Freud talks about "screen memories," the little things we do remember but are banal, as proxy for truly heavy moments. So then, what do I remember, and what is behind the screen?

Much relating to my grandmother's house and seasons. Seasons anywhere take on deeper color and passionate severity, such as the kind of sunshine that only comes in summer memories, that fills the sky, me as a boy half my size and that much smaller than a star. Earlier I remembered the mimosa tree in front of her house, the sentinel at the side door, how the presence of that tree in that little semicircular garden must have remade the view from her bedroom window. In time when the seed pods fell off they would litter the driveway, everything. I would peel them open to look inside, opening a letter older than an ice age. The tree is gone. I seem to recall a cloudy day, temperate enough to be outside, and we climbed in that tree. Is this a stand-in, a stunt double, for the truth? What can I truly say about memory? Is it trustworthy? Or does it run off with its own agendas, hiding thoughts, as woodpeckers store seed? A friend, or fair-weather? A square inch of sight, in literal truth to the eye, grows in actual space as the object viewed is further away.

triptych (vanity)

1.

the dead butterfly
with mirrored wings
gave up
its colors
gave us
its shattered vanity

2.

the true death
of vanity
will come
in a reflection

3.

light - like language,
truth, strength, life -
turns back on itself

in the face
of the pure

and frozen

moment

we're told to "be strong," when everything about our anatomy points to vulnerability, once you begin to understand the tightwire display of each day, how our body navigates space and equalizes itself, among the tides of other bodies in the same tenuous state of balance

sketch/fragment (dawn)

if you can imagine

dawn
a cleaving ellipse
hinge of a door
on which
hangs a name
known
by more
than just birds

how the blood
strains
through clawing
nerve ends
etching out canyons
screaming to feel
with depth

what is darkness,
what is day,
and what is not in doubt

this room, surrounded by the detritus of trying. life makes its way in stillness. a valley buried in silt, a womb flooded in heartbeat. this is still where you must live. and trying leads to more loss and less determined destinations. roads wave in and around your central point, your magnetic and true north, your magnetic field of flow; roads turn and tumble in mountain dusk, and take away sounds, ideas, metaphors, essays, work, love, lives, trees, simple things, complex thoughts, effort and lethargy. freeways stacked twelve high ring in the new year sky bold as cracking bells with the temerity to sign a name across a dusk-laden street. you always know what time it is. you never know what time is. when you grew you figured in absentia that time was no more than a thought, a thought to contain or constrain the body into which said thought was born and into which said thought decayed into lumps of wet sand, crashed up on beaches full of brilliant ideas, rooms full of expiring sediment. i want to crash and disappear, like a wave, to explode and glimmer and quietly pull back into myself, to reflect the sun without shame or limitation, to shed that light back onto a continent

and no one laughs
at such a divine comedy

no trees to hide our transgressions

(reading: e.e. cummings - 73 poems)