you remember — what is it you remember?
The feel of home, that moment of coming into your body, its familiar ache and shift, its little cough of consciousness resuming (Monday claims). i’m awake. i can’t quite see your face assume its usual definition. your shoulder rises like a hill i climb getting out on my side of the bed to pad to the sunroom, lift the blind on a spectral world. one early dog racing across the park, its breath steaming up through pallid light, though it isn’t light, not yet. still in bed, you turn to rise like some revenant, asking what time is it?
in the still of the day we bring something to burn. the smells of home, not roasted barley flour but tea, tea and toast. these small ceremonies ribbon through the days we share. and share, continuous, with what is gone.
it was July, that radiant kind of morning when all of outside shines in, calling the body out to play, light pristine, rearisen, chickadee’s two-note shrill euphoric,
here / i’m here
— this
joyant pouring in with sun across a kitchen nook amist with memory smoke, his breakfast cigarette, my usual struggle with a five-year-old, eat your cereal, you can’t go out until you eat. while all three of us know, between sips of this and that, only two blocks away the waves are lapping tenderly at sand, at soon-to-be bare feet, a thrill of seaweed under the gulls’ dip and shriek.
how it was, that morning of liquid flight when my father’s call came: i can’t wake her up, his voice like a child’s, crushed, lost. i’ve tried, she won’t wake up.
and birds, in the corner of an eye as i stared unfocused at their skywriting: flap flap, soar. their Sanskrit.
why does the eye slide off? the mind refuse anything more than grabbing at keys, making quick arrangements, then tearing through the parkway across the bridge along the Upper Levels, thinking glorious glorious morning, everyone driving their usual cavalcade of must-do’s and if only’s, thinking how can this be? this sudden gap.
gape. a wound that is love and not love.
you can’t do that, she told me over the phone when we’d come back to the city and i wanted to paint what would be the baby’s room. you can’t paint when you’re pregnant. that limiting fear i bridled at. it’s latex, Mom. we painted together in a memory loop from my childhood, water instead of turps, a splotch of robin’s egg blue on the soft sag of her cheek, her perfection at cleaning brushes. paint moons at the roots of our nails, and her latest conspiracy theory about her doctor, her dentist.
A pleasant glow of sentiment was shed by a light rosily shaded and suffused.
that too. its pleated shade, its fluted glass stem a little tippy, casting a glow to read by. satin quilt pulled up to her chin, hands holding the well-used public library smell of plastic covering a queen’s unbent head, the bloody intrigue of courtiers and kings, while all the while steam rose from the rose-patterned teacup beside her, twisted and thinned to
nothing in the pinkpearl glow.
rapid overlay, one place-time on another, as if we’re actually in the movement between, memory cascading its lightdrenched moments and then suddenly that single jet of recognition, parallel perhaps, that allows us to see, paradoxically, this place we’re in the midst of . . .
incredible. conflicting with explanation.
underlay, as if
her body under the
lay of the city under
lies it
Copyright © 2008 by Daphne Marlatt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
