These two poems by Carol Alexander explore what Salvador Dali called “the persistence of memory,” time’s exigencies layering and enriching the present moment…
by: Carol Alexander
Theory of a Night
Hurtling over the same desperate river
inky tarmac or platinum ice
I sought to synchronize dejection and wish.
I would feed my mother wasp paper, dried lychee
cover my shirt sleeves in disjointed notes
because she was maddened by the cellphone
but not the soft, pencilly scratch.
Just an apple twig writing its hibernal memoirs.
Rewind. Tubes of tempera on the bed,
the bathroom sink. What she painted already a memory
while wading shallows until her skin peeled. As if
she were a homesick pearl insecurely strung.
There is much meliorist yellow and blue
in the late canvases. I did not grasp the problem
she was trying to solve, dishes forgotten,
painting over a bewildered swath.
A tern feather fixed freakishly by gesso.
Each seance would end with the water jar
while winds played in the courtyard
rattling the windows with sleet.
Now night comes not as a hungry animal
but a series called The Sea. No longer my goal
in three dimensions, my mother pushes back
against each hostile takeover at dawn,
rearranges what I confide to her new terrain.
She wants no other news, nor gold’s clatter.
Her flesh slips carelessly around my skeleton;
she has shucked off my tired complaints.
Where the Animals Are
Lush July, oakleaf hydrangea, spilled cola.
Three grizzlies have replaced the Polar Bear.
Two children ago, macaques watched us,
abundant and familial. Shade on rock.
Undeserving, we’re forced to stand the hour
of sad emergence, become their crazed mirror.
We are older now. We admit we are tourists
to the speech of shriek or growl.
The limbless house enclosed in glass
waits sluggish in half-light, requiring a frisson
beyond horror. It may always be a last foray
to some miniature exhibit, cool penguins
fishing for handouts. What guano of memory
for the veteran visitor. Afternoon’s heavy
like a garland poised to rot upon the brow.
Do we think the estival skins we shed
have anything on the late magnolia blooms?
Will sleep retain the shadow of a spirit animal?
Carol Alexander is co-editor of the anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice. She is the author of the poetry collections Blue Vivarium, Fever and Bone, Environments, and Habitat Lost. Her poems appear or will appear in About Place Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Asheville Poetry Review, Bluestem, Burningword Literary Journal, The Common, The Comstock Review, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly, Free State Review, Mudlark, NELLE, Narrative Northeast, New World Writing Quarterly, One, RHINO Poetry, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Summerset Review, Southern Humanities Review, Third Wednesday, Verdad, and Verse Daily.
