I was in a dream that
I was in a city
One of impossible rivers
Flowing up and at right angles
We rode a slow gondola on waters
Which flowed through gigantic, plastic playtubes
A huge old Discovery Zone
The size of Venice at nighttime
My companion: a Blur
And our destination:
The difference between
You and Khufu
Can be measured
In paragraphs
You pair of legs
You Mercedes-Benz
(Or are you the girl
Hit by one? What
Was her name)
Standing –
Actually
Looking around – inside
Of some withering memory
Can prove
Scary:
Parts and wholes all mixed and mangled,
Branches where limbs once swung,
Boiling solids,
Tattered
Liquids
(Were furniture)
Dim in the living room;
Red as blood because it is blood
((Not real
Brain blood))
Close friends and strange people twining,
Combining, but all wrong.
And finally
It’s gone
i will try to remember your face
but it’ll be sand on the surface
of the water, and i’ll rely on
dreams to get your smile right
but time will send rain
and then the paint runs.
one day the boutique will
stop carrying your perfume
and the eumelanin of your hair
will pale like a sunfaded photograph
and our relatives will begin
to die around us, still i will
try to remember your face
but it will come to me as pixels
or a monet painting viewed too close
and i will fail to quote you
correctly anymore, and finally,
finally
i’ll start forgetting your name
How long have I chewed herbs,
Trying to forget you?
What was once a music inside me
Is now only my heartbeat
Your face ripples –
A reflection on the Lethe
The arpeggio of your laughter
Looped like a wormhole in my memory
How many suns did I reject
After dreaming of you?
What was once a heartbeat inside me
Is now only a muscle contracting
Your face is an amalgam
Of other portraits now
The decrescendo of your sigh
Cut in half like an earthworm in my memory
How many moons will I pocket
Trying to white you out?
Out curls
Serpentine smoke
Into a Byzantine midnight
.
I can’t read these heiroglyphs
I carved for myself on the walls
Of my memory
My fingers pass along the grooves in the stone
But unread and unknown,
I keep a secret from myself
.
My memory holds a door with no handle,
A box with no locks,
A moldy book with wilting pages
And an hourglass with one grain of sand inside
For telling the present moment
.
Since my memory can’t photograph
It paints with watercolor
On a canvas of sand. I can make out
Serpentine smoke curling into a Byzantine lung
.
I can’t read these Arabic numerals.
These envelopes have dried my sandy tongue.
I can’t focus
At this oxygen bar, too many Cheshire cats smiling
At this hookah lounge
At the bottom of the dark, green wine bottle
Of my memory
.
My memory curls out
Like serpentine smoke
Into a Byzantine midnight
pressing mind to cool millstone
grinding rills become rivers
shivering crests give way to
frightening troughs and dark dips
dripping with needle-tipped stones
falling water will kill time
growing stalagmite meets mind
A mysterious combination
Of musical notes stirred
The transgenerational memory
Of a distant ancestor’s passion,
Tugging me to a nearby chair
Where I wept for a lover
I had never known, never met
Yet I forget the notes
mind creaking around like an attic floor
trying to get around the bookshelf doors
to secret passageways
to redwalled rooms
nothing
to do in the midnight, moonlit night-noon
no body to hold real
close to me till i feel the glitter
of loveshivers traveling up my spine like white powder
squeeze my memory till you come
out of the crinkly folds of my brain till you come
around my place, slink around my window like a teenager
but its pictures in the attic, in the quiet, in the cold
none of it’s real like you –
it’s only stupid homonculi like toy model Mustangs or an airplane
in the attic window during a big brown sunset
⨀ 