THE MEMORIST by Bruce Bond
A tree is leaved in smaller brighter versions
of a tree, tiny branches pinned to the crease
of the leaf that is its spine. Spine, I say,
because the body is everywhere
my worry and my child,
my diagnosis in a cry of ink.
Which tells me, a physical loneliness,
older than me, keeps calling into the impersonal
designs of wilderness and traffic.
Emptiness is chaos and still
I lean into the cave to hear its portion echo.
Hello, hello, I say, in smaller darker versions.
*
No life without an echo life, fractal
arrangements in a procession of cells.
The pale undercarriage of the leaves
bears the clearest patterns, venous, ridged.
Eyes closed,
you can read them with your hands.
Ask any child. The sound of a train
carries farthest at night.
In the stillness and the cold.
Any wonder you stand before a mirror,
you with your worry, your lines of blood
in the broken eyes that see them.
*
Once, I stood before a tree like this.
A pile of leaves scorched the air.
My sharpest memory: the scent.
It was invisible and black.
I was late. Or should I say, it
was late. It was. Someone called.
When I hear that voice,
I see branches haloed in the fires
of dusk.
A minute is forever to a child.
A stare a thousand leaves that fall
into the space darkening between.
*
Winds flash our branches to a sky
whose blue is borrowed, burned,
given back to the ocean as stars fall in.
Our wind is all the colors then, and the dark
that pulls the shoreline from the shore.
Last night I woke to my father’s voice.
What you call dream,
I call the oaks outside. The cold blew in.
The bitter jewels of starlight stung.
When I say wind, I mean these strange
relations, waves pouring through the branches.
I mean mind as a property of wind.
*
To see the sun, you need a little blindness.
A box with a needle of light at the end.
A refraction, a filter, a mask.
You need a net sizzling with fish at dawn,
a rose-vendor, a sparkler, an Angeles Crest
in flames. You need what death does not,
but what we need when we look at death.
If you want to see the blaze from the point
of view of someone in the fire, you must
close your eyes. My mother taught me.
You bow your head, as flowers do,
with no light left to leverage or consume.
*
If you see in the churchyard a flock
of black umbrellas migrating west
down the field to the parked cortege,
as the sun, exhausted, whispers,
go on, take it, take the photograph,
remember,
there are no cameras at the burials
to which you are invited.
No one thought to ask. No one listened
for the click like the tumblers of a vault
aligning. No one turned bereft
to the man on the margins, masked in glass.
*
Most of what I know I forget.
I never see what the camera sees,
only the aftermath, the acid bath,
the portion of the world
that eats the residue inside.
Never the chamber before and after,
impatient for the radiance to crash.
Every photograph is terrified once.
And then the long stillness,
the eye lensed in the light that falls
against the gloss,
never falling in.
*
Today I saw my father raise a ladder
and clip the stems of avocados
as he once did, when I was small,
then I had no father,
and I was smaller still.
The fruits that fell struck the shadows
they obscured, and soon they were
everywhere, like the air that touches
all things here to give them names.
That was sixty-some years ago,
and today, as a child, I gathered them
up, as I was told, shadow and all.
*
The fruits that died there back then
grace my table with their leather
armor and strange green meat
I sliver with a blade.
When my father lost his balance
and darkness took him under,
I gave the permission to open
his skull. I was a voice on the line.
No less. Not there to see,
as I see now, the bone lift, pressure
fall, the emulsion,
limned in blood, emerge.
*
When she was a child and a holiday
guest trapped her between the rails
of a small steel bed, the world burned
with a thousand details to reclaim.
The charred breath, lemon cologne,
the cheers of a violent sport on TV in the den,
and still the man remains to this day
faceless, nameless. Not that she needs
his name. Only hers. Call him
suffered in silence, laughter of men.
Bury him in smoke and the breath
of meat blackening the oven chamber.
*
Every part a summons of the whole
broken diamond of light a girl sees,
distracted, lost, across the sea-blue wall.
The missing pieces are there and not
quite yet, and everywhere the scent
of a man and hand across the mouth.
To see it, as we name it, is to see
a periphery, at best. Memory holds up
a monocle to each small thing,
each, that is, but the girl at the center,
the prick of the compass,
the wound that touches all.
*
One day you will lay down your burden
the way night lays down a fog across
your bed, and you, exhausted, enter,
if only to see in the field
a dead child, no sooner glimpsed
than eaten by a cloud, and you know
a child’s there, in the mist of every mirror
held close, every breath you took
for granted, until, that is, you swallowed
it, waiting for the footsteps to leave,
the child to bleed sunlight, the fog to lift
you as you breathe.
*
Forgetting was never the whole story.
Amnesia does not forget. Not that
alone. Some wound recalls, some beast
in the labyrinth, chafing the earth.
There needs to be a name for suffering
with no one there to feel it.
A friend who suffered taught me.
We poured each other drinks and laughed.
He said he forgot a year of his life.
Pain was never the whole story, either,
though laughter betrayed less than we thought,
our forgetting more than one man knows.
*
The art of memory is the art
of seeing two as one.
Your friend as a chair, say,
where you left it, where you sat
and drank and watched him
die, sip by sip, and did not know.
You did not see,
or did and did not know you saw,
the shadow you were in, cast
by some great light in the distance.
Every chair is two chairs now,
one of whom is empty.
*
I got high with a kid who waxed
ecstatic about the unity of nature,
eyes lit like the tears of a candle.
One, one. It sounded better
shared. How I chanted one
to sleep is anyone’s guess.
For wherever there was one,
there were two,
longing to be one.
Fire cannot see the fire.
It takes an eye with a tiny fire in it.
A hole to drag the fury through.
*
If you look at a cross in a yard of crosses
and see no corpse,
you are looking at the part that needs you
to kneel, to come a little closer, read.
Christ is bound to the shadow
of a cross, the way ink is to the word ink,
or an eye to the bloom that pins a widow
to the planet.
This is my flesh, says the man who turns
as the earth turns away from earth,
or a lover to love at dawn,
flowers to the fire.
*
A friend I love left with me a stone
worn smooth with waves and jade
set in the common element. I see her
in it still. She who looks and sees
the island it was from, the oldest
on the planet, and her promise to return.
When a friend between us died,
I saw that friend in a stone on its shadow
on a desk on the shadow of the desk.
I saw her in the shadow of the earth
that falls invisible, barring the eclipse
of a moon made of warm, invisible stone.
*
My first word was a fetish,
a child of unconscious joy
whose inner light is lost.
I placed it over the hole in air as gods
do a crown of stars or infant cry.
When a mother leaves, the world arrives.
When the talk turns to paradise,
without fail,
there is a silence in the conversation.
The word for sleep, what does it know
of sleep. These little failures
make the good companion possible.
*
The word perfect comes from the image
of a circle. Draw one and you find
the closing of the curve the hardest part.
But if you shut your eyes,
you just might hear perfect intervals
in the hymns that promise a better life,
one that is complete, finished,
and the horror that is heaven.
I never knew why Jesus talked of himself
in third person. Was the story over.
Where shall we begin when we are
two people, one of whom is listening.
*
When my father left, he left us
an empty house on the market.
Nothing was something
opening a door at the end
of the hall my mother paced, all night,
clearing her throat. The art of listening says,
to be unfinished is a blessing.
Ask the choir of lilies on the altar,
the final cadence as it rises. Ask
the surgeon who lays the harvested flesh
in a woman’s chest. And then, it moves.
It walks. It walks right out his hands.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-eight books including, most recently, Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019); Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU Press, 2019); Scar (Etruscan Press, 2020); Behemoth (Criterion Books, 2021); The Calling (Parlor, 2021); Patmos (Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts Press, 2021); Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Press, 2022); and Invention of the Wilderness (LSU Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including seven editions of The Best American Poetry.