Lamp of the Body

The Poem Speaks to Memory

17 the poem speaks to memoRy If this is a hymn, I’m not the one to sing it. I admit it: Sometimes I think of your heart as fleshy, diluted fruit.Watery as a tomato, half-rotten, begging salt. It’s infuriating how things seem to find their way to your fingertips while I have to wrestle anything I can grab to the ground. You are the bald light bulb swinging over the past, alternating harsh, soft, harsh over the surfaces of its face, a chiaroscuro. Look at you, pointing to the sky, calling it blue. Close your eyes, you say. And it’s still there, still blue because it comes to you that way, and you hold it. If this is a hymn, I’ll sing it for questions neither of us can answer, not for certain. Tonight the crickets thick around this house overlap, repeating like a loop of song. 18 The shrill pitch trembles, a kind of vibrato. Night grass is a color for which there is no name. Green and plum come to mind, but the shade does not exist.The color, unnameable, glows when it thinks no one is looking, not even you. No one rows to the island of his childhood without rowing through you, and you are the deepest water there is. ...