Evensong II (15 December 2023)

 I will remember.

In the morning, I will remember.

My short-term memory shorts out, the lumens blown.

Yet, I will remember in the morning, I tell myself at night when I lie awake. The mind gives me poems, lines, fragments. Bits of language respond to my stillness, coming to the fore of my mind like koi awaiting my arrival at the edge of a pond. In the dark, in the closet, the stillness invites the language. I promise to write it down in the morning.

I will remember, I promise myself. I will write it down in the morning.

About haunting, being haunted: it is memory and remembering. The tremors, the terrors, are traumas of the body being remembered. Haunting is memory. The ghost is me.

Heat ignites in my core, rises through the column of my body. Like a wildfire I am my own weather system. Radiant. Grief induced menopause. My body burns, a final period just a month after my child left.

Tell me, grieving mothers, how has your body been remade by your children? I am sorry that it isn’t just me. I am sorry that you suffer this way, grieving mothers. Let me gather you in. Tell me the secrets of your bodies. Our bodies are the haunted houses of our dead children. The burning, the final bleeding, leaking milk from my breasts even though my youngest child was weaned almost two decades ago.

In the morning, I catch the ferry to Battery Park. The sun crests the horizon and I’m too blinded to see the Manhattan skyline. I feel the engine groaning through my feet. Saliva fills my mouth and I wonder if I’ll throw up.

What was it that I was to remember this morning? What trace is left? The question is the haunting. The question stalls out at memory’s edges, lingers at the penumbra. My frustration is the rattling of chains. The heat flares up and bursts in beads of perspiration at my brow, the crown of my head, my collarbone.

I walk through Grand Central and spy a petite elderly woman outside of Hudson News. Her head bowed, small suitcase and duffle bag at her feet, her Rosary beads shimmy in her fingers, her lips tremble in prayer. I stop a short distance away, fondle the Rosary beads in my pocket, consider all of the mothers known to me who have lost their children. Help me, I think. It is more than a thought. Help me, I pray. Help this woman, I pray, lighting my gaze on her profile once more before turning towards Vanderbilt Hall.

I open the knitwear stall in the holiday market. I am early, arriving an hour before the other vendors so I have time to write. I quickly unpack the three sweaters I finished the night before and set them out on display: one creamy ivory cashmere, two sweet pink brushed Italian silk. Sweaters are like poems, in that both art forms use material and negative space. With poems, the material is language and the negative space is the white space of the page. With textiles, the material is the fiber and the negative space is what happens between loops. Yet no one would walk by my booth in the market, eyes wide, mumbling Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful, incantatory, making it so, were I to display my poems. Even more than with handmade luxury knitwear, patrons might balk at the price of priceless lines. A sweater breaks down over time. Poems are forever.

At the end of this market day, as with others, I fall into bed with deep fatigue. My whole body aches and often this physical exhaustion fails my emotional equanimity. A photo of my daughter shows up in my phone’s homescreen carousel and I lose it. I let myself have the cry, knowing these tears are one of three forms of tears: one kind occurs to naturally dispel an irritant from the eyes; another kind occurs in response to environmental conditions such as wind; this third kind is a response to emotion and contains a hormone that has natural pain killers. We are supposed to cry when we are in pain, be that pain physical or emotional. This is how our bodies heal.

After tears I seek out comfort in language and open a pdf of Anne Carson’s Anthropology of Water. Her wisdom, her artistry (Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful), inspires me always. Too tired to read beyond the introduction, though, I let my eyes close after reading these lines: “After all, the only rule of travel is, Don’t come back the way you went. Come a new way.”