History
Mallarmé said that Loie Fuller, with the wing
of her skirt, created space
like the new convertible
brought home by the neighbors
on our block: at first a question mark
in the sky, then rising above them
half a parenthesis until only
a comma was left behind, the shape
of their hands as they waved
down the street. “We ought to say a feeling
of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of
but, and a feeling of by,” William James
claimed, “quite as readily as we say
a feeling of blue or a feeling
of cold,” but Leonardo’s double-helix
staircase at Château Chambord wraps
its arms around its own quiet
center, makes sure that the person going
up and the one coming down
never meet. The empty spaces, Conrad
said of maps, are the most interesting
places because they are
what will change. So was it he
who invented pinto horses, taught
the mockingbird to keep not one
but two blank patches beneath
its wings? We could hear
the car radio as they drove
away, Elvis insisting I’ll be yours
through all the years, ‘til the end of
time. From Latin cor,
for heart, to remember
in Spanish, recordar, means to pass
once more through the heart
the way the blood keeps coming
back for another tour, another
spin around the block. The yellow-
orange sash flapping past the window
was memorable, a memorial, so much
like an oriole or the scarf that keeps
circling the past’s held
note: parked by the curb, the wisteria
was all ears, a hysteria of listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment