Burn and Dodge

Obj ect Memory

 oBJeCt memory Wear the cap (knitted chocolate brown) and veer back to an alpaca farm in the Negev winter so you almost feel the wallaby nibble, claws clutching your hand full of seeds as it withdrew its ouch and after, your lover withdrew inside the whirlwind. Let the window open onto a fossil field you’re being dragged back to something and is everything you touch unpurgable of this fog-tissue so it sits in your palm rides your sickbed-head, holds your teacup with the neurons folding you in folds? Take the wood-carved loon so newly still: smaller than your pinky it rests on your desk inside your unrest gathering last summer’s lakeside dustups . Or that sponge you just scavenged from the beach in St. Pete: tiny pocked breath-holes grey soggy tube hardened in air already pipes the stroll with a petulant five-year-old. Why else clasp on this silver bracelet each morning like a talisman  plucked from inside a porcelain persimmon your husband gifted you? Eight linked dime-sized coins embossed with Chinese characters your dad brought back from San Francisco when you were twelve: fú—lù—shòn—quán—vu—yi—jí—xiáng (Good LuckWealthLongevityEverything as YouWishAuspiciousAuspicious!). Aren’t you triply pleased: by its resounding fortune, by the jingle the coins make each time you shake your wrist, by the private song Memory makes inside each uplifted thing? ...