brighter Than a boxed-in lens. Huge Blackwater river rats That knawed through the doors of our dry toilets in Twig Bog Lane were as ignorant of color as me; and Could not have known that their multi-layered bristles Would soon be seen in more subtle shades of brown.

—in memory of Angela Marie Incoronata Caruso Mortola, May 21, 1903–January 14, 2001 1 In-and-out sun   like the light of her mind   that knows and doesn’t   feels and forgets   pelts of rain hid and seek   of thought   first gray then rose but still a steady backlight   (sometimes hidden): “Remember Woody Allen’s line?   I’m not like that   I don’t care when it happens   where I just don’t want to die   not scared   not that I just don’t want to   and I told the doctor!” and the doctor   laughing “Cute old lady   said she doesn’t care about the why and wherefore she just doesn’t want to die . . .” and therefore? then she forgets   smiles   turns her head to nod grande dame at shadows on the walls that gather where the light collects   and falls 2 They gather   where the light collects and falls we can’t see them   but she seems to think at least a few are smiling   so she feels she has to say hello   politely thank these thoughtful ghosts who visit   sister   brothers Sunday best in black   old Brooklyn friends who hardly see   the gulf of sixty years mama and papa   severe Sicilian bookends “Come in, come in” her eyes light up   she waves and beckons all to chairs around her bed so she can boast to brothers   and their wives of all the special things   her daughter did and how her grandkids won   so many prizes and as she vaunts   and glows   her smile blazes 3 But though she glows   but though her smile blazes the sister flickers   fades   the brothers falter her eyesight’s bad   it’s hard to see their faces as if she peered through gauze   or a thick filter and then the others come   the ones she calls “co-tenants” of her rooms   the lovers screwing coarse as goats   in corners   nasty girls smart-aleck guys   who do know what they’re doing and what they do   is occupy her place back home they swarmed   all over her apartment set up a stove   behind her lovely bookcase nursed babies on her sofa   bold indifferent and even here   still shameless in their clingings they mean to steal   they’ll steal   her best belongings 4 What should she do   to safeguard   her belongings? she begs for help   urges us to lock to triple lock   the doors   to hide her things her pearls right here her fruitwood in New York her mother’s hand-carved walnut chairs   the leather- surfaced desk   at which my father sat so long ago   wearing the cashmere sweater grandma bought him   and the Sulka shirt Listen!   Are we listening!   Have we heard? How well he dressed!   How beautiful their place! four rooms in Queens   what lots couldn’t afford in an age of breadlines   shameful jobs   or worse “Tuono di Dio!”   thunder of God   she looses the curse she learned in childhood   for most uses 5 The curses learned   in childhood   have their uses Tuono di Dio! she swears when they strip her   bare to bathe her Tuono di Dio! when the nurses slide the soiled bed pads   to the floor or prop her   in the wheelchair   to be fed thunder of God   echoes along the halls when she tries to fight   the husky nurse’s aide come to sponge her bruises   stains and spills embarrassed   we shiver   in the corridor while she flails   and shrieks for the police “Tuono di Dio! Call the police!”   God’s thunder will scorch us if we leave her   in this place away from her apartment   calm   and peace away from her belongings   purse and keys 6 Away from her belongings   purse   and keys (and crumpled Kleenex   reading glasses coins and comb she always   carries   in that purse) she isn’t real!   she might be only bones! yet the belongings   longings   must go on the bookcase and the rugs   and tables must survive   outlast her   so she tells her grandson how to plan an auction   in the east there are the costs   of those belongings   that the value of mahogany   and this the price of sterling silver (which she fought to buy—a fifth-grade teacher   in the thirties—) and the bracelets   furs   her in-laws gave too bad they can’t   go with her to the grave! 