Memory and Happiness
- Memory and Happiness
Amazing to feed misery like this, and so Selfish: sitting there, in a crowded park, A book on his lap the ghost of the book
He wishes he’d written. Amazing— How in all that bright, cheap air he could cut Again and again with that one
Serrated blade that reddened As it healed him. The West
Indian woman throwing a sideways faggot At him, throwing at least what his ear Shaped into a faggot, was a tooth of it,
As if she could taste, Could literally smell in his crawling sweat The name of the man that
Passion ironed him to. But passion doesn’t mean Intimacy, does it? Never did.
He is so human, this fiend so in need Of charity that here, finally, is the part you’ve Waited for: when I lean out [End Page 130]
From this page I’m writing on—or up, Instead, from the book—to kiss him: Two tongues cradled in a pathetic speech,
Forgiveness.
Remember when I was a boy, and did not yet know Myself. Was I really, then, a boy—?I might have been a blade of the grass I rolled in, itching, Chasing ants— I was outside the knowledgeI needed to know myself, know anyone. That was happiness. [End Page 131]
Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). He is also the recipient of a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Other honors include fellowships and scholarships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, Fence, the New Republic, Oxford American, Poetry, and many others. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently resides in Brooklyn.
