Evelyn
How much does a memory weigh?
How it does breathe, yet.
How it does possess the skin.
Atoms of thought with a prominent pressure
that bang against the brain,
that dredge the soul’s reservoir,
that will,
that have no mortality,
that cannot be killed.
Ghosts living on the inside
and wafting across the room
from rides hitched on pipe smoke,
coffee grounds, mint leaves,
and Jean Nate,
mildewed newspaper pages,
dog urine and bus exhaust.
They are the salve and the savior.
They are the salt and the devil.
She sits in a loosely fitted rocking chair,
wooden sockets distended
from decades of creaky, sisyphian walking,
now held together with the damp lint and grit
of endless days that did indeed, end.
Her curls, dipped in sulfuric beauty magic
cast long french-curve shadows,
greedy clawing hands across swollen walls and decades
of framed, corrugated faces.
She wades in the remembering
in the meeting of her husband
in a rundown bowling alley in Harlem on a violet night,
pressing the Madonna into her chest
as she closes her lashless eyes.
She rocks and casts predictions.
She rocks and sputters regrets.
She warns us all.
She is the orb, the Tiresias of our time
(or at least of the moment)
infused with a new light from being squeezed
up against life’s steep edge
as pebbles and coherent thoughts,
as crocheted doilies and baby blankets
yellowed photos that piled up (like dust in a corner)
loosen from the plasma,
from the outer eaves of her life,
come slowly away from her
(of her)
beneath her ever-diminishing weight
crumble and cast off into the black below
tumbling down into Dante’s subdivisions.
What was once a mountain
what was once a monument
what we once climbed
and clung to
like red clay babes on a Mexican storyteller
begins to crack,
to come undone.
Only a rind is left on the rocking chair.
How much does a memory weigh?
Whispers that resound in the déjà vu
that rustle in the peach-fuzzed heads
of the young.
That surge in the nuclei of their bodies
That resonate through the thick unyielding
foliage that spans the space
between the beginning and the end.
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