7 What happens to belongings   after the grave? They’ll be   up here and she   she’ll be   down there what of the   stuff she worked   so hard   to have? polished mahogany   and mink   and silver and even the fifteen-year-old   television still good   still just right for the nightly news and the brand-new   vacuum cleaner   even still a— a something someone ought   to choose her face is crumpling   like a handkerchief don’t give it all   away   don’t give it up if you don’t want it   at least sell it off! don’t let the others have it either   stop the thieves before   they drag it all    away don’t let my belongings go astray. . . . 8 Don’t let my belongings   go astray call the super   tell the doorman   keep the windows locked   and barred   the crooks away the one who break   and enter   when you sleep the ones   who follow   sullen   knife and rape how many years   she’s warned us   can’t we hear they’ll pick the locks   they’ll climb the fire   escape just look   the crooks are here   are everywhere a sudden nod   a glance at   the next bed where a wizened   person   gasps and snores that one now   she saw her   yes she did peering in closets   rummaging in drawers even in hospitals   they have   no pity they rob you   when they see   your things are   pretty 9 Yet O it’s nice   that all her things are   pretty her smile blazes   back in Jackson Heights (on one of the   better   blocks   in New York City) her beautiful   apartment   basks and waits a hush of rugs   a drawn Venetian   blind keeping the silence   keeping the bars   of shadow gathered like silent   guardians   around the hanging   shelf   the Wedgewood   the piano and there the family   photographs   are massed my father’s face   blade-thin   in sepia my baby self   in flounces   or undressed from times   when she was poor   but happier belongings blurry   as if   underwater bearing the prints   of mother   father   daughter 10 How far the age   of mother   father   daughter! my baby room with walls   now pink   now blue (but never yellow   though I begged   I fought her) and the tiny snowman   globe   where snowflakes   flew and the little silver   Virgin Mary   shrine whose key I   turned   to play Our Lady’s song “Ave Maria”   tinkling   out of tune and the gray   hooked rug   where silent bluebirds sang and a rabbit ran   away   among the trees but never   vanished   never could   escape whatever chased him   from the knitted haze a scary   thing because it had no shape though now the whole   room’s painted hazy   gray and the rabbit   trees   and birds   raveled away 11 When did her mind   begin to ravel   away? —that time she fell   outside   the beauty parlor (getting pretty for   her grandson’s    birthday)? she didn ’t   answer   when we tried   to call her and soon   with mop and broom   she fought the others called 911   the super   the police there on the sofa   sat   the nursing mothers the lovers   crawled and thrashed   under the bookcase we flew   to Queens   we packed up all   her things the fox-head furs   her mother ’s lion-necklace “But what about all my other   best   belongings?” she worried   then gave up   resigned   to silence a roar of takeoff   buckled in   she hissed “Here’s to my new   adventure   in the west!” 12 At sundown   tantrums   shake the sunset west the nurses turn her toward the flashing   window “See the flowers? See the pretty bird’s nest?” bushes tug in tubs   on the patio where a night   wind   rises   over Astroturf batters the waiting   tables   chairs   and wheelchairs as if they stood   in a swirl   of Pacific surf whose icy water   glitters   darkens   clears “Here’s dinner, hon!” the nurse’s aide   with bib holds out a tray of lukewarm   grown-up   mush last week a fall   tore muscles   cracked a rib how did   she fall   did someone   really push? she tries to remember   strains to see   remembers (sometimes) the names   of sundown   visitors 13 Sometimes the names   of sundown visitors hook into thought   sometimes the sounds   unravel blur   sister   brothers   TV commentators (Frank and Vito turn into Ted Koppel) I visit   afternoons   bring cupcakes   chocolate the only stuff she   ever wants   to eat can barely swallow though   one night past midnight she coughs   a little   chokes on   her own spit the night nurse   didn’t hear   the radio was turned on loud   she’s kind of scared   and sorry and puts a rose   on the poor   old lady’s   pillow and a mortician   calls   and tells us   not to worry above the sunlit bay   the slicing planes rise fast   and one speeds east   with her “remains” 14 Back among   her belongings   her remains glide north northwest   in a shiny   SUV designed to weather snowstorms   freezing rains far from the simmering   fields   of Sicily the East Coast cemetery’s stony   pressed into a cleft   of hills   black ice   I skid on leaning to greet the freckled   hearty   priest looking   not looking at the box   she’s laid in at the edge of the polished   boards   that hold her husband the priest   says the words   she scorned   she didn’t believe (she has to be blessed   to belong   to holy ground) and O she would   scold us   if she were still alive! no Tuono di dio no bolt   so fierce and true as the light of her mind   that felt   that thought   that knew

