April 22

I wonder at the past, how it underwrites us, some invisible thread to call us back, calm & tender, to remembrance, even if what unfolds before us here wears the mark of beauty. I think of place, of geographies that tie themselves inextricably to our dreaming. That a friend writing me would note a river in California she wanted so badly to swim in again. Or another describing the old growth firs. These places, even in simple imagining, pull & enchant, cast webs of star & slivered moon. Memory finds it texture this way. The smell of blackberry cobbler, or the dust lining the Mason jars in the mud room. The taste of red-hots. The look of the swirling Missouri sky from the rear window of the van. Sound of the Pecos River, hushed in babble, songbirds branch-flittered, the sun-baked pine-needles soft underfoot, pinon & pitch. Or the wet leaves & slick bark, the vines rotting from Pennsylvania elms when we, full family, walked each in a green poncho. That persistent tap of rain on cheap plastic. Jason pulling a branch & it falling to him there. How is it these places, these details come to haunt us so vividly, pull us so from our presence that we would starve dreaming of them? Fugitive things, kept in safe harbor, beyond recall, beyond slow erosion. I wonder often at what the mind bids come before death. A lingering smile, an embrace, a vista beheld in youth, a word, a gesture. How it boils down, how in our silences we never cease to speak.

Remembrance, too, always that bifurcate thing, as lovely as destructive. How it can unspool in rhapsodic fugue, & wing & come near to rapture. & how it can call out your distances, cusp of oblivions. That Lethe-wards balance—in each recollection there is absence of all other recollection. Privilege wrought of nostalgia may be purchased at the expense of some old piece of memory’s architecture. Say, the smell of a lover’s hair, or the feel of an old friend’s hand upon your back, or the lazy glance of a stray dog, or the country you lived in when you were very small. They fall from us, or we loosen our grasp, & they go. & we, the waves that cross an ocean culling & sieving, until crest turns to trough & we, too, fall, pulled back into that darkness from which we came. Oblivion abounds, but in it, such a richness, such a texture, such a life. “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” writes Rilke. Writes the wind through Rilke, walking along a solitary beach, a storm sloping in from the distant shore. Oh, & that: the smell of air pregnant with rain.

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