Part 1: for Plums and peaches
I listened to the voice of a woman
I knew nearly fifteen years ago, when
we teetered on the edge of adulthood.
I heard things that were, things that
were not, things that might have been.
I heard the girl next door
humming arias in the dark.
I heard Durham in August and
the diminishing of colloquialism
of South Carolina after the Return.
It was not like listening to the past.
Or living in Atlanta,
Manhattan and Denver.
Part 2: one year later
I visited the voice seven months
later and found photographs of an
unremembered me: a birthday party
and broken asphalt. I wondered if the
woman who kept it on her bookshelf
owned the memory in the photograph.
In some ways that day will always belong
to her, and I left unable to distinguish
how much of my re-collection was nothing
more than a picture of a picture. I wondered
how many fragments of my being are left scattered
in Atlanta; how much of my Self is left unremembered.
author, voice, and bookshelf
Part 3: two years later
Two years later the
memory of Atlanta
is fading. This year's
sojourn was – like life –
layover rather than
destination. End points
are odious and elusive:
every time one appears,
a beginning takes its place.
I had a dream about
the woman in Atlanta
(the one in memory)
earlier this week. She
served tea to fifteen
Chinese children. I
woke from the dream
and sent word to Chicago.
I've never been there, and
so it lives not in memory
but in imagination. Identical
twins separated by time,
united by desire. Bough and aft,
forward and back, the face of Janus
haunting every moment called now.
the first version of this poem appeared here
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