I In the absence of reliable ghosts I made aria, Coughing into emptiness, and it came A west wind from the plains with its arbitrary arsenal: Torn sails from the Ganga river, Bits of spurned silk, Strips of jute to be fashioned into lines, What words stake—sentence and make-believe, A lyric summoning. II I came into this world in an Allahabad hospital, Close to a smelly cow pasture. I was brought to a barracks, with white walls And corrugated tin roof, Beside a civil aviation training center. In World War II officers were docketed there. I heard the twang of propellers, Jets pumping hot whorls of air, Heaven bent, Blessing my first home. III In an open doorway, in half darkness I see a young woman standing. Her breasts are swollen with milk. She is transfixed, staring at a man, His hair gleaming with sweat, Trousers rolled up Stepping off his bicycle, Mustard bloom catches in his shirt. I do not know what she says to him, Or he to her, all that is utterly beyond me. Their infant once a clot of blood Is spectral still. Behind this family are vessels of brass Dotted with saffron, The trunk of a mango tree chopped into bits, Ready to be burnt at the household fire. IV Through the portals of that larger chaos, What we can scarcely conceive of in our minds— We'd rather think of starry nights with biting flames Trapped inside tree trunks, a wellspring of desire Igniting men and gods, A lava storm where butterflies dance— Comes bloodletting at the borders, Severed tongues, riots in the capital, The unspeakable hurt of history: So the river Ganga pours into the sea. V In aftermath—the elements of vocal awakening: Crud, spittle, snot, menstrual blistering, Also infant steps, a child's hunger, a woman's rage At the entrance to a kitchen, Her hands picking up vegetable shavings, chicken bones, Gold tossed from an ancestral keep. All this flows into me as mottled memory, Mixed with syllables of sweat, gashed syntax, Strands of burst bone in river sand, Beside the buried stones of Sarasvati Koop— Well of mystic sky-water where swans Dip their throats and come out dreaming.

1 White lather on black soap— Maria’s gift. It reminds me Of when a woman died And they handed me her ring. Then they left to divide the roots for her. Daylight went down there shining. By accident, cleaning the hearth Of a house to leave it for good, I learned how to see A star come out: work My hand into the ashes. 2 “You’ve thrown a chestnut hull into the fireplace again,” Said Colette’s mother, “My clean ashes!” Naughty Colette had soiled the washing ashes Of applewood, poplar, and elm. Stretched over the big cauldron In the washhouse, hemp cloth held the ashes The washwoman poured a jug of boiling water on. They smelled almost sweet as the lye Filtered into the mass of linen. The air darkened with blue clouds. In the smoking lava layer of ashes, A few cinders of chestnut hulls, The tannin’s yellow stain. 3 Look for something You’ve been every day of your life. You said it was “lonely.” I’m certain it is also “clean.” My body’s big years diminish soap. My grandmother, whose diamond it was, Had a stone in her tub. I rubbed it on my feet As later I walked, Building little hoofs, All summer shoeless on creek gravel. That black bar of stone In the widow’s clean house, That volcanic pumice skips Over most hard places But softens at least one. 4 Once there was a downpour of rain They took as a judgment. It confused her billowing, steaming skirts. Another time—those times were hard— The executioner let go the twisted hemp From her neck sooner than he should Because the flames reached his hands. Nor would I, if I’d had to live then, Put my hands into the fire Those three hours it took to reduce her. But after, I’d scrub all over With the ashes of the still warm Black heart of the witch.