When You Have Forgotten...

1.

Nothing personal about cold salad. You may remember

we sat in the southwest corner of the Italian restaurant,

but the food is the food, as is the table's silent lacquer,

and those unmemorable cups hold all lips the same.

So, the other little rituals you will do with him and not

remember me. An omerta of objects in perfect accord.

Even a scent lingering on the pillow, maybe, or in jackets

we warmed each other in, the bedsheets, the tee-shirts,

the couch with that throw blanket we lay beneath watching

our movies - the movie itself runs its course no shorter,

no longer - return to mere cloth, with no semblance,

no former shape. They haven’t much power. I repeat

your name, you do not appear. Nor your smell, your shape.

No interrogation of things gives up your whereabouts.

2.

The world is little traveled and curves slow and away,

staying light in the places it first was light, and dark

in the places it was deigned it should be dark. I am old.

You’re too old. We cannot stare at the old things to bring

them back to life, believe me I’ve tried. The beach is there

for anyone to come see it. Every grand city's monument

there for anyone who wishes. But you and I cannot rouse

new feeling from sober tracks we pushed into the earth.

Even sunlight reaches us and fills the house with a warmth

carried across the cosmos already dead. Either I know

because I am here without you, now, or because I was there

with you under that radiation and its funereal heaviness,

boding. The restaurant dishes up the thing it’s famous for

every weekend since we first came, the menu unchanged.

3.  

What is memory? Is it the precise arrangement of pinions

and tumblers like a key to the lock at the end of the mind?

And if one roller, one ball bearing is out of place, will it not

turn? So, you drive the unvarying route to work, you sleep

in the shape you left in the sheets the night before, and you

go about happy in the dugout of a nest you made of this life.

But each kiss enacts new pathways through to the heart

ensuring there is no exact contact, no cut could explore

the same wound twice. Even if his hold will be no different

than mine, his wandering as unequivocal, the bolt your bodies’
various entanglements make snap and fasten just as absolute.

When you have forgotten my hands, the power of their pull,

forgotten our willingness, you’ve forgotten that far-reaching
intuition that worked in us without logic, mine and yours, etc.

Reviews

[h d e rushin]

the first two stanzas are of an individual embracing the doctrine of an unfathomable universe; existential
in it's proverbial willingness to observe. Love means you eventually loose all power. The world and everything in it becomes the macula of all differentiated truth. Memory pushes its way past the
barricades of reasonableness. And I agree.

But the final stanza is the tipping point by which most humans are driven to suicide, or to compulsive gambling,
or to spending the night in the strip club. And that is that memory, however we thwart it's attacks
by growing older, cannot be fixed nor can it be reconciled.

You have chosen the love poem which proves my theory about poetry. That love poetry is the launching pad for all poetry. Everything starts there and everything will ultimately fall at loves feet.

excellently written.....dana

[W.k.kortas]

The wise and wonderful rushin has, as is his wont, pretty much hit the nail on the head, to my way of thinking. What I will note, then, is how wonderfully built the piece is. It doesn't escape notice that this love poem, or perhaps better love misbegotten poem, is built in stanzas of a sonnetesque fourteen lines each, and that there are three stanzas, and all that this particular number evokes. This is world-class writing, nothing less.