The Winter Getaway begins Friday! I am going to bite the bullet and install Twitter on my phone, simply because I imagine there will be several occasions when I want to post updates, but want to avoid my computer or won’t have access to it. I will then promptly delete it from my phone on Monday. I lucked out with the new holiday calendar at work; we have off MLK Day, so I don’t need to use my hard-earned PTO for this. If you’re going, I’ll see you there, and if not, stay tuned, for I will do my best to keep updating. (For the Refinery, I may post it on Friday instead of Saturday, just to be sure; I suppose I could do a timed post as well.)
We Write Poems wants something about revising the past/memory through writing. I’m going to be a little bit mysterious, and say that this poem is not what you think it’s about, probably. But if it helps you to think of it as “advice on a breakup”, then who am I to argue you out of it?
David
Leave your photographs out in a Southern sun
until he blanches into islands of edgeless light.
Draw a needle over the records of his voice,
turning its timbre to a thread of crackle and hiss.
Wash his clothes a hundred times, so when they ask,
what colors did he wear, you can say you don’t know.
Cut up his letters into strips for the birds,
who will weave their walls in the too-far-off spring.
Give away his stories and his stacks of change
to the untold homeless at your sneakered feet.
And then soak that memorized body in tallow
with a wick blooming from his hair to be burnt down.
When you’re done, there will be an aleph of smoke,
paper in the gutter, and someone else’s name.
Exhale strongly, and turn three times for a charm,
in search of some other air to breathe.
despite knowing from the literature that all spells have unintended consequences, and that an incantation for purpose or purposes unknown is doubly dangerous, I have to read this aloud.
This is a beautiful poem. No matter how much we may wish, desire, even yearn to forget, we can not, because every cell we own knows we were fully alive in those moments and wishes, desires, and yearns to feel that way again. Thank you Joseph,
Elizabeth
http://soulsmusic.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/threads/
Events and people have the power to affect us, interesting how the poem ended with a “spell” for counter-action?
A great breakup poem, and the last three couplets really takes one’s breath away.
this IS breathtaking, no matter what it is about. having lost a lover to death, that is my interpretation ~ for a long time it was too painful to have even good memories within reach.
this is exquisite poetry, Joseph.
How do remove someone from your skin? How do you try to forget? You describe a ritual of post-breakup better than I. All I did for one lover was burn her photographs and destroy her gifts…all in wild, fiery, Pele fashion. Yours is much more methodical, calculated, and thorough. And makes for, as dani put it, exquisite poetry.
-Nicole
nicely done indeed….thanks for sharing your words
I read it first without the introduction and then went there to look for help.
Did you kill someone?