memory

Memory

I.
space the minute-hand blocks / sun
through window or door
upon the street
index of memory.

i called her once. embarrassed heartbeat / static
fabric of the pause
brittle leaves in the corner smell of urine
pain as dampness through the
tinder the wind gathered
amidst those trees

her answers were the grass scars of summer.

II.
above the sea / the atmosphere’s quarry of
thunder mutes the suburb
we grew as the avenue / the scrape of leaves
subdued beneath rain
sun private in the
passage of work
– a walk through its limpid
edge at dusk –
moon abrupt invented frames
– dream or bedroom sill –
laundered our sorrow on the road.
every street drove me through myself / i said ‘you
are its eternal aim’
as shallowing waves web minute flotsam
through the shell / i
willed myself into that grit
of silence.
sun on the street gravity of the clock falls
as hard / as unclear a touch above
the surface.

III.
my blindness crumbles at the rain / gust sheaved upon
g u s t .
the swift skin of cloud on the asphalt obscures
your imagined grief / severs it
its marrow a street faded from
the sun.

IV.
ancient minute. sun’s bitterness on stone / rare alcohol
of jasmine a
sleeve’s enshadowed
crease.

as your drive toward mountains /
                                                remembrance:
                                                light as the camber’s
                                                desert blade of water
                                                no-one
                                                reaches.

to A.G., K. J.
& J.R.

ponsonby
april 1982

The music is from a recording by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra of Aaron Copland’s ‘Quiet City’

3 thoughts on “memory”

need to reread…lovely phrases…I love the likening of the shadow at beginning to the minute hand, and the atmosphere’s quarry of thunder!

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Many thanks, Dean. I have wondered for years if there was an exact meaning to the image, and can only reach the conclusion that the image was inexactly about inexactness; that is, the clock hand raised above the surface of the clock can never show the time exactly because we could see it from different angles. In the same way a shadow falling on the street is perhaps never ‘exactly’ on it because it falls on a surface that is irregular. Perhaps I meant this (still not sure). Hence, the ‘index of memory’ thumbed to often is no longer ‘exact’. Thanks for prompting me to wonder about it again.

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