Read You Must Remember This Online
Authors: Michael Bazzett
You Must Remember This (6 page)
scream of the wounded child?
Then there is the silence
of truth unspoken. The muteness
of rust on barbed wire. Or the general quiet
of you
reading this: the silence of the birdbath
waiting for rain.
Given the unspeakable nature of their differences,
they decided to settle their divorce in mime court.
It was a pale imitation of justice, but all in all
we agreed the testimony rang true. Outside,
the shadows of the houses swallowed
the shadows of the pigeons without flinching.
Some things are easier to absorb than others,
said the judge, using white gloves and what
we finally understood to be an invisible rope.
Before that he'd been trapped in a glass box
which most likely represented the transparent
vows they'd first spoken on that rainy June day,
back when we were so concerned with our finery
we missed the nerves wired under the words.
I.
Listen and tinsel wrestled,
and silent inlets were born.
Still water opened before us,
there, off the coast of Bologna.
The hourglass held falling snow
and gentle was the root of genital.
This Latin mispronunciation
stemmed from the ancient decree:
Tenderly touch what is tender,
and often you will feel better.
A fork of geese dragged the sky
with hoarse and rasping wings.
The sound was a lone thing
in the blank and open air.
II.
And suddenly it seemed you wanted to be a part from my collection
and apart from me. I could not tell if you meant this
in an underhanded way, and thus became utterly whelmed.
Calm down, you said. Render seizures unto Caesar.
If only such things were aloud, said the mime offhandedly.
He'd wandered in searching for conclusions,
and his gesture was little more than a white-gloved shiver.
How lovely, you motioned back, with a nearly silent
murmur. Listen. It ends as it begins.
It all begins with
might
, the word
and its power, which might make
right unless it's the muscular sort
and then we're talking otherwise.
We might begin again, I think,
without losing one another,
given these current arrangements,
given that we're talking
about possibilities, about mights,
about one poem with two beginnings
and the many dozen doorways
that we don't walk through each day
opening up a permanent and shadowy
elsewhere, a space where one man
can spend his entire life beside himself,
inhabiting two houses on the same street,
happily eating an orange in one room,
weeping softly to himself in another,
breathing soundly in both places at once,
and of course it is the weeping man
who might be happy, pushed toward it
by Casals coaxing something eternal
from the emptiness of his cello,
while the man eating the orange might
be ticking toward some sort of pain,
carefully separating peel from fruit,
one sweet section after another,
oblivious to what could be happening
to a wife and daughter elsewhere:
a small indignity perhaps, a rudeness,
or maybe something darker. But as it is,
his pleasure multiplies with each
bursting bite,
Oranges are miracles
,
he thinks, envisioning himself
a contented monk in a sunlit cell
which in the way of cells soon divides
again and again, until he's imagined
an entire monastery of robed brethren
chanting vespers and stooping in the fields
each one of them wearing a rough garment
and wondering how it came to be
that he found himself so far from home
filling his basket with tender lavender
in the mind of a man he's never met.
              Â
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
â
JOHN LYDON
It was a September picnic
and in the splintered basket
purchased cheap
as trucks and tents were being loaded and packed
the fruit spotty, ready for wasps
but wonderfully fragrant
were pears.
Pears from the open-air market
overripe in a damp brown bag.
The fragile leather of their skin
spiraled from the horn-handled
knife in grandfather's hands
knotted and working
with the thoughtless
efficiency of six decades
twirling out damp garlands
to drape our fingers.
We were on the train, crossing the St. Lawrence,
heading into the sunburnt fields beyond Montreal.
We were eating pears. Slices lifted wetly from the blade.
The train clacking and the picnic not yet begun and this
is nonetheless all that I can recall. I remember only the pears.
We could draw conclusions about anticipation, or about joy.
Or that possibly only sweetness persists
but this would trouble me all the more because
this memory is not mine. It belongs to Moses Herzog
who in turn owes it to Saul Bellow who wrote him
into life and placed him in a book that I read and never forgot
and now, yes, I remember the pears. I can taste them,
even, after all these years that never passed
between me and that honeyed moment.
What utensil would you use to eat a bowl of rain?
How many policemen does it take to make a candle?
Where is the pelvic bone of a centaur located?
How many policemen does it take in general? Nine?
Doesn't that strike you as more than enough? What if
one of them is named Wick and the other Tallow?
Could their marriage be called a candle? Does that
complicate the uniform? If one were the front
of the centaur would the hind end dream of goats?
When I mentioned a bowl of rain earlier was it clear
that I meant a bowl constructed solely out of raindrops
and not a conventional bowl holding collected rainwater?
Now when I mention a bowl of rain is it perfectly clear?
Clear as the fallen rain? Rain settled in a puddle that holds
pale drowned earthworms because for one fatal moment
they mistook that clear panel of water for a long deep drink
and did not recognize it as the vessel of their demise?
Why does drink hold the demise of so many? Are we
there yet? Will we ever be there? How can we truly know?
What would the earthworm tell us with its pale tiny mouth?
              Â
If a lion could speak, we could not understand him
.
â
WITTGENSTEIN
the problem would not be those beautiful
teeth or the dark purse
of his mouth muffling consonants
or the complete absence of adjectives
but rather how his tense
always slides through time
loose as a brushstroke
shading every action into now
and there would be the arrival of one word
for blood riding the wind
and another for the shuddering
twitch of the hindquarters that presages the burst
before sudden fangs make meat go slack
also that volatile purr
coughing and guttering
like candle flame in the breeze
as well as the unnerving jokes ending in splinters
of marrow and cracked bone
and the confusion of sixty-two
different words for hunger
each one opening
into the same fearful roar
but only the one
telling silence
for sleep
The scene is so clear it might be a memory.
But no. It is too clear for that. This is something happening right now.
A woman stands in a field near the only stand of trees for a long way
round. She is looking down, scanning the ground. Perhaps she is
searching for acorns.
But she is beyond the tree-shadow, and she has no basket in which to
gather, and besides, upon closer inspection, it turns out the trees are
not even oaks. She parts the grass with her hands, gently, as a mother
might push the hair from her child's forehead. She steps gingerly
over the rooms and tunnels filled with tiny animals. A wind comes. It
shakes the tree and runs its hand across the field, flattening the grass.
This evening, she will still be here. It will be hard to see the lesser
darkness of her dress bobbing above the greater darkness of the field.
Days from now, when she finds it, we will no longer be watching.
She will draw it gently from the thatch, glinting like a baby snake, a
thin gold chain.
There you are, she will say matter-of-factly. She will examine the
clasp carefully and then refasten the chain around her neck and begin
walking through the fields toward home. It is just as well that we will
no longer be observing the scene. Her faith in the clasp seems almost
perverse, and it would be all you could do not to cry out.
The financier walked into a roomful of women, scantily clad in lacy
underthings. They were all quite heavyset, and their amplitude ap-
pealed to him. He became aroused.
“What is it that you want from us?” they murmured, as he walked
among them. “It seems we were summoned here specifically for you.”
“How do you know this to be the case?” he asked, gently brushing
the hair from one woman's shoulder.
“Because none of us remember anything other than this room.”
He paused and looked around him. Many of the women appeared to
be just coming awake, blinking lazily on their velvet couches. One
smiled at him and arched her back, stretching. “So you remember
nothing at all?”
“Nothing. It's as if we were born five minutes ago. Or five hours.