97 Memory poems

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.

Alexandria, 1954 When my grandfather came back from his swim, battered this time by the treacherous currents, the rocks jutting out of the water like knives, my sister and I sidled into his room thinking the house too quiet and saw him like a hurt beast standing by his bed, naked, wet. My grandmother was kneeling, toweling his calves, my mother was mixing a poultice. “Look at his bruises,” my sister was whispering, “and the veins like swollen rivers.” We kept inching toward him while my grandmother daubed him with cream and wound him in a bedsheet and made him odder than any dream of him. “Children,” she said turning toward us, “let him sleep, this is your grandfather.” We hurried away, having said not a word to him, nor he to us, though our eyes had never left his body and we ached to touch him, brush our fingertips along the webs of cuts and discolorations in his pale skin. All day we wished he would somehow rise like a true ghost, the sheet ruffling in the drafts; “Grandfather,” we whispered at his closed door, “come to us, bring us your stories,” but when the last lights were put out that night and the dark spread about us like a purple bruise we wished we had never wished what we had, every waft of wind had a rustle to it and the sound of water was deep in our ears and by morning, he had become for us in his shut room the ghostliest of imaginings, and keeping our distance, we waited only for his door to suddenly swing forth and reveal him standing either healed and smiling and unstrange, or what seemed likelier to us now, about to change our lives.

The damp had got its grip years ago but gone unnoticed. The heads of the joists feathered slowly in the cavity wall and the room’s wet belly had begun to bow. Once we’d ripped the boards up, it all came out: the smell, at first, then the crumbling wood gone to seed, all its muscles wasted. You pottered back and to with tea, soda bread, eighty years shaking on a plastic tray. One by one we looked up, nodded, then slipped under the floor. We moved down there like fish in moonlight, or divers round an old ship.

I take my kaleidoscope off the shelf, look through the little hole at the end of the cardboard tube; I turn       and turn       and turn       and turn, letting the crystals shift into strange and beautiful patterns, letting the pieces fall wherever they will.

In one who doesn’t speak the story petrifies, gets stumbled over, causes hurt. Then, says the man who should know about the past, then is a word you need to learn now. Then lived lives had has a name a body, sacrificial hands so god might help us. Feel with your hands and feet back along these countless steps and hear the incessant bloodrush, its dark red presence. That was what the man insisted, in so many words, pointing to the ornate temple corridor, an altar conjured at its vanishing point.

The land is full of what was lost. What's hidden Rises to the surface after rain In new-ploughed fields, and fields stubbled again: The clay shards, foot and lip, that heaped the midden, And here and there a blade or flakes of blade, A patient art, knapped from a core of flint, Most broken, few as coins new from the mint, Perfect, shot through time as through a glade. You cannot help but think how they were lost: The quarry, fletched shaft in its flank, the blood Whose trail soon vanished in the antlered wood, Not just the meat, but what the weapon cost— O hapless hunter, though your aim was true— The wounded hart, spooked, fleeting in its fear— And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.

This room, how well I know it. Now they’re renting it, and the one next to it, as offices. The whole house has become an office building for agents, businessmen, companies. This room, how familiar it is. The couch was here, near the door, a Turkish carpet in front of it. Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases. On the right—no, opposite—a wardrobe with a mirror. In the middle the table where he wrote, and the three big wicker chairs. Beside the window the bed where we made love so many times. They must still be around somewhere, those old things. Beside the window the bed; the afternoon sun used to touch half of it. . . . One afternoon at four o’clock we separated for a week only. . . And then— that week became forever.

Quick passage into memory and behind only blank spaces, blue stain on pink litmus or merely known so closely something falls away receding from touch, caught in the air your fingers move, agile water-fly padding the surface of what is seen even among these defractions, bent pencil or warps of a flat eye, the wide world circling.

Air as lost time Voice of a cloud, of a ghost crowned with nimbus Smack-thin, it lingers forty years I thought it came from the jeweled world we’d seen Everything stuffed, urgent, glittering alive But it was just pleasure, blank and sure Now what is there to sing From speakers, the tune folds and fades in waves Earphones drive it through your head

I look in that one kind of dwindled. And in this, look up, a truncheon in my fist, tin pot on my head, the war. My father, I’m looking at, is my age then and thin, his pants streak to the ground, shadows of rosevines . . . His father sits beneath a cat. Here the shadow has more flavor than my trains, elbows on livingroom floor, bangs that curl, opera broadcast, The Surreptitious Adventures of Nightstick. I lie in the wind of the sun and hear toots and smell aluminium smoke. The tiny oval of my mother’s youth in back and the rest is dark. Sundays, the floor was black. At the beach, here I’m a nest of seaweed, an earlier portrait of surrealists I saw later, a stem of grey what rises from my scalp. My hair is peaked in brine. And this here hat, dark green fedora over same green corduroy suit for a trip to the nation’s capitol, how far askance I’ve been since and never another hat. Cromium rods, the hand in the guide’s pocket seems far removed. Blurry shoes on sandstone steps, double and over exposed. Then in this one the SECRET points to my head, shaved, and emblem, OPEN, striped in “pirate” T-shirt and HERE IT IS. My elbow bent, upright this time, behind a pole. I had yet to enter at this snap the cavern beneath my sneakers. To the right my soles protrude from beneath a boulder, for I had trapped my mother and she asked Why. Taken. Given. Flashlight brighter than my face, another grotto, where the ball of twine, indirection, gave out but we never got very far in, Connecticut. I swim out of another cave in a further frame, cramped gaze of sunlit days, apparel forgot. Later I reel in a yell as my cousin takes a bite from my shank beneath ranchhouse breezy curtains of Marion. On a trudge up from the gasoline rockpit in the gaze of Judy Lamb, she carries my pack, my jeans rolled as I step on a pipe. Estwing in hand and svelte as only youthful can. Most of those rocks remain and she married a so-so clarinetist. My greygreen zipper jacket leans against a concrete teepee, my father looking bullchested stands before. Perhaps we had just argued. Central Park cement steps of pigeons, the snow removed. Overexposed whiteshirt at the drums, stick fingers ride cymbal at the camera raised, livingroom Brenton with orange & black “sea” wallpaper and orange&black tubs. I wore a wristwatch then and never again, drumtime hitching me past it. I graduate from highschool in white dinner jacket and diploma and frown, too many hot shadows back of the garage. Must roll up the bedroll with skinny arms and lam for the caves. Dave & A. Bell by the Ford Company Squire first time allowed alone to tool Bleak grass scapes of Knox farm. Rope down a crack, mosquitoes and Koolade, sun dapple leaf moss sandwiches, ache. Then in this group more drums on the roof, the gravel and the flat, a cover attempt for no album even thought. I tap and step in the dim known street. Lean on a chimney to inhabit the sky, deep with drops. Here I’m pressed on a wall of Tennessee limes, stones-throw from mouth of the underground we camped in. Too many thoughts, elide. Then lie on a beach in a doughnut pattern shirt with a stick, a pipe?, in my mouth as my cousin grins shiny beyond. Truro, also waiting for the caves. With the poets then I’m fat and the driveway is dark, the clapboards all white in a day of all talk. This then all ends in color, my red bandana and shirt out on Devil’s Pulpit, open hand addressed to the grey where Hawthorne and Melville now view of a highschool. While the water still spills, and the cat squints at leaves blown, my father wears Brahms, families lean in on one for a group shot, and the rock remains shattered in a star.