Ash, Snow, or Moonlight

Tonight two step out
onto a fourth story porch,
lean against the railing and look at the moon.
Whether they intend to stay
a while, or only a moment because something awaits,
terrible or tender,
I can�t say.

(I memorized this poem in line at the National Gallery with Brittania and Norjpol, waiting for tickets for the Van Gogh exhibit, which we did not get, which was on the eve of Bathsheba�s wedding day. Which means, I think, if I remember aright, that this was early Saturday morning, December 5th, 1998. I think. I did not remember this on my own�I had let this memory go, where I tried to memorize this poem. Brittania reminded me. I remember the ridiculousness of that weekend, of driving to and fro to DC, of not getting tickets, of eating lunch from Frisco�s where I used to work. I remember that I remember nothing not one thing on my own. This is why my solitude is so dangerous, why I need my friends, my old friends, always around. I need their collective memory to remind me of my own life.)

Whether one mutters to the other,
or they stand in silence,
I don�t know. And I don�t know
if they�re here together in a brief repose,
or at the edge
of something incommunicable.
I don�t know
if the man shivers now because he suddenly
sees the waste his life is to be in thirty years
on another shore, or because true autumn has begun
this moment of the present year, in a province
whose name evokes in half the world
a feeling of the vastness of the world.
I can tell you there is a war
going on, but don�t ask me
to distinguish if it�s ash, snow, or moonlight
that creases these people�s faces.

Of this man, who each night hums a song and rocks his sons,
and falls asleep before they do, his tune long gone,
his labored breathing finally lulling them,
and this woman, who sweeps by rote or moonlight
the wood floor of their one room,
what news?

They won�t stay long to gaze, for the night is cold.
They look neither young nor old,
though something about the way they
stand suggests fatigue.
They will die,
and one before the other to ensure grief.
But I don�t know:
is it tenderness
or habit, perhaps a tender habit,
when the woman brushes her cheek
against the man�s shoulder?
Do they admire the moon�s ascent, or lament its decline?
How often have I seen these two?
Am I stricken by memory or forgetfulness?
Is this the first half of the century or the last?
Is this my father�s life or mine?

And suddenly I am back in that first poetry class, with Brittania and Sasha (whom I'd forgotten until Brittania reminded me of him) and Bill who led the discussion for this poem and who was in all of my poetry workshops the whole time we were in school together and how I admired his writing but despised him, although why I despised him I can't remember. And I remember the look on Kim Garcia's face, the first great writing teacher and still the best of my life, when she said the name Li-Young Lee and when she heard that poem. Such satisfaction and hunger there.

When I was little, little enough to still be in the bath with Oliver, little enough that my mother bathed us there, leaning against the big tub, little enough that my mother still could get down on her knees for us, I thought (and I was old enough to think like this, to think in complete sentences, old enough to know I was an �I� and separate from other �I�s�) I will remember this moment for the rest of my life. And I do, I remember it. I pressed the memory into that long dark hallway of forever, like pressing leaves between wax paper, only permanent. I remember the light at that moment. In my mind the light was candlelight and the water was shallow and tepid. And that is all.

I remember longing, always longing, for the minutes that had already past, for the books I�d already read, for my parents in the other room, for god, for summer, for snow. And I remember beginning to understand that longing is a kind of loving, a kind of contentment, the sweetest moments are those thick moments of longing, of deep darkness, of ecstasy, of fullness, of a rich plucked life. Stay with me friends, stay with me.

A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I�m forgetful,
but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.
���.
I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me.