A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry

Memory

47 That Was Then Memory Sally Ball If memory be done by characters in the brain yet the soul remembers too, for She must remember those characters. —Isaac Newton Messala Corvinus forgot his own name. One, by a blow with a stone, forgot all his learning. Another, by a fall from a horse, forgot his mother’s name and kinfolk. A young student of Montpellier, by a wound, lost his memory, so that he was fain to be taught the letters of the alphabet again. The like befell a Franciscan friar after a fever. Messala, the soul— she knows the faces of your friends, Barrow’s face, and your mother’s. The difficulty lies in believing her. She does not bother with evidence. She bears in her pockets notation and also all the human qualities. We do not experiment with her: She must be trusted, followed, a path in a dark wood, where the trees are inscribed with faces, with letters, the imperfect curve of C, the depth of O an R like new foliage, the V of a forked elm. Trusted and pursued. ...