Note - Angie Estes They wrote to say theyd found my mother wondering in the garage—like entering the ethereal sphere, I thought: drawing near to its desire, so deeply is our intellect immersed that memory cannot follow after it, as if desire were a fugitive dye made from the blue stars of the forget-me- not and hell could be defined as that which cannot be forgotten, the damned condemned to go on like Paolo and Francesca in desire but unable to recognize what could move them so * * * When I was a child, my mittens were attached to each other, their cord running under my coat from hand to hand like the blue veins in the clear plastic Invisible Man I assembled in the basement, and after he left assisted living, my friends father kept asking, What if my mother dies again? What, I thought, if she slips off like a glove * * * In paradise, Dante says, we will have only a memory of having had a memory, now lost like the photograph of my mothers great grandfather printed from a negative made from a photograph of a negative, which we Xeroxed for keeps: its the same old story of the Perseids, their gray hair streaking the sky the way ethereal is streaked by real * * * Like denizens of the cadenza, cicadas scratching their cicatrices, a star shines until day begins to lighten the sky, the shining gone though the star remains, not shining but not yet gone, still moving across the heavens right up to the moment the sky turns sky blue.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 16:48:10 +0000
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