Snow falls, silent outside the window. It covers the ground like absence layering over memory, at once beautiful, and cold, and obscuring.
Tag Archives: memory
small stone (106)
The yellow porch lamp bronzes the old man’s hair. He tells stories of places I’ve briefly been. Spilled milk from his cereal dots the table.
cold mountain (50)
50
death remains impartial
Someone gave him a bottle of whisky, another tucked a pocket of smoking tobacco into his jacket. For the journey, since we were all pagans before we were Christian before we were Buddhist, and the oldest traditions hold strongest and the journey across the dark sea will be long, and he will want a drink and a smoke on the way. The mortal walls of the coffin are built from memory and laughing sorrow. What leaches out into our lives from the spent core of the recently passed are neutrinos; neither this nor that until we are changed by them. Result becomes valance. Speak no ill of the dead we say, and perhaps it is because the dead are not dead, but incorporated into us, our lives, our recollections drawing back together the diffused trajectories of a life into a new and shining constellation. We are saying, speak no ill of us, either. Yes death is impartial, but the life we give and re-give to one another is a marvelous and mysterious thing. Inheritance of memory, of more than memory, of having been changed, and changing.
new year’s resolutions: the most beautiful thing
Cherry blossoms
If I say the words right away, delicate, lovely, ephemeral, transient, let me relieve us all the burden of dredging them up each spring. When the silence those words usually fill begins to feel lonely and frightens us, remember the black branches in winter, haven for the sparrows who eke it out between and beneath that starker resilience.
Tea
Oolong without a proper pot: what a pity. Roll the taste around, let the scent re-emerge from the back of your palate like a memory. Say it is delicate, ephemeral. Feel the tissue of your heart scald from time to time with your tongue, let the two console one another (organs of the flesh and imagination) with the fire of the moment, and nothing more.
Companions
The warped and tiled table of the nuns’ house kitchen. The rungs of a chair, and my feet kicking at them as I did twenty-five years ago, as if I had never stopped kicking at them. The stark light of a gray morning softened by the frosted pane of glass. The nauseating uncertainty of both greeting and goodbye. The golden frog hidden in the rock’s bore. The regrets we learn to let go, the wishes we learn to let lie. The rain laying in on the paddy, the faint squeak of rubber slippers on the wet road. The spoon that served as a pin to lock the door’s handle-ring. The knock that served as an invitation into the dark and unknowable day.
I’ve posted before about the most beautiful things, but the previous “most beautiful” post was about cluster headaches (and fell firmly in the Living Hagiography category), and this post is partly in response to Fiona Robyn’s “most beautiful thing” prompt at Writing Our Way Home. I’m in advance of the April 24th blogsplash, but there’s enough beauty in the world to keep us busy from now ’til then.
如 (thus) 是 